Charles Rangel: “I may be wrong, but I thought I heard some sense of partisanship in the gentleman from Texas' presentation on this bill…”

“I may be wrong, but I thought I heard some sense of partisanship in the gentleman from Texas' presentation on this bill, and I am going to try to restrain myself and try to remind my Republican friends that things that they are talking about today are Democratic concepts. These are concepts that we Democrats have and continue to support. The only difference that separates us today is that we believe that until we have the fiscal discipline to abide by our budget rules that we should have the money to pay for these tax cuts before we cut the taxes. Now I had thought, and probably my colleagues have had a caucus and changed their mind, but the last I heard from my Republican leadership friends was that they were running around the country pulling up the Tax Code by the core. They were pulling it up by the roots. They were saying that the system was too complicated. And they had the majority, and they had the opportunity to fix it, and they came back with a $300 billion bill, which we supported, that was far more complicated than any code the Democrats left them. So let us forget all this talk about flat tax, consumer tax and retail tax. They should say that they would like to be realistic and deal with taxes that most of the people want.”