Charles Rangel: “Mr. Speaker, this is the biggest fraud on farmers, and especially tobacco farmers, that I have seen in my 34 years in…”

“Mr. Speaker, this is the biggest fraud on farmers, and especially tobacco farmers, that I have seen in my 34 years in Congress. Here we have some help allegedly for the tobacco farmers, and those of us on the Committee on Ways and Means could not even discuss it because it is not in our jurisdiction, yet it is in our bill. A person does not have to be a politician or Member of Congress to know if we are talking about farming and tobacco, we should be talking about the Committee on Agriculture and not the tax-writing committee. This bill has nothing to do with taxes, nothing to do with international sanctions against us. It has everything to do with trying to pick up votes for those people who know that they are facing economic distress in this area. The right thing to have done was to have it in the Committee on Agriculture, which has jurisdiction and who understands this issue even better than some of the smartest Members on the Committee on Ways and Means.”