Lloyd Bentsen: “we are not legislating today, we are choreographing for the upcoming Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. If…”

“we are not legislating today, we are choreographing for the upcoming Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. If we were legislating today, we would be doing as my colleague, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel) just said, we would be sitting down in a bipartisan fashion and trying to figure out a way in which we could fix H.R. 4810, the bill before us today, that could get a true bipartisan vote for it, and would address some of the flaws in the underlying bill. For instance, the underlying bill does nothing about the alternative minimum tax, and the gentleman knows very well that there are many American families who actually do suffer a marriage tax penalty but also have children, two or more children, I have two children, I assume I would be subject to this at some point, that they would hit the AMT, and they would not get any benefit, if any at all, of what is proposed in H.R. 4810, but the bill does not take care of it. The Democratic substitute does, perhaps that is something my colleagues might want to pick up in their bill.”