Russ Feingold: “I will reiterate, this is really the fish-or-cut-bait amendment. I always appreciate the eloquence of the Senator from…”

“I will reiterate, this is really the fish-or-cut-bait amendment. I always appreciate the eloquence of the Senator from Utah, but I notice a sort of different tone when he speaks about this amendment as opposed to the balanced budget amendment. There is sort of a lack of urgency to his tone about this. His tone suggests that whether we get this thing done by 2002 or 2006, the important thing is that we just have this balanced budget amendment on the books. That just does not seem to square with the rest of the comments I have heard from the Senator and most of the other supporters of the balanced budget amendment. There was no suggestion by the Senator from Utah that we could not limit this to 3 years. I appreciate his candor on that. That is something that is available to the Congress. It has not been done before, but when the limitation was put in the first place on the 7 years on the 18th amendment, it was my understanding that was not done before. So there is no literal constraint on that.”