Mike Conaway: “in the immortal words of Doc Holiday in Tombstone, ``Our hypocrisy knows no bounds.'' Both sides equally applied. The…”

“in the immortal words of Doc Holiday in Tombstone, ``Our hypocrisy knows no bounds.'' Both sides equally applied. The arguments earlier that half of a percent cut, 5 basis points of a cut, as if that's some sort of a draconian decision to be made, the truth of the matter is the committee, the subcommittee had a fixed amount of money to work with, and they chose to make some trade-offs. They chose to fund more here and less here, more here and less there. But none of those decisions that they made were couched in the terms of some sort of mean spiritedness. And at the risk of prolonging the debate, which I think is an important debate for us to have, I'm going to offer up an amendment that I know has a point of order which stands against that. Before I do that though, I'd like to quote something from Justice George Sutherland. A lot of us heard earlier about the way tax planning is done, used, misused, and it was used in the pejorative; that only big oil companies or other companies could use the code that we currently have in place, that you and I and our colleagues put in place, to affect their tax affairs and that families don't get to do that. Well, I would argue based on this quote: ``The legal right,'' and that's a right, ``of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his or her taxes, or altogether avoid them by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted.'' Gregory v. Helvering, Justice George Sutherland.”