Orrin Hatch: “The fact that you cannot command a supermajority is part of what is going to happen here. What we are saying is, look. I…”

“The fact that you cannot command a supermajority is part of what is going to happen here. What we are saying is, look. I think a better illustration, if the Senator wants me to substitute one for him, would be the vote last year on the tax package which the President brought up here. It is an interesting constitutional question that I know will intrigue my dear friend from West Virginia who has spent a lifetime studying the Constitution--for whom I have a lot of respect--in that area, among many others. That is, that vote last year did not have one Republican. We have been excoriated by Members of the other side of the floor as Republicans because we did not vote for that tax increase, or the deficit reduction part of it either. We did not because we did not want taxes to increase. And some stood up and said, ``We stood up and did something about the deficit.'' Well, I suspect that is true. We just did not happen to agree. But now that vote was a 50-50 tie in the Senate. I want the attention of my dear friend from West Virginia. It was a 50-50 tie. Had this constitutional amendment been in effect, would that bill have become law today? Or would it have become law at that time? We did not have a majority of the whole number of the U.S. Senate. It took the Vice President to break the tie. There are two ways of looking at that. One is that 50 of us could have thwarted the tax increase. I think that would have been a terrific thing to do, and that is what we tried to do.”