Dale Bumpers

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. First, Mr. President, let me thank very sincerely my distinguished colleague, Senator Graham, for his very fine statement, very accurate statement, and very heartfelt statement. Like me, he is a former Governor. He understands precisely what we are talking about. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senators Graham, Dorgan, Conrad, and Harkin be added as original cosponsors.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I yield 12 minutes to my colleague from Florida.

Mr. BUMPERS. We would be willing to accept 20 minutes on our side and 8 minutes for her, which would be 28 minutes.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I must object to that at this point. Senator Graham wants 10 or 15 minutes and I have 3 or 4 minutes of wrap-up I want to do. Could the junior Senator from Maine give us some idea how much time she might wish?

Mr. BUMPERS. How would you like to be Debbie White? She also sells wallpaper. How would you like to be Debbie White, paying State sales taxes, privilege taxes, every tax under the shining sun the State can impose on you, working just to keep your head above water, and have somebody walk in and take your time for an hour looking through wallcoverings, and they walk out saying nothing, and suddenly you realize that they saw this ad that said: ``Shop in your neighborhood, write down the pattern number, and then call us.'' Who here thinks that is fair? Or here, a boat company. I put a letter in the Record last night where a woman and her husband in the boat business in California spent all kinds of time and thousands of dollars trying to make a $250,000 boat sale. After spending all that money and time trying to sell this boat, the customer says, ``Thank you very much for your time, but we have just discovered we can go to Oregon and buy this boat and keep it out of the State of California for some prescribed period of time and bring it here and save ourselves $19,000.'' And here, what does this boat company's ad say? ``No sales tax added outside of North Carolina.'' Who here thinks this is fair? Not one. Not one. I would love to debate this, as I did before the National Governors' Conference last year. I think there were seven Governors in that room who objected to this--the Governor of Wisconsin and others who have big mail order houses in their states. This amendment, I promise you, will provide more relief, by far, to the States than the mandates bill ever will. The problem with the mandates bill is, by the time we debate a point of order on every single bill we pass in the future, that is all we will have time to do. You talk about gridlock. You wait until these points of order start being raised. Mr. President, when Senator Pryor and I were Governors, we used to condemn the Federal Government for its mandates. If I were Governor today, I would condemn the Federal Government for not passing this amendment. I thank the Chair.

Mr. BUMPERS. I am happy to yield.

Mr. BUMPERS. Will the Senator yield for one observation?

Mr. BUMPERS. I am going to wax eloquent. I hope the Senator from Maine will pay close attention, because what I am talking about makes eminent common sense. Last night, somebody said on the floor of the Senate: ``Call your Governor and see how he or she feels about this mandate bill. If you call your Governor, your Governor will say: Please vote for the Kempthorne bill.'' I have a sequel to that: Call your Governor and ask him how he wants you to vote on the Bumpers amendment. All but about eight of them will say: Please, for God's sake, support the Bumpers amendment. Every single Republican will vote the way their Governor wants them to on the first, and not one single Republican will vote the way the Governor wants them to vote on my amendment. When it comes to gridlock, we are pretty good students. We have watched the other side bring this place to a standstill time and time again. I do not want to bring it to a standstill. I want to vote on this. But one of the reasons I am not for cloture is--and it is not just my amendment, there are other amendments that will make this a better bill--the debate might dress it up to the point that I would vote for it. But when it comes to germaneness, how many times have you heard Senators stand on the floor of the Senate and make these great speeches about what a terrible burden the Congress places on the States, cities, and counties? Here is an amendment that would help the States to fund those burdens. It does not require a State to do anything. So what happened? Because the Supreme Court says this is a burden on interstate commerce which only Congress can authorize, the burden of collecting the tax now falls on the person who buys the merchandise. Forty-five States have laws now obligating consumers to pay taxes on merchandise bought out-of-state. I think the State of Arkansas collected $10,000 last year. There is not 1/1,000th of one percent of the people in Arkansas that even know that bill is on the books. In 1992, the Supreme Court said only Congress can permit a State to require out-of-State companies to collect the use taxes on goods they ship into the State. That was the case of Quill versus the State of North Dakota. The Court said, such a collection requirement no longer violates the due process clause and, although such a requirement imposes a burden on interstate commerce, Congress has the right to determine whether that burden will be allowed. So if Congress wants to give the States the discretion--not the mandate, but the discretion--of requiring people who ship merchandise into their States to collect sales tax, Congress can do so. That is what the Bumpers amendment will do. Last night, the junior Senator from Maine said, ``Let the States decide.'' She ought to support my amendment. That is precisely what I am saying--let the States decide. Where are all these States righters now? Everybody is talking about what a terrible burden Congress imposes on the States, and here is an amendment that says we are going to give the States discretion. And this amendment will not get a single Republican vote--not one. The sum of $3.301 billion is what the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations says this could give the States. This is the amount of money they could use to deal with houses in this country contribute 3.3 million tons of garbage in catalogs alone. There are places in this country where it costs $100 a ton to dispose of that stuff. And what is their contribution to the State? Not one thin dime. And it is not just 3.3 million tons of catalogs. It is also those packages that your merchandise comes in. That has to be disposed of, too. This mail-order business is growing like Topsy--$100 billion a year. L. L. Bean in Maine is the second biggest mail-order house in the country, headed for $1 billion in 1995. I am not criticizing the Senator from Maine; if I were from Maine, I would probably be making the same speech he is making. But let me ask you this simple question: What if, instead of $100 billion of retail sales a year, these mail-order houses represented about 50 to 70 percent of all the sales in this country and not one dime of sales tax or use tax was collected? How would you educate your children? Who is going to pay the policemen, the firemen? Who is going to take care of the landfills? Wal-Mart, KMart, they have made their contribution, to the shuttering of Main Street. These mail-order houses are making their contribution, and they do not pay anything. And my amendment does not say they have to. It simply says, ``Governor, if you and the legislature think they should, you can have that right.'' That is what this amendment says. It is just that simple.

Mr. BUMPERS. The Senator from Maine and I both know that the germaneness rule in the Senate will take down almost any amendment. The Senator from Maine thinks my amendment is not germane. Let me just cover that for a moment. The Senator might want to be seated because I am going to wax eloquent here for a while.

Mr. BUMPERS. I am saying that we have a perfect right to offer our amendments, and we are not going to be shut out if we can keep enough discipline to keep 41 votes in the saddle.

Mr. BUMPERS. If I may continue on what the Senator from Ohio was saying, I am not a signatory to the contract. I was not asked to sign it, and, of course, would not have signed it had I been asked. It does not apply to me. What applies to me is to do what I think is best for the country and to make certain that these bills are not rammed through here before people who have legitimate interest in them, and who want to improve them, have an opportunity to do so. I have never seen a time when the Senate, for the most part, was not better served when it slowed things down and forced the Members of this body to think about it, rather than to do what was political. Last night, the senior Senator from Maine came over and said, first of all, he did not know I was going to bring the amendment up. He said he was at home and did not know it was coming up. Let me say to the Senator from Maine and everybody else, I am not in the habit of calling people, particularly people I think are going to be opposed to my amendments, to tell them when I am going to bring up an amendment. Nobody has ever done that with me, and I do not do it to anybody else. The way this works is, you hang around here until legislation and amendments are offered, and if you have an interest in them, you go over and talk on them. The Senator from Maine also talked about ``business as usual,'' ``gridlock,'' and that my amendment was ``nongermane.'' Let me make a couple of observations on that. Surely he has not forgotten that in the 103d Congress Democrats had to file, or vote on, 72 cloture motions-- 72. Senator, after the Republicans brought this place to a standstill time and time and time again last year, and you won overwhelmingly on November 8, we decided we will try it if it works that well. Maybe in the election in 1996, people will reward us.

Mr. BUMPERS. The Senator is absolutely right.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. It could be. It could be any time in the future.

Mr. BUMPERS. If I may comment on that very last sentence, this says that if the appropriation is less than the amount this agency determines to be needed to fully implement the mandate, you are giving that agency two options as I read this. They can either cut the mandate to some extent, modify it to make the money fit the mandate, or, as I started out a moment ago, or declare the mandate to be ineffective. I think the Senator and I both are reading this the same way now. What I am really suggesting is that this is a tremendous discretion that we are handing to the executive branch to declare that we either have not funded it fully and, therefore, they are going to cut it, or they are just going to torpedo it altogether. Now, why would we want to give the agency that kind of authority? Obviously, we feel the mandate is important or we would not have passed the bill.

Mr. BUMPERS. I thought for a moment that the Senator from Idaho had explained this to me. But in looking it over again, I have difficulty getting the sequence of events as to how this is going to happen and in what sequence. It says that the third alternative here--that is, the authorization for appropriations--a number of criteria must be met in order to avoid the point of order. First, any appropriations bill that is expected to provide the funding must be identified. So far so good. Second, the mandated legislation must also designate a responsible Federal agency. That is fine. We can designate the agency that will implement the mandate, that shall either, one, implement and appropriate a less costly mandate if less than full funding is ultimately appropriated, or--this is really a big ``or''--declare such mandate to be ineffective. Does that mean that we are authorizing after we have imposed a mandate and provided the funds--it says ``or'' allow that agency to declare the mandate ineffective. So they could, if they decide, as I read this--and I want to be corrected because this is an immensely complex bill. Does this mean that agency, if they find that we have not fully funded that mandate, could provide for a less costly method of implementing it? And I assume we have designated them and given them the authority on the front end. The bill is already passed and we have given them the authority to come up with a less costly method of implementing the mandate or declaring it inoperative. Am I reading that correctly?

Mr. BUMPERS. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. BUMPERS. Absolutely, Senator. Modification to Committee Amendment On Page 25, Line 10

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I understand the majority leader has said there will not be any more rollcall votes tonight. Certainly, I am not going to try to keep the Senate for any prolonged period of time, but I think it would be appropriate to begin debate on this amendment, about which I feel very strongly and which I think is a very important measure for the Senate to consider. But at some point I will discontinue the debate, and it is my understanding that tomorrow, if cloture should fail, this would be the pending amendment. So I do not want to delay the Senate in getting out of here this evening. I just want to say to my colleagues this is an amendment that will do more for the States, frankly, in the short term than this entire piece of legislation. In 1967, the Supreme Court said that the States could not impose a tax on a mail order catalog house because it would be a violation of due process and the commerce clause. So that was the law of the land until 1992, when a case called Quill versus North Dakota was decided by the Supreme Court. That decision reversed the 1967 decision. It said, No. 1, we are changing our mind about due process. It is no longer a violation of the due process clause if the States elect to require out-of-State companies which send goods into their State to collect the applicable sales tax, or use tax. A use tax is effectively the same thing as a sales tax, but they call it a use tax because it is a tax on the use of the product, not the sale of the product. No. 2, although imposing this tax collection burden on an out-of-State company constitutes a burden on interstate commerce that is impermissible under current law, the Congress has the right to determine if that burden should be allowed. So the primary problem that prohibited States in the past from levying a sales tax or a use tax on mail order houses--due process--was removed. Now, I cannot say this often enough, for anybody who is hesitant about the thrust of this amendment, that it does not impose a tax on anybody. The tax is already there. This amendment simply allows the States the discretion of saying to the mail order houses: If you are going to ship goods into this State, goods. Now, Mr. President, I do not know how many States will do it. Five States do not have a sales tax so this amendment would have no impact on those States. They would not levy a use tax on mail order products because they do not levy sales taxes on their own in-State products. The reason this legislation is important is because virtually every State in the Union--45 of them to be precise--have a use tax now. It is levied not on the mail order house but on the buyer of goods from the mail order house. If you order a sweater from L.L. Bean and you ship it into Arkansas, even though L.L. Bean doesn't collect the applicable use tax, the State of Arkansas says that the purchaser of that sweater shall remit a use tax in the exact amount of the sales tax to the State revenue department of my State. So what you have is a lot of people who are getting a rude surprise because the States are beginning, more and more, to find these people who are buying big ticket items. People are buying these big ticket items and suddenly somebody from the State revenue department in Florida or North Carolina knocks on the door and says, ``Friend, that boat you bought for $250,000, you owe us $12,000.'' We have letters galore in our files from people who have had that rude surprise. Now, admittedly, the States collect very little revenue out of this. And you know the reason they do not is because the people of your respective States of West Virginia, Ohio, Idaho, and the rest of you, do not know there is a use tax on the books. Mr. President, what do you think mail order sales in this country amount to? Just figure it out in your own mind. You open your mail every day, and you are getting two, three, four times as many catalogs at your house every week as you used to get. I will be happy to yield to the majority leader.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk.

Mr. BUMPERS. So, Mr. President, the Gorton amendment is open to amendment, is it not?

Mr. BUMPERS. Is that the amendment the Senator is alluding to?

Mr. BUMPERS. What is the pending amendment?

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I just want to comment for a minute or two, because I know the other Senator from Maine wishes to be heard. No. 1, if I were a Senator from Maine I would be making the same speech I just heard. The second biggest catalog sales house in the United States is L.L. Bean from the great State of Maine. But there is another very cogent point I neglected to make in my opening comments, and that is the State of Maine collects the sales taxes for every dime's worth of goods that L.L. Bean sells in the State of Maine. They do not collect 1 penny for the other 49 States. They are probably in the half billion dollar range now, maybe much more than that. They are the second biggest. I believe Lands' End in Wisconsin is the biggest in the country. So, No. 1, everybody should understand that under current law, law established in various Supreme Court decisions, any mail order house that maintains a retail outlet in another State has to collect the sales tax for that State. J. Crew, they have retail outlets in Maryland and Virginia. Eddie Bauer has retail outlets in about 15 States. So those companies must collect use taxes when their mail order merchandise goes into States where they maintain retail outlets. It is only when they do not have a retail outlet in a particular State that they do not have to collect use taxes on the mail order goods sent into that State. To suggest that this does not give mail order houses a competitive advantage when I just got through reading a letter about how this company in Long Beach, CA, lost a $250,000 sale because of a $20,000 savings in the sales tax. Why, of course people price shop. I will fill the record up tomorrow with cases just like it where people tried their very best to make a sale, and they say thank you very much for telling us about it, we will go across the State line and buy the merchandise and bring it back in and save the money. Mr. President, to say that this amendment is not germane to the Unfunded Mandates bill is something that defies imagination. With the Unfunded Mandates bill, we are talking about the burden that Congress has been putting on the States of this Nation, ordering them how to build their landfills, how to fill the landfill, what their municipal water supplies must do, every kind of environmental regulation we could put on them. They say ``we want you to start paying for it.'' The thrust of that idea is legitimate. I believe in it. It is a very complex issue. But this amendment says to the States, ``Those burdens we have already placed on you, we will help you pay for that.'' And to say that principle is not germane to this bill makes no sense. We are simply saying we will help you pay for your landfill, if you, State and local government, want us to. Let me repeat what I started off saying in the beginning: Maine, since it already collects the sales tax from all the sales made off of L.L. Bean--and I misspoke earlier, Senator--it was Lands' End that said they do not think this would be a burden. L.L. Bean has not said that, to my knowledge. But Maine has the best of all worlds. And I love Maine. I have the utmost respect for my colleagues from Maine. But they are collecting sales taxes on all the sales they make in Maine, but they do not collect a red cent for the merchandise they send into other States through catalog sales. They do not pay for disposing of the catalogs in the local landfill or the packaging they send the merchandise in. The Senator says that is not germane. That is what this bill is all about, trying to help the States. So, Mr. President, I cannot say it often enough, this amendment gives the States the discretion. It does not require the States to do one blessed thing. It says if the States want to require out-of-State companies to collect use taxes, just as retail outlets in your State have to collect sales taxes, the States can do it. It has only been since 1992 when the Supreme Court ruled in Quill versus North Dakota, that we could even debate this issue here. Now, Mr. President, this is an idea that will not go away. It will happen, sure as God made little apples. Maybe not on this bill, but it will happen. And the sooner the people in this business understand that, the better off we will all be. I yield the floor.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, the question was how much business is the catalog industry doing in this country? The answer is almost $100 billion a year and growing at a rate of 6 percent a year. To judge by the number of catalogs coming into my house, they are growing much faster than that. So you might ask, No. 1, why should these people bother with collecting a tax on behalf of the States where they sell merchandise? I used to be a small town merchant. I had a hardware, furniture, and appliance store. I even had a cemetery and practiced law as well. I did anything to try to feed my wife and three children. My biggest competitor was not the guy down the street. It was the Sears & Roebuck catalog. They do not do much catalog business anymore; I think maybe Sears does no catalog business now. But I can tell you that offices of every Senator in the U.S. Senate has received communique after communique in the last 3 days saying, please support Senator Bumpers' amendment. They are from small town, main street retailers all across America because it is not just Wal-Mart and K-Mart that are putting them out of business; it is the catalog business which enjoys a competitive advantage because they do not have to collect that 5 to 8 percent sales tax. What would this mean to your State? In my State of Arkansas, it would mean $19.6 million a year. In Illinois, $233 million a year; Pennsylvania, $145 million; New York, $359 million; and California, $482 million. Call our former colleague, Governor Wilson in California, and ask him how he feels about this legislation. It is supported by the National Conference of Mayors, the National Governors Conference, the National Conference of County Executives. Who are we trying to help with S. 1? The Governors, the mayors, and the county executives. Mr. President, I used to be Governor of my State. These mandates drove me crazy. It was a big issue with me 24 years ago when I first became Governor of my State. I am not too crazy about this particular unfunded mandates bill, even though I was a cosponsor of it last year, and I am not at all sure I am going to vote for this one. But be that as it may, if you were to ask some Governors in their State, ``Would you rather have the right you would get under the Bumpers amendment or the mandates bill?'' they would take this legislation, because they are scared to death that this mandate legislation will never amount to anything. And you might say, ``These people do not do business in your State, so why should they collect a sales tax there?'' But they do impose a burden on the States--they send 3.3 million tons of catalogs and solicitations into the landfills of this country every year. And what is one of the biggest problems every mayor has? Why, the local landfill. In a lot of jurisdictions in this country it costs $100 a ton to dispose of garbage. But it is not just the 3.3 million tons of catalogs which mail-order companies send into the States. All the packaging that their merchandise comes in has to be disposed of, too. How much are the catalog houses contributing to the mayors to help them dispose of these millions of tons of garbage? Not one red dime. Mr. President, this is not designed to be punitive. It is designed to be fair. In order to be fair, I want to say this: There are a few mail order houses in this country which collect sales taxes in every State where they send products. There is one very notable case of such a company--essentially an office supply house which does over $200 million in business a year. When they formed the company, they sat down in the boardroom and said, ``Shall we or shall we not collect sales taxes on our sales and remit to the States?'' They decided, as good citizens, they would collect a sales tax and remit it back to every State they shipped into. Do you know who the founder of that company was? It was Senator Robert Bennett of the great State of Utah. He said to the Small Business Committee during a hearing last year that ``We thought it was the right thing to do.'' Mr. President, we have made this bill as simple and fair as we know how to make it. No. 1, we only require mail order companies to file a return with the States every 3 months. No. 2, we set up a toll-free telephone number at the State level so that any questions the catalog houses have can be resolved free of charge. And we have exempted all but 875 of the 7,500 mail order houses in the country, because we exempt every company which does less than $3 million in business a year. Of the 7,500 mail order companies in this country, 6,675 of them do not do $3 million a year. The mayors did not like it because I exempted them. But we thought it was fair to do so because this amendment could create a slight administrative burden on small companies. So only 825 of the 7,500 catalog sales houses in this country are going to be affected by this bill. Mr. President, sometimes the mail order houses say this is too complicated. I am not going to belabor it tonight, but tomorrow I am going to bring about a week's supply of catalogs that came into my home, and I am going to show you why that argument that this is too complicated on us will not fly. The reason it will not fly is because a lot of them already collect use taxes in as many as 25 or 30 States. Senator Bennett's company says, ``Include sales tax unless you are from Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire or Oregon, which do not have sales taxes.'' And then look at what they say: ``If your order is less than $10, include $2 for shipping charge. If your order is $10 to $25, include $2.50,'' and here is another chart that you have to look at when you order. So they themselves have very complicated catalogs sometimes. And it would be immensely less cumbersome if you simply said: ``Send with your order the local sales tax.'' because they are at such a competitive disadvantage. Let me tell you one other thing. There are some out-of-State companies that really drive local retailers up the wall. There are out-of-State companies which say, ``Go down to the local store, get the model number of the product you want, and call us toll free at this 800 number.'' You think they do not say that? Look at this advertisement: ``Discount Wallcovering. Shop the phone way. All brands, first quality, free delivery. No sales tax (outside Pennsylvania).'' But here is the real clincher: ``Shop in your neighborhood. Write down the pattern number book and then call Wallcovering, Inc.'' How would you like to be a wallcovering retailer and somebody comes in and goes through all your merchandise, picks out the number of the wallcovering they like and they said, ``Adios, see you later.'' They go home, get on a 1-800 line and call this outfit and they say, ``Here is the pattern I want, ship it to me with no sales tax.'' There are going to be a lot of Senators that vote against this amendment. But there is not one Senator in the U.S. Senate in his heart of hearts that would not tell you that such a practice is grossly unfair. Here is an ad by an outfit that is too small for anybody to read unless you are right on top of it, so I will tell you what it says. It is a company that sells boats, motors, fuel, water pump kits, everything from the world of boats to everything that makes a boat run. What do they do? They say, ``Nobody beats our deal.'' Up here in red it says, ``No sales tax added outside of North Carolina.'' Mr. President, I hate to belabor the Record, and I am not going to do the whole thing, but I want to read you a letter that I got from a person in the state of California that was in the boat business, Long Beach Yacht Sales, Long Beach, CA. January 18, 1994. Hon. Senator Bumpers, Chairman, Committee on Small Business, Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC. Attention: Mr. Stan Fendley, Tax Council: Thank you, in advance, for your sponsorship of legislation regarding the collection of interstate sales tax. This week we lost a $240,000 deal as a result of a sales tax issue. The buyer bought a boat in Oregon to avoid our local and state sales tax. The vessel will be kept out of state for the required period of time and will be subsequently brought into California after the waiting period has elapsed. Based on our local tax rate of 8.25% the resulting tax would have been $19,800. Not only did we (and the State) lose this deal, but we also lost the time and expenses involved in upselling the customer to a more expensive boat (from $140,000 to $240,000), sea trialing the boat and providing extensive consultation regarding the product. The customer thanked us but basically said for $19,800 he would have to make an economic choice to buy elsewhere. Sincerely, Ray Jones, Owner. He told them, ``I can buy it in another State and bring it into this State and save myself almost $20,000.'' Who in their heart of hearts in the U.S. Senate thinks that is fair? So I say, this is not punitive, and I am not just pointing the finger at all of these people. Fingerhut out in Minnesota said they do not think this would be much of a burden on them. L.L. Bean, in the State of Maine, said they did not think this would be much of a burden on them, either. So I applaud them. I applaud them for their generous statements and their citizenship. I do not blame them for not collecting the applicable taxes. I would not collect them either if I did not have to. Mr. President, the thrust of this amendment is to give the States the discretion. This does not impose one single thing on the States. It says to the States, ``You have the discretion of requiring the collection of use tax on merchandise being shipped into your State so that retailers in your State are competing on a level playing field with out-of-State companies.'' Mr. President, until that fateful November 8, 1994, I was chairman of the Small Business Committee. As chairman of the Small Business Committee, and as a former small businessman, I have always championed the rights of people to start a business, make Government as unobtrusive as possible, reduce the paperwork burden, reduce the regulatory burden, everything to give people an opportunity to grow and prosper. When we held hearings on this bill last year, we had retailers from all over the country come and testify. We had a music store owner in my State talk about how many people came into his store, got the model number off the instrument they wanted, and went back home and ordered it. The retail Main Street jewelry stores left in this country, you can count them on one hand, because they cannot compete. Yet these are the people we look to organize the Christmas parades in rural America. They are the people that every State depends on to pay sales taxes to educate their children. They are losing billions of dollars of sales every year to this absolutely burgeoning catalog sales business and it is time we give the States an opportunity to do something about it. Mr. President, in the morning I am going to do two things: I am going to read you some additional letters from retailers as to what they are putting up with out there. Second, I have a whole stack of catalogs. I am going to go through some of them and show you how complicated it is now and how, if you adopt this amendment, you not only curry favor of the mayors and Governors of this country, you probably lighten the administrative burden on some catalog companies because they will only have one tax rate to worry about in each State instead of many different local rates. Mr. President, before I yield the floor, I ask unanimous consent that this amendment be set aside until we return to S. 1 tomorrow morning. I am not sure what the hour is. Mr. President, when are we scheduled to return to S. 1 in the morning? Mr. President, I will withdraw that request. Mr. COHEN addressed the Chair.