Charles Rangel: “Mr. Speaker, I hope I have not said anything to anger the Members on the other side. The only frustration that we feel…”

“Mr. Speaker, I hope I have not said anything to anger the Members on the other side. The only frustration that we feel is that it is very unusual for tax bills to come on the floor that are not sponsored by Members of the committee so that at least they could talk with us about them. It is even more unusual that the bill never would even come through the committee so that our staffs would have been attuned to understand better what the implications would be about the bill; and, of course, one has to be very suspicious when in the middle of the night a bill is introduced and it just reaches the floor on the Suspension Calendar. Mr. Speaker, you cannot talk about hundreds of billions of dollars, or I guess some people can talk about hundreds of billions of dollars, without having it come before the committee; but we would like to believe that somewhere in here it makes some sense. Obviously, you have not really had enough time to make any sense out of this, because you are bringing up a bill and you are asking Democrats to vote for it, but the people who drafted the bill are asking Republicans to vote against it. Now, I know people do not think much about the Congress, but this really confuses them. If you have a bill, at least you should be supporting it.”