David Thomas: “clearly, based upon the Chair's ruling, the fact that the argument had been made about the denial of a Member to appear…”

“clearly, based upon the Chair's ruling, the fact that the argument had been made about the denial of a Member to appear before the committee is without substance. Perhaps if someone has a thesaurus and they look up synonyms for ``without substance,'' they may find a word referring to a particular lunch meat. The fundamental point we are making here is we spent an hour with their bemoaning the fact that we want to make the marriage penalty permanent, they now want to take an hour on their substitute which makes the marriage penalty permanent. One would think that if they were in opposition with all those vehement phrases in the first hour to making the marriage penalty permanent, they would have a substitute that would do something other than making the marriage penalty permanent. But I have to let my colleagues realize here that what we are engaging in on the floor with the offering of the Democrat substitute could probably generally be referred to as political baloney. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.”