Willie Hefner: “I do not know where to start here. There was a budget that was offered here that supposedly was supposed to get a lot of…”

“I do not know where to start here. There was a budget that was offered here that supposedly was supposed to get a lot of support, was going to cut Medicare $270 billion, was going to do $240 billion worth of tax cuts. Right now we are not talking about raising taxes on anybody. But it seems to me, if we are going to do something of this magnitude, we would have some hearings on it, especially something as important as amending the Constitution of the United States. And let us make one thing perfectly clear. We have been sitting here for almost 3 hours, and what we have come down to is the gentleman from Texas has talked about something that is a very frivolous thing in a campaign year, a campaign year, and the gentleman from Indiana said what we have done, we have given the President the line-item veto, but they saw fit to pass everything else in that bill except give the President the line-item veto the authority for this year. We are going to wait until after the election. Everything is predicated on the November election. The consultants have already been together and said, Hey, look, what we are going to do on this amendment tonight: The folks that vote against it, we are going to brand them as big spenders and liberals and don't want to get the balanced budget, and we will have a campaign issue in November. It is just that simple. They do not particularly care about restrictions on raising taxes. Nobody wants to vote to raise taxes. I pay taxes.…”