David Thomas: “I want to take a couple of moments. I already mentioned my concerns about the Thompson amendment, but I have to say it…”

“I want to take a couple of moments. I already mentioned my concerns about the Thompson amendment, but I have to say it is interesting that the Senator is curious as to why there are objections to this amendment. He ought to recall that the Senate has already rejected three or four amendments for the same reason, and that is, we want to send a clean bill to the President. The idea that his is being rejected because of certain things is just not the case. There is a notion here that this bill ought to be sent, right or wrong. I happen to think that he is exactly right. There is also the implication that if you do not agree with this amendment, you do not care about these things. That is not true, either. We do separate things. There are seven or eight bills now in place. The Senator says we are not going to tie the President's hands and then on the other hand says this is going to force the President to do something. We need to get it clear. I wanted to make the point that there is no evidence that people do not care about these things. They do, indeed. There is a belief that these issues ought to be separated and we ought to deal with PNTR and then deal with the other issue. We should not think this is going to cause the President to do a number of things when we already have in place at least seven laws that are not being adhered to. Those are the things on which I wanted to be clear.”