Don Nickles: “I plan on yielding back additional time. I came in today thinking we should have 10 minutes on each side on every…”

“I plan on yielding back additional time. I came in today thinking we should have 10 minutes on each side on every amendment today. I don't want to cut people off from being able to debate their amendments. My colleague from North Dakota is correctly wanting to have time agreements on a multitude of amendments. I am willing to enter into those, but I am insisting on being able to see the amendment. I know my colleague from North Dakota is trying to get them. A lot of people say I want a time agreement, but they are rewriting the amendment as we speak. That is not fair. We need to have both sides be able to analyze the amendments so we will know what we are debating, especially if we are going to be in a very truncated timeframe. If I am debating an amendment and I say it increases taxes by $24 billion, I want to be accurate. I actually insist on accuracy. It bothers me if we are not accurate. Mr. President, I am going to speak on the Boxer amendment for a moment. We had a time limit of 20 minutes on each side on the Boxer amendment. It was breached very significantly primarily on the Democrat side, and maybe a little bit on our side. This is an amendment that says we want to do some things to create jobs domestically, but in effect it says we want to sock it to the people creating jobs by increasing their taxes. Then it says we will give tax credits if you do such and such. It is a tax-spend amendment, $24 billion of increased taxes.”