Ernest Istook: “this is the amendment that has the support of the governors who have serious concerns about this legislation, and also…”

“this is the amendment that has the support of the governors who have serious concerns about this legislation, and also of the retail merchants who seek nothing but fairness in this. We should not discriminate against those who do business via the Internet, nor should we discriminate against those who do business outside of the Internet. Now, as has been brought forward, the big problem with the underlying legislation is that it tries to take an easy thing, saying we do not discriminate against the Internet and ignore the difficult task of resolving the difficulties of equal treatment, a level playing field. As has been proposed by the governors, and proposed by retail merchants, and we have letters of endorsement from them, we need something that they know is a road map. This is how we do it uniformly and fairly. As the legislation sense of Congress specifies, it would be through a centralized, multi-State registration system for sellers, uniform definitions for goods and services that are subjected to a potential tax; uniform and simple rules for attributing transactions to one jurisdiction and one jurisdiction only, so there would be no multiple taxation and no discriminatory taxation; similarly, uniformity which the States frequently do through the Commission on uniform laws. Madam Chairman, this is simply Congress trying to give a road map. That is what people have been crying out for. We want to do things in a fair, nondiscriminatory fashion.”