Bill Thomas

Mr. THOMAS

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I will tell the gentleman it does not, because what we do is simply put in place the current tax structure on a permanent basis. If I might very briefly continue, and I will try to get time on this side if the gentleman does not have it, if you have indicated you agree you want to make the tax permanent, and I want to make the tax permanent, if we make the tax permanent, is it not incumbent on us to make sure we follow fiscal discipline over the next 8 budget years and make sure we move tax measures that can empower the business sector and individuals so that we can grow the economy so that we do not have to worry about the consequences that the gentleman is concerned about? I think it is the idea of fiscal conservatism and the idea of trying to grow the economy that some of my friend from Texas' friends are worried about actually having to do. You would rather create a false crisis than to grow ourselves out of it. That is my opinion.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, under the rules of the House, does the minority have the right to offer a motion to recommit?

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I understand the gentleman chafes under the rules of the House because he is now a minority. I understand that. I was 16 years in the minority, and we are operating under far more liberal rules of the House. I understand how it grates on him. But I will tell the gentleman that the structure that the gentleman had when he was in the majority was far less liberal than ours. If the gentleman will carefully review what I said, which is good practice for everyone, my complaint was about the use of the term ``raid'' and the fact that the structure that triggered the review was the Office of Management and Budget. That does not appear in the underlying bill. As far as I know, one of the best motivations to make sure people do the right thing is to have a goal; and if we make marriage tax relief permanent, we have a goal to make sure that the responsibility of not pushing this off on to our children is one that we would match by fiscal conservatism and stimulation of the economy.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw the words so that we can go forward.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, just so everyone here understands that this is probably one of the grossest forms of politics that is being engaged in, the gentleman from California just took to his feet and indicated that we should be spending our time on other factors. He mentioned, for example, the question of inversions. I just want all of the Members here to know that 1 week ago today, the Committee on Ways and Means held a hearing on inversions. Is it not ironic that it was the gentleman from California (Mr. Matsui) who moved that the committee adjourn before the panel of experts was heard, before the Members had a chance to respond to questions? So here he is, complaining that we are not looking at inversions, when he was the one that moved to adjourn the committee. Now, that is politics.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, golly, if any Members listened to the first hour, they would think our friends on the other side of the aisle were in opposition to what we wanted to do. That it was a sham, a farce. And then, lo and behold, their substitute takes the majority's bill. Now at this point I am running through my knowledge of quotes that might perhaps put this in perspective, and the only one that comes to mind is the Yogi Berra quote, ``When you come to a fork in the road, take it.'' Mr. Speaker, what we have here is an hour of debate about how horrible this side of the aisle and those who really do want to eliminate the marriage tax penalty on the other side of the aisle are in trying to offer permanent repeal. If I understand what the gentleman from California (Mr. Matsui) is offering is permanent repeal. He is offering the underlying bill. So if the gentleman from California did not understand the context in which I referred to his argument about the fact that the gentleman from Connecticut was not allowed to appear in front of the full committee, in which I said there had been 17 full committee hearings, and only one had Members in front of it, is baloney. I said it was the * * * baloney; and if the gentleman does not understand the use of that phrase, let me explain it. Apparently the argument that the Democrats have been making for the last hour is baloney. parliamentary inquiry

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman's desire to let us get back together, to let us lower the political rhetoric. We are doing some kind of game here, and what they are engaged in is serious legislative business. I ask anyone to read the substitute. First of all, their bill has no effect until 2010, calendar year 2010. That is 8 budget years from now. We do not have to worry about what kind of obligation our children are going to have if we make prudent spending decisions, if we stimulate this economy to allow entrepreneurship to prevail so the economy can grow. We have eight budget seasons to create an environment to bootstrap ourselves out of the situation that the tragic events of September 11 of last year put us in, the position we are in. So to say that now we have to shut off all possibility for 8 or 10 years down the road, basically tells me they have no faith in the American people and they have no intention to engage in prudent fiscal policy over those 8 years. Now, let us talk about taking rhetoric out of the debate. If you find out what it is that the structure of the substitute does is, it takes the congressional control over the purse strings, jealously guarded by the Congress over the years, and blithely says the Director of the Office of Management and Budget would certify, would take the decision out of the people's House and take it down to the executive branch. I think that is fundamentally wrong. It undermines a key provision of the Constitution. But what is that the Director of the Office of Management and the Budget is supposed to determine? This is where the politics comes in. I know sometimes we use jargon, and especially budgetary jargon, and it gets confusing about what we really mean. Let me read. It says that ``during such 10-year fiscal period, the provisions of section 1 would not result in a raid on Social Security trust funds or increase the size of a raid on such funds.'' Now, I would say that the fundamental political motivation of this substitute is to focus on how they describe the decision that the Director in the Office of Management and Budget would make. He or she would decide whether or not there was a, quote-unquote, ``raid'' on the Social Security trust fund. If you believe that is technical jargon that is used to determine a budgetary consequence, okay. If you believe ``raid'' carries pretty heavy political power and that the determination of a raid does not create an attitude, does not get you into a negative frame of mind, then I guess you do not understand how much this is a political exercise. I appreciate the gentleman from Texas, my friend, and his fundamental concern about our resources. I believe he is absolutely honest in his attempts to make sure that we live within our budget. I agree with him. I am willing to join hands with him. But what I want to do is unleash entrepreneurship, to hold the fiscal discipline in place. We can work our way out of this problem. But I just have a little trouble with the technical term to determine whether or not his substitute has validity, and it is the term ``raid.'' I think the term ``raid'' in and of itself is a political statement. Mr. Speaker, I yield the remainder of my time to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Weller) and ask unanimous consent that he be allowed to control the time as he sees fit.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I do not know about separating the wheat from the chaff, but I do think we ought to separate the bull from the waste. Notice that when we come to the floor to argue the issue in front of us, they always want to argue a different issue. One week ago today the elimination of the estate tax was on the floor. They did not like us voting on it. The Record shows it passed. Today the marriage penalty will pass. Next week we will be introducing legislation to deal with prescription drugs. But about this Maloney baloney, understand this, we have had 17 full committee hearings and only once did we have a member panel. It is not the ordinary and customary thing that we do. That is baloney. We have had subcommittee hearings. We have had 68 subcommittee hearings and we have had 60 members testify at those subcommittee hearings. We are having a subcommittee hearing on inversions. We have invited the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Maloney). Let us see if he comes, as all the other Members have come to the subcommittee. The reason they wanted to disrupt the hearing was because they want to try to make a political point. The Maloney business is baloney.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 440, I call up the bill (H.R. 4019) to provide that the marriage penalty relief provisions of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 shall be permanent, and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, in a further attempt to expedite the process in which the gentleman from California's comments about the committee's failure to allow a Member to offer testimony at full committee when that is the extreme exception to the rule rather than the general rule and the argument that we denied it because of the gentleman, that that argument that the gentleman was making was in fact not accurate or factual, which is in a colloquial way sometimes referred to as baloney, the gentleman from California is willing to strike that structure which has been presented if it offends the gentleman because I want to move on with the debate. The gentleman's argument, notwithstanding that, is still phony; but if he is so upset with that reference that we continue to delay the proceedings of the floor, the gentleman from California would ask unanimous consent that that be struck.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, yesterday the House was privileged in a joint session to hear from the Prime Minister of Australia. It was, I hope, for most Members a rather refreshing presentation of the closeness of the two countries, because he provided us with a speech which pointed with pride and viewed with alarm. He talked about areas in which we have common purpose, and areas where the Australians, through the Prime Minister as the head of the government, had some concern about legislation that we might be passing. But I want to focus on one small statement that he made which I think has profound significance and which I had not quite heard it put the way the Prime Minister put it. He said that the best structure for social welfare is the family. And although we have discussed in many different ways the value and virtues of the family, the idea that from a societal point of view the ability to nurture the family structure as the best social welfare unit is, I think, what we are about today. In this system, or in any system, if you do not want something, if you want to discourage it, you put up barriers. One of the cleanest barriers that you can put up to stop activity is to tax something. If it costs you more to do a particular behavior, you tend to do less of it. If we want to encourage a particular kind of behavior, we should reward it or create incentives for it, or, at the very least, make sure that in the way we engage in governmental interactivity in that area is to remain neutral. We are here today to take the tax structure, which historically has penalized marriage, which is the foundation for that family unit, and we have penalized it by virtue of the way in which the tax structure is arranged. Indeed, today we are half enlightened. That is, we have decided to suspend the penalty through the tax structure on marriage for a period of time. It is through no fault of the House that this has occurred, because the House passed permanent marriage relief reform. It is because of the constitutional necessity to have the House and the Senate agree on a structure to be sent to the President to become law. Under the arcane rules of the Senate, at the time that this was moved, it could only be done for 10 years. Notwithstanding the fact that 10 years seems a long way off, one of the things we ought to do at the first opportunity and at every opportunity is to correct that fundamental flaw, that if in fact we have decided that we ought not to penalize marriage, then we ought to make it permanent. And that is the sum and substance of the legislation that is before us today, to take a provision that is currently temporary in the law and make it permanent. If you are not going to incentivize marriage, at the very least make sure you do not punish it. That is what this vote and debate is all about. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Weller), and ask unanimous consent that he control the time.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, clearly, based upon the Chair's ruling, the fact that the argument had been made about the denial of a Member to appear before the committee is without substance. Perhaps if someone has a thesaurus and they look up synonyms for ``without substance,'' they may find a word referring to a particular lunch meat. The fundamental point we are making here is we spent an hour with their bemoaning the fact that we want to make the marriage penalty permanent, they now want to take an hour on their substitute which makes the marriage penalty permanent. One would think that if they were in opposition with all those vehement phrases in the first hour to making the marriage penalty permanent, they would have a substitute that would do something other than making the marriage penalty permanent. But I have to let my colleagues realize here that what we are engaging in on the floor with the offering of the Democrat substitute could probably generally be referred to as political baloney. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, rather than delay the process, since a number of Members really want to go home and rather than trying to get the Parliamentarians to attempt to divine sentence structure, the gentleman from California would ask unanimous consent to remove the statement and put in its place that the argument from the gentleman from California about the way in which the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Maloney) was treated is phony baloney. Parliamentary Inquiry

Mr. THOMAS

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the bill just passed.

Mr. THOMAS

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I am old enough to recall a period of time in which records were first 78 rpm, and then we got the smaller ones when the kids' rock 'n roll began to come in, the old 45s. What was usually done was that there was on one side of the record the hit song, and then on the other side, what came to be known as the flip side. Rarely did we get a 45 record that had two really good songs on both sides, and there were some folks who made a living by living on the flip side. So we have had the debate about getting rid of the death tax, repealing the death tax permanently. That is the hit side. The flip side of that record is what we are now debating. I do not care how many numbers on a chart are presented, I do not care how someone is going to tell us we are going to be okay for a while. The name of the song on the flip side is: we are reinstating a permanent death tax. The hit side is repeal, the flip side is that we want to retain a death tax. That is one of the reasons they talked about the hit side and the flip side. Here in terms of this particular debate, all we have to say is, do what most of the kids did when they had their 45s: play the hit side, not the flip side. Oppose the substitute and support the underlying bill. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Dunn), and I ask unanimous consent that she control the balance of the time.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, in terms of that honest, pleading appeal, I am going to just try to put a couple of tests in place to see how real it was. If this motion to recommit is so critical to the future of the Social Security trust fund, why was it not in the Pomeroy substitute? 190 Democrats less than a half an hour ago voted to raid the Social Security trust fund. The Pomeroy substitute spends more than $22 billion over the next 5 years. It violates the budget, and it runs us into deficit spending, and it violates this motion to recommit. So if Members are so concerned, why was this not part of the Pomeroy substitute? The answer is, they want to complain about it but they do not want to be responsible for it. Less than a week ago we had many Democrats on the floor wringing their hands over the constitutional crisis; that if we sent the executive branch the superwaiver in the welfare bill, that we would be ceding constitutional authority to the executive, constitutional authority that we should cling to our chests very, very hard because we do not want to give up this constitutional right. Did Members read this? It says, ``The director of Office of Management and Budget will certify.'' It is the executive branch that will tell us if this institution, with its constitutional powers, is in violation, and it is the OMB that will correct it. I find it ironic that within a week, they take a position which was an absolute constitutional prerogative and throw it in here as the way in which we are going to control the process. I guess the thing that gets me the most is 190 Democrats just voted to violate this motion to recommit; and, without a second thought, they offer this motion to recommit. That kind of tells us about how sincere these Members are. Parliamentary Inquiry

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 435, I call up the bill (H.R. 2143) to make the repeal of the estate tax permanent, and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Dying has been euphemistically called ``buying the farm,'' but for many Americans today, reality is that when they die, they have to sell the farm. The argument that two iron clad rules of life are death and taxes are currently linked in the law today in the most bizarre fashion, and that is, although we still have the certainty of death and taxes, the interrelated consequence of each is timed unfortunately to the question of when someone dies. How in the world have we gotten ourselves into this particular situation? The House has voted twice to repeal the death tax, not just for 10 years, permanent repeal. However, in dealing with the other body, given the arcane rules of the other body, we currently have the situation in which the death tax is reduced, then ended and then reinstated. Providing real tax relief today currently has a hook tomorrow, and one of the things we need to do is to make sure that we move the permanency of the estate tax repeal so that those who awaken on New Year's Day 2011 are not faced with a massive tax increase. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time, and I yield the remainder of my time to the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Dunn) of the Committee on Ways and Means and ask unanimous consent that the gentlewoman control the remainder of my time.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the motion to recommit.

Mr. THOMAS

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 2143, the bill just passed.

Mr. THOMAS

Mr. THOMAS. Before anyone thinks that this is a decision on a narrow, technical parliamentary discussion, I want you to understand what is at stake. My friend, the gentleman from Massachusetts, said he could not believe that we would be doing this, or that Thomas Jefferson would not comprehend the fact that we were trying to run our business this way. The gentleman from Massachusetts had a popular politician at the time that Thomas Jefferson was a popular politician by the name of Elbridge Gerry. He created the gerrymander, to draw a district so bizarre that it was said, ``It looks like a salamander. Let's call it a gerrymander.'' Why was it drawn that way? To retain political power. They would go to any lengths to retain political power. If you take the logical argument of the gentleman from Massachusetts and say that we really ought to express ourselves on each and every item, that you should not hide something in a bill, can you imagine what the procedure would be on the floor of the House if each and every item had to be voted on? Because if you did not vote on it, then you are hiding it behind another item. And that when you are in this kind of a structure, i.e., moving a supplemental bill, by its very nature it is supplemental, it means we have picked up some pieces, we have had some things happen we were not aware of and we have had to put them together to respond to the real world. Not the desired world, the real world. And that their problem is they do not want to vote on this. They had a chance and they did. They voted ``no'' on the rule. But the majority prevailed. They now do not want to vote on this bill so it can go to conference and we can make an adjustment on the fundamental balance sheet of the United States because they do not want to vote on it when it comes back. So I want everyone to understand, this is not a narrow parliamentary argument. This is simply a resurfacing of the fact that they do not run the place anymore and they do not like it. Because they used to do this routinely. And, guess what? Obviously by the reaction, it is quite true. Because what we are doing here is trying to deal with a situation no one had planned on. And what the friends on the other side of the aisle are concerned about is that we might actually be able to accomplish something. Because every move they make and every word they speak is planned to try to get them to return to power following the elections this fall. Our job is to run the country as a responsible governing majority and we intend to do just that.

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Chairman, I would like to be heard on the rule.

Mr. THOMAS

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the first test flight utilizing digital fly-by-wire flight control systems at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, located on Edwards Air Force Base in my district. On May 25, 1972, Dryden's F-8 Digital Fly-By-Wire (DFBW) aircraft, piloted by Gary Krier (now Dryden's Director of Flight Operations), successfully tested the technology that is now used on space shuttles and military and commercial aircraft. Digital systems revolutionized the way aircraft were designed, built, and flown. These systems made planes safer, less vulnerable to damage from enemy weapons, more maneuverable, and more stable than the former hydraulic systems. In addition, digital systems provide a smoother ride than a hydraulic system--an important application for commercial airliners. Previously pilots controlled aircraft manually, manipulating control sticks linked to cables and rods that moved surfaces on the wings and tails. The flight testing done at Dryden 30 years ago allowed the engineers of today to develop and fly unconventional plane designs like the B-2 Stealth bomber, and paved the way for the air superiority that America enjoys today--an invaluable asset in the war on terror. I commend all those who worked on this program and thank them for their dedication. I am confident that the work performed at Dryden today will revolutionize the skies of tomorrow and keep the United States as the world's preeminent aerospace leader.