Melvin Watt

Mr. Chairman, I reluctantly have to oppose the gentleman's amendment. This bill is into micromanagement enough. We are micromanaging local governments, we are micromanaging State courts, and now we have gotten into micromanaging the time…

I rise in hardy support of the Boehlert-Delahunt substitute. This may be the most direct vote we have taken in this Congress on State rights and local rights and this whole issue. What this amendment does is it strikes out all of the…

I was sitting in my office not intending to participate in this debate and really got incensed. I sat there, and I wondered, what must the American people be thinking is going on here? What must my Republican colleagues be thinking? Do…

Mr. Chairman, my amendment deals solely with title II, the products liability part of the bill, a part of the bill which I would point out to my colleagues has no limitation to small businesses and is a complete usurpation of State law on…

sometimes we get lost in the technicalities of these legal bills. But we should start with the proposition that our liability laws in this country actually reflect the values of our country that personal responsibility and corporate…

Because on the Martin Luther King holiday, we had a wonderful tribute in Charlotte in which I read part of Lincoln's words to the backdrop of our Charlotte symphony orchestra; and during the reading, they were showing on a television…

Mr. Chairman, the Chair of our subcommittee, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Canady), would have us believe that this is a technical amendment. It is not. It is a very substantive amendment, and we should be aware of that. The chairman of…

as masterful as the chairman who spoke on behalf of the Committee on Armed Services is, he cannot speak for the Committee on Armed Services. We bring a major substantive change to this bill to the floor, give it 10 minutes of debate, 5…

I just want to address this third thing that we are doing with the money under the Scott amendment. The gentleman is transferring $50 million to the Drug Court Program. Now, I can tell you, because I have a Drug Court in my Congressional…

I am observing this debate in somewhat disbelief. About 25, 30 years ago, when I was a young lawyer just starting to practice law in North Carolina, I tried the first carpal tunnel syndrome case under the North Carolina workers…

I rise in support of the Burr-Myrick amendment. It is true that this amendment will impact on the one company in the Nation, because this is a unique company. The company happens to be in the insurance business and it currently happens to…

I rise in opposition to particularly the last part of this amendment. It really is a real disservice to mutual policyholders, who are owners of the insurance company. To allow an insurance company to take the assets and convert to a stock…

In this day in which we are moving toward allowing banks and insurance companies and securities companies to come together into one corporation, the concern that I hear more often than any other concern as I talk to constituents is a…

we have heard a lot of debate about the merits or lack of merits of abortions. I want to turn the attention of the Members to another issue, and that is the legal issue that resulted in this matter coming to the Committee on the Judiciary…

Mr. Chairman, let me just advise my colleagues that these bankruptcy mills that the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran) is talking about are attorneys who provide bankruptcy services, consumer credit counseling services, many of whom are…

Mr. Chairman, this bill currently requires that every bankruptcy filer, no matter whether his filing is or is not contested, file at least 3 years' worth of tax returns with the court. In our subcommittee we had hearings, and the…

Let me talk about this in a historical framework first and see if we can figure out what is going on here. On April 15 of 1996, this amendment came to the House floor. On April 15 of 1997, this amendment came to the House floor. On April…

I want to start by responding to a few comments that were made by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) in his presentation. Madam Speaker, one would think that all of this talk about how taxes have gone up and revenues have gone up during…

We even offered to take that out of the bill. You would think that people who were seriously interested in passing a constitutional amendment that limited the ability to raise taxes would have jumped at that, they would have said, ``Yeah…

If we want to set up a judicial process where we spend 200 years defining what the word ``de minimis'' means and have the courts do it, that is what this bill is going to do. But even more important is, we are setting up a direct conflict…

It is the fourth year on or about tax filing day that my colleagues have brought this same amendment to the floor of the House. It has failed on each prior occasion. They know it will fail again today. And this amendment is not here as a…

I think taxes are good sometimes and they are bad sometimes. They can be beneficial; they can be detrimental. I really think this debate is about the essence of our democracy, which is majority rule. It is not about taxes or no taxes. None…

Mr. Speaker, this is a debate about amending the Constitution. We can pretend that it is a debate about whether we raise taxes or not, but I want to remind all my colleagues that the Republicans have been in control of this Congress for…

Let me get to the point I want to make. ``De minimis'' is probably no worse than ``reasonable cause'' or other general terms that are used in the Constitution. That is not my point. My point is that we have gone through 200-plus years of…

I was seated here listening to the stories and thinking about what this trip meant to me. Let me start by just thanking the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis), our leader, our primary leader, and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton)…