Charles Rangel: “let me join with the gentlewoman from Washington in wishing President Reagan a happy birthday and in saying that, as…”

“let me join with the gentlewoman from Washington in wishing President Reagan a happy birthday and in saying that, as most people should know, that this is a tax policy bill, but because it deals with more politics than policy, it did not go through the Committee on Ways and Means. True, we have a lot of Members here trying to protect our jurisdiction, but it went through the Committee on Rules. That means it is supposed to be noncontroversial. It means that what some of the people are projecting here is not only do we accelerate the tax cuts, which the Committee on Ways and Means has seen with their majority to enact and to pass into law, but they even are talking about making it permanent, which not only costs trillions of dollars, but at a time where we find that 40 or 50 million people will become eligible for Social Security. I think this is not noncontroversial. I think it is something that should go through the Committee on Ways and Means. And I kind of think that since all of this was enacted at a time when we did not have a recession and we did not have war, that we really are tying up the hands of the Congress to project what is going to happen in the future. There was a time before the State of the Union message that I thought Osama bin Laden was what was the threat to the United States. The President says there are 10,000 terrorists walking the streets throughout the United States of America.”