[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 47 (Monday, April 15, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H3243-H3249]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   PROPOSED CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Colorado [Mr. Skaggs] is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Mr. Speaker, let me just say, I have discussed with the 
gentleman from Texas [Mr. Barton], who I believe is scheduled to have 
the hour special order following this one, and I think the country will 
be well served by a real give-and-take kind of debate on this very 
important issue of amending the Constitution to require a two-thirds 
vote by both the House and the Senate.
  So I expect we are going to be yielding back and forth a lot for some 
questions and answers on both my time and the time of the gentleman 
from Texas later on. I hope it will be a useful, enlightening and 
serious discussion about this proposal which is way past due, because 
we have not had a serious, enlightened and careful discussion of this 
before it gets to the floor later today. In fact, the procedures that 
the majority has followed in scheduling this matter for the floor on 
April 15 really makes a mockery of the regular order that ought to be 
followed in bringing something of this substance and moment to the 
House for a vote.
  Mr. Speaker, I spoke about that a little bit earlier. I am not going 
to belabor it again now. I do want to remind my colleagues that I, 
because of the abuse of process that the majority has followed in 
bringing this up without any vote in committee, any markup in 
committee, any time for Members to really examine it, I really think 
all possible procedural rights ought to be exercised, at least at this 
point in the process. But let me just talk for a moment, then I want to 
invite the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Moran], to engage on this with 
me, as well, talk for a moment about what, for me anyway, is one of the 
most central matters raised by this proposal. That is our reliance or 
not on the fundamental principle of majority rule in this Republic of 
ours.
  I do want to commend the sponsors of this proposal for one thing. 
They recognized that if we are going to require supermajority votes to 
deal with any particular kind of legislation, in this case taxes, then 
you have got to put it in the Constitution. I think, in effect, they 
concede that the attempt made by the House a year ago January to do 
this by a mere change in House rules is constitutionally improper.
  But I oppose this amendment, as I say, primarily because it violates 
what James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, and of 
its defense during the debate on ratification, what he called the 
fundamental principle of free government, and that is the principle of 
majority rule.
  The Constitution makes very few exceptions to that principle, and 
none of them has to do with the core ongoing responsibility of 
governance, which includes, among other things, of course, how we raise 
the revenues necessary to fund the responsibilities that the Federal 
Government has. I believe we should be very, very wary of extending any 
of the existing supermajority exceptions to other areas, especially if 
it would complicate the essential responsibilities and competency of 
the Government.
  Mr. Speaker, I think we need to be particularly aware of the fact 
that it is a logical corollary of any time we require a supermajority 
to do anything that we are giving effective control on that issue to 
the minority. You cannot have it any other way. Under this proposed 
amendment, that majority could be comprised of as few as 34 Members of 
the U.S. Senate, representing less than 10 percent of the American 
people. They would have effective power to control the Government's 
revenue and tax policy.

  Now, that is bad enough as a matter of basic democratic theory and 
philosophy, but I think, putting that to one side, if we really look at 
what is likely to happen were this proposal to get into the 
Constitution, we will be amazed at the absurdly impractical 
consequences that will flow from it, some intended, perhaps, I suspect 
many of them unintended.
  Let me just take a look at some of those that seem to me to be most 
significant. First of all, if this were in the Constitution, it would 
for all practical purposes lock into law whatever the then-current tax 
structure of the country might be at the time of the amendment's 
ratification, because I would suggest to you that it will be extremely 
difficult to meet the two-third vote requirement necessary to make any 
significant overhaul of the tax system. There may be some tinkering 
around the edges that could command two-thirds.
  So if you like the tax system the way it is now, or if you have 
supreme confidence that some future Congress is going to get it just 
right before this amendment might be ratified by the States, then sure, 
embrace this. I simply do not have that level of confidence, certainly 
in the way the tax laws now are, or in the supreme wisdom of some 
future Congress that may adopt some reform or overhaul of the Tax Code 
to have gotten it just right later. But we should be aware that we are 
really buying into whatever the then-state of affairs happens to be at 
the time of ratification.
  I think another consequence of this proposal would be to greatly 
complicate our efforts to balance the budget, which ought to be the 
central goal that we unite behind right now, particularly complicate 
the efforts to balance the budget as it relates to changes that will 
reduce the growth in entitlement programs. We all know that is where 
the money really is, if we are ever going to get this deficit problem 
under control.
  Another reason that I think we ought to think long and hard and then 
reject this proposal is that as with the current rule of the House 
requiring, except when it is waived, which is always, requiring a 
three-fifths vote whenever there is a tax increase, this constitutional 
proposal is vague and will almost certainly generate confusion and 
litigation and, I believe, basically put the validity of most future 
tax legislation on hold for whatever period of time it takes for the 
courts to go through and parse out the language of this proposed 
amendment, deciding what is meant by some ``reasonable'' act of a 
future Congress to define what is meant by ``de minimis'' and any 
number of other vagaries that are inherent in this proposal.

                              {time}  1445

  I have got a number of other points that I may get around to as the 
debate continues this afternoon, but my colleague from Virginia, Mr. 
Moran, has really put in a great deal of time and effort in examining 
this proposal. I know he has a lot of things on his mind about this, 
and I would be pleased to yield at this time.
  Mr. MORAN. I thank my very good friend from Colorado for yielding to 
me and for his valiant efforts to resist the political temptation to 
vote for a constitutional amendment which is really little more than 
political grandstanding.
  Now there are any number of reasons that Members could choose to vote 
this down. They could vote it down because we already have a rule that 
requires a three-fifths vote to increase taxes and every time that it 
has applied to legislation the Committee on Rules has waived that rule.
  They could vote it down because it is bad public policy. It says 
essentially that whatever is in the Tax Code now stays because it is 
going to be almost impossible to change it. It is going to be 
impossible to close the corporate

[[Page H3244]]

loopholes. Even things like capital gains reductions which are expected 
to increase revenue would be in violation of this legislation which 
says that--a piece of legislation that increases revenues by more than 
a de minimis amount requires a two-thirds vote.
  They could vote it down because this debate has already occurred. 
This debate took place during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. 
Article IX of the Articles of Confederation required a supermajority 
vote to increase taxes, and it was found that it did not work. So they 
had to go back. They had to correct it because they realized that on a 
tough vote it is hard enough to get a majority of Members to do the 
courageous and right thing, let alone two-thirds of the body.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Could I engage the gentleman just on that point because, 
you know, you stop to think of it, we would not have this Constitution 
to amend had it not been for the fact that a supermajority provision in 
the Articles of Confederation, just like the amendment that the 
proponents are proposing, was found to completely paralyze the then new 
National government of America. Is that not correct?
  Mr. MORAN. It is absolutely correct. You know, I think that this 
amendment in some ways shows almost a contempt for the wisdom of our 
Founding Fathers. They tried to do what this does because they knew the 
political expediency of making it very difficult to increase taxes. But 
it brought our country into gridlock, and so that is why they had to go 
back in 1787 to say the only way we are going to move forward and 
realize our potential as a nation is if the majority rules; in other 
words, if every Representative has an equal vote. If you say that you 
require two-thirds, then the majority does not have an equal vote. The 
people who have a disproportionate vote are those in the minority 
because it only takes one-third plus one to prevent the will of the 
majority from becoming law.
  Now this is particularly applicable in the Senate. In the Senate, as 
you know, every State, no matter how many people are in that State, 
have two Senators. There are 17 States that represent less than 10 
percent of the American population. Those 17 States just happen to be 
represented by 34 Senators, one-third plus one. So that 10 percent has 
a disproportionate influence upon the course of legislation.
  Now imagine, why should 10 percent of the people be represented by 
people who can thwart the bill of the majority of 90 percent of the 
population? That is not democracy, that is not equal representation. 
When you get into issues like a gas tax or any number of things that 
might affect rural areas more than urban areas, this becomes 
particularly apt.

  Mr. SKAGGS. Let me interrupt the gentleman on this point as well, 
because I think it really bears looking at some concrete examples. As 
the gentleman has pointed out, a piece of legislation could pass the 
House, the body that directly represents people in this country, by an 
overwhelming majority, unlikely in the case of a tax bill because they 
are so difficult to pass, but let us say for the sake of example, and 
then be held hostage by 34 Senators even though 66 Senators might also 
agree that it is in the national interest. Or in a close case in the 
House, 146 of our colleagues here could stand in the way of the will 
expressed by 289 of our colleagues in the House, the one-third plus one 
that the gentleman points out.
  Now is that really the kind of dramatic shift away from the 
fundamental principle of free government that Madison wrote about so 
persuasively over 200 years ago that is in the national interest? I 
fail to see the point.
  Mr. MORAN. I think obviously the answer lies in the question. It is 
not. It is an aberration of what our Founding Fathers intended, and I 
think this is a terribly important point. You know, if I were a 
lobbyist for a corporation that was using a loophole to get billions of 
dollars of tax preferences, and we can name any number of them, I do 
not think we need to be specific, but we know that there are about $400 
billion of tax preferences in our Tax Code where people can make a 
legitimate argument of uneven treatment. But if I were a corporation or 
a wealthy individual; for example, if I was one of these very wealthy 
individuals who decided that I did not want to pay taxes on gains I had 
made in this country, so I denounced my citizenship and decided I am 
going to claim my citizenship offshore, some island or whatever, and 
even though I can still live here 6 months, or 1 day less than 6 
months, or whatever the law is, I would know the law, and in fact I do 
not have to change my standard of living or my annual vacation plans, I 
just decide I am no longer an U.S. citizen. I denounce my citizenship, 
I live someplace else and, thus, save billions of dollars in total on 
gains made in this United States.
  We tried to get--and I will just finish this statement--we tried to 
get legislation through that would have saved $3.6 billion over 10 
years just from a handful of wealthy families who denounced their 
American citizenship. We could not change that, we could not do the 
people's will to make them pay taxes on gains incurred in this country 
because all they would have to do is to go after those few folk over in 
the Senate, if they could not do it in the House, and, simply, they do 
not have to deal with the majority, with 67 percent. All they have to 
do is deal with one-third, and focus on them, and thwart the will of 
the majority.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Well, certainly in my frame of reference $3.6 billion is 
not a, quote, de minimis, unquote, amount, which is the exception made 
on this proposed constitutional amendment. So, if I understand the 
gentleman, it would require the concurrence of two-thirds of both the 
House and the Senate even to get at such an egregious flaunting and 
flouting of fairness in our Tax Code as this expatriate tax break 
provision that you so well described.
  You know, one of the other ironies in this is, because of the way 
this proposal is worded in talking about not raising internal revenues 
by more than a de minimis amount, rather than not raising tax rates or 
tax base, that we could end up being hung up over even passing a 
capital gains tax cut because certainly the advocates of a capital 
gains tax cut argue that it would increase revenues in some of the 
economic forecasting models that are used. So it seems to me that we 
are in the absolutely crazy situation in which it could even require 
two-thirds of the House and the Senate to adopt a cut in rates that the 
advocates claim would result in an increase in revenues.
  Is that the way the gentleman reads this?
  Mr. MORAN. It is exactly the way I read it, and it is the way that 
Mr. Dreier, who is one of the leaders on the Republican majority, reads 
it as well. In the Committee on Rules, consideration of this 
legislation said, well, what a minute, the way this is worded is that 
if you cut capital gains, and it does as we say that it does, we 
purport that it will substantially increase revenue in the first couple 
years, and that is probably true. As far as I am concerned, I think it 
probably does do that. In the outyears it may be a more problematic 
situation, but in the initial years people are going to sell their 
stocks and assets more quickly. It will raise revenue, but that means 
that you are going to have to get two-thirds of this body and two-
thirds of the Senate to approve it because it increases revenue 
certainly by more than a de minimis amount.

  Talk about the law of unintended consequences.
  Mr. SKAGGS. If I may interrupt the gentleman again, as I mentioned at 
the outset, the gentleman from Texas, who is the principal sponsor of 
this proposal, and I agreed we would try to have a free exchange. I see 
he is on his feet. Perhaps he can enlighten us as to what that 
wonderful lawyer Latin phrase ``de minimis'' really means and how some 
future Congress will be able to make some sense out of this.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. I thank the distinguished gentleman from 
Colorado for yielding, and I am going to make two points, and then I am 
going to yield back since it is your time. I wanted to focus on this, 
the majority argument that you were speaking of, but before I do that I 
want to directly answer the question on de minimis. It is our intent 
that de minimis is equal or less, and in an economy that is $6 
trillion, if you want to put a figure on it, in the implementation 
language and in the colloquy that we will have with the chairman of the 
Ways and Means Committee later this evening, we are going to say de 
minimis is one-tenth of 1 percent or less. So that is the number, but

[[Page H3245]]

de minimis is defined as negligible, or minimal, or having little or no 
value.
  Mr. SKAGGS. One-half of 1 percent of GDP or one-tenth of 1 percent of 
GDP--or of Federal revenues?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. One-tenth of 1 percent of the existing revenue 
that is being generated by the current tax system.
  Mr. SKAGGS. But would the gentleman agree there is nothing to prevent 
some future Congress from coming up with whatever arbitrary definition 
of de minimis it might see fit to impose?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. That is certainly true. A future Congress could 
change the implementation standard.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Or is that the case, because it talks about reasonable 
legislation. Are we going to have the courts deciding whether a 
Congress has reasonably exercised its judgment about what de minimis 
means?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. This constitutional amendment, as all 
constitutional amendments, are subject to court review, which as a 
strict constitutionist I know that the gentleman from Colorado would 
support that.
  Mr. SKAGGS. But let me yield to the gentleman from Virginia.
  Mr. MORAN. If I might suggest to my friend from Texas, the 
Constitution is not a rough working draft. You know, here we are, for 
the first time you are telling us what the words ``de minimis'' mean, 
which you want to put into the Constitution. Well, what you are saying 
is, as I calculate it, anything that is less than $1\1/2\ billion, 
$1,500,000,000 could be considered de minimis. Is that----
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. That is over an extended period of time based on 
the existing Tax Code. But obviously the gentleman from Virginia can go 
to the Webster's Dictionary and--we picked the least offensive word 
that we could to put in. The intent is to, in a broad sense, keep the 
tax burden, the Federal tax burden, on the American people in 19 
percent or less, which it has been historically.
  Mr. SKAGGS. As someone who studied Latin for 4 years, I do not find 
de minimis offensive, I just find it vague and confusing as something 
to put into the U.S. Constitution.
  Now would it not have been preferable for this to go through the 
committee process so that we can really examine exactly what these 
terms mean before we vote on putting them into the Constitution?

                              {time}  1500

  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Mr. Speaker, If the gentleman will continue to 
yield, I think there is some validity to that concern. We did have one 
hearing at the Committee on the Judiciary subcommittee. I certainly was 
not opposed to hearings at the full committee. For whatever reason, 
those hearings were not held.
  I will point out, and the gentleman knows as well as I do, as part of 
the balanced budget debate, we have had debates on the House floor four 
times in which the tax limitation balanced budget amendment was one of 
the amendments that was voted upon. As has been pointed out in the 
opening statements of the two gentlemen in this special order, we did 
have a short debate on the three-fifths vote for an income tax increase 
as a rule change at the start of this Congress. It is not as if this 
subject has never been debated on the floor.
  I would also point out, Mr. Speaker, and the gentleman knows this 
also, this is not physics and rocket science. The American taxpayer 
very quickly grasps that two-thirds is a higher fraction than one-half.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman is 
making the claim that yes, this has great symbolic value as a bit of 
political rhetoric, I will concede that. But why do we have to do this, 
making such a rush of what ought to be the normal deliberative process 
that the House should go through, especially when we are talking about 
amending the Constitution?
  As the gentleman knows, the language that we are supposed to vote on 
later today has never been the subject of a committee hearing or 
markup. In fact, it was introduced on the Thursday night before we left 
town for 2 weeks on Friday a couple of weeks ago. Is that not an 
extraordinary rush to judgment on something as complex and serious as 
amending the Constitution? And is not in fact the reason that this did 
not go to committee that the Committee on the Judiciary was seen as 
unwilling to mark up and report a proposal like this out?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to 
yield, I will concede the gentleman's point that more debate at the 
committee would have certainly been in order. I am not going to deny 
that. I will point out, though, that the day after the vote on the tax 
limitation balanced budget amendment, I believe in February 1995, the 
Speaker of the House said that we would have a vote on the tax 
limitation amendment as a stand-alone amendment on April 15 or near 
April 15, 1996, so the concept has been out there for a year.

  We certainly have had numerous hearings on it in some of the think 
tanks and things of this sort, so it is not as if this is a brand new 
concept that people have trouble grasping.
  Mr. SKAGGS. If I may, Mr. Speaker, is it not correct that this 
proposal, the one we will vote on in the U.S. House of Representatives 
later today, perhaps----
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Hopefully today.
  Mr. SKAGGS. That this language never existed on paper until the 
Thursday before this 2-week break and has never been the subject of a 
hearing in any committee of the Congress, much less being marked up by 
the committee of jurisdiction, the Committee on the Judiciary? Is that 
not correct?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. That is not quite correct.
  Mr. SKAGGS. What is wrong with that statement?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. It was the subject of a hearing in the Committee 
on Rules when we went to the Committee on Rules to ask for 
consideration today.
  Mr. SKAGGS. That was the morning after it was first introduced, is 
that correct?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. That is not the Committee on the Judiciary. But 
if I could, I would like to talk about your principle of majority rule. 
I think you said that there were 10 States, or 10 percent of the 
population had 34 Senators. I am going to just read the presentment 
clause in the Constitution. It says: Every bill shall have passed the 
House of Representatives and the Senate before it becomes a law, be 
presented to the President of the United States. ``Shall have passed.'' 
It does not say ``shall have passed by a majority,'' or ``shall have 
passed by a supermajority.'' It just says ``shall have passed.''
  In the original Constitution there were 7 two-thirds supermajority 
requirements: Conviction in impeachment trials, article II, section 3, 
clause 6; expulsion of a Member of Congress, article I, section 5, 
clause 2; override of a Presidential veto, article I, section 7, clause 
2, quorum of two-thirds of the States to elect the President, article 
II, section 1, clause 3; consent to a treaty, article II, section 2, 
clause 2; proposing constitutional amendments which is what we are 
doing today, article V; and State ratification of the original 
Constitution, article VII.

  Since that time, there have been 3 additional two-thirds 
supermajority vote requirements added to the Constitution, which brings 
the number to 10. The purpose of a supermajority requirement, in my 
opinion, and if you read the Federalist papers and some of the writings 
of James Madison, it was felt that if the issue was large enough that 
it needs more than a slim majority, that you really need consensus, you 
need a supermajority or a two-thirds vote.
  Certainly in today's era, it is this gentleman's opinion that raising 
taxes any higher than they already are is one of those occasions that 
we need to amend the Constitution and require a supermajority.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Let me just say, I believe the gentleman's recitation 
proves my point, because none of the examples that the gentleman cites 
for requiring supermajorities has anything to do with the presentment 
clause. None of those examples involves the presentment of legislation 
to the President for his approval or disapproval or veto. In fact, they 
all have to do with extraordinary matters in the course of conducting 
the business of the country. None of them has to do with the core

[[Page H3246]]

legislative responsibilities of the Congress. And in fact, it is very 
clear from the fact that the framers, during the course of the 
Constitutional Convention, considered and rejected several times 
proposals to attach supermajority requirements to particular 
legislative matters, that it was not contemplated by them that the 
presentment clause could be some kind of excuse, covering the 
advisability of any supermajority requirement for regular legislative 
business.
  So the gentleman's points are accurate as far as they go. They simply 
are irrelevant to the validity or not of the argument about the 
importance of majority rule as a central tenet of free government.
  Mr. MORAN. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, I 
thank my friend for underscoring that point. In fact, it might strike 
one as the height of arrogance to think that after our Founding Fathers 
put together a Constitution that has withstood the test of time and 
made us the strongest country in the world economically, socially, and 
militarily and every other way, that after they debated this issue at 
length and decided several times that a supermajority would not work to 
come up with the revenue necessary to finance the expenses of our 
Government, now we want to come up, without committee hearings, and to 
second-guess, to change their decision. It strikes me, Mr. Speaker, as 
not particularly wise or, more importantly, consistent with the intent 
of our Founding Fathers.

  Mr. Speaker, we may sometimes be in the posture of taking the less 
conservative approach. I think right now we are taking a very 
conservative approach. Do not treat our Constitution as a rough working 
draft. Recognize the wisdom that went into this Constitution.
  My friend, the gentleman from Texas, has said that de minimis, the 
term de minimis was chosen because it was the least offensive term. I 
do not think that really ought to be the criteria by which we make 
legislation.
  When we define it now, for the first time that I am aware of, as one-
tenth of 1 percent of the Federal gross revenue, which is about $1.5 
billion, I need to ask the gentleman, does this apply to that 
expatriate loophole where a few families can save themselves millions 
and millions of dollars by simply renouncing their American 
citizenship? That is a loophole that I would hope many of us would want 
and eventually will be able to close. Does that preclude us from being 
able to do that with a majority vote of this House?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield 
further, first of all we are not here to either praise Caesar or bury 
Caesar, Caesar being the current Tax Code; we are here to come up with 
an amendment to make it more difficult to raise taxes.
  I guess what I might have said when I said ``least offensive,'' we 
wanted to use a term that was as close to revenue neutrality as 
possible, without saying revenue-neutral, because it is physically 
impossible if you want to change the entire tax system or you want to 
monitor it or modify it in some way, to speculate down to the penny 
that the change is not going to increase taxes. So de minimis was as 
close to revenue-neutral in terms of terminology as we could get.
  Mr. MORAN. If I could suggest to the gentleman, $360 million is not 
exactly getting down to the penny. That is the amount of money that we 
would recoup if we simply made people pay taxes on gains generated here 
in the United States, rather than being able to denounce their 
citizenship and claim another residence to avoid taxes. That is $360 
million annually, $3.6 billion over 10 years. But you are saying that 
if it is less than $1.5 billion, it does not count, it is de minimis. I 
do not know a lot of American families that consider $1.5 billion de 
minimis.

  We need to know how many of these tax loopholes are going to be 
precluded from being closed with your legislation.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. If the gentleman will continue to yield, this 
legislation does not preclude any tax loophole from being closed. This 
gentleman from Texas is not on the Committee on Ways and Means. I 
believe each of you two gentlemen is. I may be incorrect in that 
assumption. So you and the other members of the Committee on Ways and 
Means can do whatever you want. If you pass a tax law that has the 
effect of raising the tax burden on the American people more than a de 
minimis amount, it will take a two-thirds vote. If you want to change 
taxes, cut taxes, you want to lower revenues, you can do that with a 
simple majority vote.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Mr. Speaker, let me look at another recent example in our 
collective experience here earlier in this Congress. When we took up 
the majority's reconciliation bill last fall, I believe as I recall, 
there was a significant revenue-raising component to that, including 
changes in the Medicare part B premium.
  I happen to think that we are going to need to deal with that aspect 
of the Medicare Program in order to put it on a sound financial footing 
eventually. I was not one to criticize that very difficult political 
choice that the majority brought to us at that time. But the amount of 
money involved in that Medicare proposal, I think over whatever 
economic timeframe you want to look at, was significantly more than the 
expatriate tax loophole involves, some tens of billions of dollars. The 
reconciliation bill including that provision did not muster anything 
close to two-thirds vote.
  I think therein lies the problem, and the responsibility that we have 
to examine the consequences of what you are proposing that we do, not 
merely to discuss this in terms of the abstract notion that we are fed 
up with high taxes, but is this workable?
  If we are going to have a deal with entitlement reform fairly and 
sensibly, which by most accounts involves asking wealthier Americans to 
pay more for their health care if they are able to, we are doing to be 
facing, if this is in the Constitution, a requirement of getting two-
thirds. We know how difficult it is to pass something like that, 
because it is the political third rail of American politics; how 
difficult it is to get a simple majority. If we have to get a 
supermajority to deal with the wealthy end of things, and we cannot, 
what will be the course of least resistance? It is going to be cutting 
the benefits on the poor, which we can do by a simple majority.

  I invite the gentleman's response to that conundrum.
  Mr. SHADEGG. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. SKAGGS. I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.
  Mr. SHADEGG. Mr. Speaker, the fundamental essence of the gentleman's 
question is, is this workable. I believe the answer is, indeed, clearly 
it is workable. I think the language or the points that you make now 
highlight the difference between that language which is before this 
body today and the language of the rule, because what we have done is 
to let go of the original language proposed in the constitutional 
amendment introduced by the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Barton] and 
indeed embraced a different concept.
   That language would have said any increase in any tax rate or any 
increase in the base to which a tax is applied would require a 
supermajority; thus, the difficulty which you found in the language. 
Some would argue that, indeed, that is the preferable way to go, 
because it would mean that not only would we hold down increases but we 
would stop changing the Tax Code on a daily basis. Indeed, we made some 
4,000 changes of one kind or another in the Tax Code in the last 
decade. But that is not the language that is before us today.
  The language of the rule which you just raised, the language which, 
indeed, was constrained by rule, the legislation you referred to, is 
not the language that is before us today. The language that is before 
us today embraces the concept of revenue neutrality, and, indeed, that 
is the language which we put in the Arizona Constitution in 1992, and 
which has been placed in many other constitutions.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Speaker, I believe the gentleman 
from Arizona, who was just addressing the House, supported the 
majority's reconciliation bill, which included the significant 
adjustment in Medicare premiums, way more than a de minimis amount. 
Does the gentleman not agree that that is a difficult political hurdle 
to get over by a simple majority, much less by a two-thirds majority, 
and that if we are going to do fair entitlement reform, it is exactly 
the kind of tough

[[Page H3247]]

choice that a future House is going to have to make? Yet you are making 
it next to impossible for us to do exactly what is best advised for 
fair entitlement reform.
  Mr. SHADEGG. If I can make one quick point, and then I would like to 
allow my colleague, the gentleman from Texas, to be able to respond, 
first, the fundamental point here is that you could accomplish any of 
that with a simple majority provided it was tax-neutral. So were you to 
raise a premium, you could offset that by lowering a tax on some other 
location. I believe, however, as the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Barton] 
will point out, it did not apply to this instance at all.

                              {time}  1515

  Mr. BARTON of Texas. On that specific point, as you know, Medicare 
consists of two different parts, part A and part B. Medicare part A is 
funded by a tax, and you have to pay it if you are working in this 
country. I believe it is 1.2 percent, but it is certainly a tax.
  Medicare part B is not mandatory, it is voluntary. Admittedly 94 or 
95 percent of the American senior citizens choose to participate in 
Part B, but it is voluntary. Those that choose understand if they so 
choose they have to pay part of the premium.
  Under the resolution that is on the floor today, it would not take a 
two-thirds vote to change the medicare part B premium. It would take a 
two-thirds vote to raise the part A tax, unless at the same time you 
lower taxes on that part.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Reclaiming my time, I beg to differ with the gentleman. 
The gentleman's proposed constitutional amendment talks about any 
increase in the internal revenues--it does not talk about Internal 
Revenue Code--the internal revenues by more than a de minimis amount, 
made by any change in the law.
  Whether Medicare part B is voluntary or not, you are certainly 
talking about changes in the law that drive a major, not a de minimis, 
a major increase in internal revenue.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. I will stand by what I say. I believe that my 
explanation is correct.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Here again, would the gentleman agree, this is the kind 
of discussion and debate that ought to have occurred in the Committee 
on the Judiciary, so we could have had appropriate refinements made to 
clear up what is a fundamental area of vagueness and therefore 
potential uncertainty and litigations? That is why we should not be 
voting on this out of the regular order as we are going to.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. I am not opposed to more debate on it.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Would the gentleman join me in moving to send this back 
to the Committee on the Judiciary so it can be the subject of hearings 
and markup?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. I will certainly join the Member in having 
hearings. After we pass it this evening with a two-thirds vote, we can 
continue to have these hearings.
  Mr. SKAGGS. So we are going to decide what we have done after we have 
already passed it. That is a terrific standing of things on their 
heads.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Again, the concept is not one that you have to 
be a physics major to understand. If you would realize that two-thirds 
is a larger number than one-half, you have grasped the principle that 
we are trying to establish.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Let me yield to the gentleman from Virginia.
  Mr. MORAN. If I might suggest to my colleague from Texas, we are not 
suggesting that our colleagues need to be physics majors but they ought 
to be responsible legislators, particularly when we are attempting to 
change the Constitution of the United States. We ought to know the 
definition of some of the terms.
  You just threw out the idea that de minimis means $1.5 billion. Does 
that mean annually, or does that mean if you raise $1.5 billion over 5 
years or 7 years or 10 years? None of these answers are evident.
  Also, user fees, we are talking about going to a system where we can 
have user fees for bridges and for roads and for national parks and the 
like. Are user fees included here? If you read the language of the 
legislation we were given, the constitutional amendment, certainly they 
are because that is internal revenue being generated.

  I do not think we ought to be, as I suggested, treating the 
Constitution as some kind of working draft that we can amend as the 
notion comes to us, either on the floor of the House or even in 
committee or in any personal way. What we ought to be doing is enabling 
all the Members of this body to understand fully the consequences of 
their actions. We have that responsibility, and that is not the 
responsibility of a nuclear physicist but it certainly is the 
responsibility of a Member of the House of Representatives.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Let me ask the gentleman from Texas, since he is the 
authoritative person in interpreting this language, what does the 
amendment contemplate by the phrase ``internal revenues''? Is that as 
distinguished from external revenue, tariffs and excises?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Internal revenue is certainly the internal 
income tax system, the internal revenue system of this Nation, and it 
is taxes that have to be paid by the American people. To the gentleman 
from Virginia, when he talked about user fees, you could certainly 
raise the user fee to the national parks by a majority vote. That is 
not part of the Internal Revenue Code of this Nation.
  We will have the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means on the 
House floor sometime this evening, and the chairman and I will engage 
in a colloquy in which just those kinds of questions are asked and 
answered.
  Mr. SKAGGS. If I can reclaim my time, if the gentleman meant raising 
income taxes by more than a de minimis amount, why did the gentleman 
not use that term in the constitutional amendment rather than the term 
internal revenue, which has a much broader connotation to it than 
income taxes do?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Well, there are some other broad-based taxes.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Well, then, what would those be?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. The Social Security tax as a payroll tax is one.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Why not the Medicare tax?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. The Medicare part A is a payroll tax.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Why not the Medicare part B?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Because that is voluntary. That is not a tax.
  Mr. SKAGGS. But that is part of the Internal Revenue Code.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. That is a premium.
  Mr. SKAGGS. It is part of the Internal Revenue Code, is it not?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. You can choose not to pay that. That is 
voluntary.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Is it part of the Internal Revenue Code?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Is the gentleman from Colorado paying that 
premium right now?
  Mr. SKAGGS. The gentleman is not over 65, despite my appearance.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. You are not.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Is it not part of the Internal Revenue Code?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. But you are paying the part A tax now.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Right.
  I submit that this is a very artful redefinition on the fly of these 
terms in a proposed amendment to the fundamental charter of the 
country, and we do not know what we mean.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. It is the gentleman's time and he has been very 
gracious and I think this is helpful. I do not want to abuse his time. 
But as in any constitutional amendment if we pass it, and in my opinion 
it is not if we pass it, it is when we pass it, there will be obviously 
implementation language, implementation law, legislation, as in any 
constitutional amendment. These types of questions will be extensively 
debated in the committee, on the floor, in conference with the Senate, 
in conjunction with the President and the Cabinet officers involved in 
the particular debate and I am absolutely confident that the democratic 
process will yield satisfactory answers to these questions.

  The basic principle, once again, is making it more difficult to raise 
revenue, the tax burden of the American taxpayer, and I do not think 
there is any misunderstanding about that between the two distinguished 
gentlemen on the Democratic side, or certainly myself and the gentleman 
from Arizona [Mr. Shadegg] on the Republican

[[Page H3248]]

side. That is the principle that we are debating.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Reclaiming my time, I submit that there is a fundamental 
disagreement about what we mean. What the gentleman is saying is that, 
``Well, we may not know what we mean today when we're amending the 
Constitution, but we'll figure it out some later time.''
  I think that is really getting things backward. We need as much as we 
possibly can, and I think our discussion reveals that we do not yet 
have as clear an understanding as we possible can of the import of the 
gentleman's words in this proposed amendment.
  Certainly most provisions of the Constitution have been subject to 
some litigation. We should not, however, go out of our way to leave 
terminology so vague and confusing as to unnecessarily invite a 
plethora of litigation and uncertainty in this area which ought to 
have, as much as we possibly can, some sense of precision and 
certainty.
  Let me yield to my friend from Virginia again.
  Mr. MORAN. I would underscore the point that my friend from Colorado 
has been making. We ought not be flying blind on legislation to amend 
the Constitution of the United States, not even knowing what the terms 
mean, not even getting it out of subcommittee or having consideration 
by the full committee, bringing it to the floor.
  A lot of concepts have been around for a long time, but most of them 
the majority would never consider bringing to the floor without having 
full consideration by people, both Members and staff, to be able to 
look at this legislation, to understand what these terms mean, to be 
able to inform the Members so that they know what they are voting on. 
That is the first flaw.
  This morning I had a little debate on a morning news show with Grover 
Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, who came up with this idea 
and has been promoting it, and he made the same point that our 
colleague from Arizona, Mr. Shadegg, has made with regard to the number 
of States, and the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Barton, I know, has made 
it, who have these kinds of supermajority requirements.
  But let me suggest there are some differences between those State 
budgets and the constraints they are under and the Federal budget. For 
one thing, States can borrow money, and most States do. Most States are 
able to get their capital money through long-term indebtedness. We 
cannot do that. We are on a pay-as-you-go basis. We have a current cash 
accounting system.
  Another thing that States can do that we cannot do is go to the 
Federal Government as a funder of last resort. Look what happened in 
California, and I think Arizona was involved, any number of other 
States have been involved actually this year in any number of natural 
disasters. Florida. I will not list the whole number of States, but a 
great many States were victims of natural disasters this year.

  They did not have the money in their budget. With some of them they 
did not have the money because it would have been too difficult to 
raise the revenue necessary, so they turned to the U.S. Government to 
fund the costs of repairing and rebuilding.
  We have no one to turn to. In fact, I understand there is an 
exception: If war has been declared, then you can raise money. But 
there are any number of other things that could happen to this country 
that would necessitate us raising substantial revenue for the public 
good, the common good of this country.
  We do not know what is going to happen in the future, and it may be a 
whole lot of these disasters that might occur at the same time. It may 
necessitate us raising revenue. But to think that 17 States that 
represent 10 percent of the population have the ability to thwart our 
responsibility to fund the needs of this country, those States may very 
well not experience a natural disaster, so it would be in the interest 
of those particular Senators and Members of Congress not to vote for 
that revenue raising.
  But certainly if a majority of this body and the Senate thinks that 
it is necessary and is willing to show the political courage to vote to 
raise revenue for the common good of this country, then they ought to 
be able to do so and should not be thwarted, should not have their vote 
minimized, de minimized, if you would, by this legislation. That is 
exactly what this constitutional amendment would do.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. SKAGGS. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I have great sympathy for the 
gentleman from Virginia when he talks about a certain number of States 
with a small percent of the population thwarting the will of the 
majority. Texas and Colorado were not in the original 13 Colonies. 
Virginia was. It was one of the big States, but it lost on that issue. 
It was called the great compromise. The House was the representative of 
the people, the Senate representative of the States. I can be 
sympathetic with you, but we lost that fight 200 years ago.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Let me, if I may, pose another question to the gentleman 
about his language in this proposed amendment, and the gentleman from 
Virginia was touching on this. It provides that a majority could raise 
revenue either if there is a declared war, which we of course know 
happens rarely, or if the country is engaged in military conflict.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Serious military conflict.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Is it correct to interpret the military conflict language 
as involving a shooting conflict of some kind?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. Yes. It would not apply to the gentleman from 
Virginia's comments about floods and droughts.
  Mr. SKAGGS. So it would not apply to the circumstance that the 
country endured for the better part of 40 years, namely, the cold war?
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. It would not, no, sir. Unless you did it with a 
two-thirds vote.
  Mr. SKAGGS. So if I understand this phrase correctly, if we were 
facing again that kind of dire threat to the national security but one 
that, God willing, does not get to the point of a shooting war, but 
nonetheless demanded the preparation of our military defenses in a way 
that required raising more money, it would take two-thirds to do that.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. That is correct.

                             {time}   1530

  Mr. SKAGGS. Mr. Speaker, I am sure the gentleman is aware of the fact 
that on the eve of the prior two World Wars, we could barely muster a 
majority of this body to start facing up to that challenge to our own 
national security.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. On the eve of what we now call the First World 
War is when we got the 16th amendment that made the income tax 
constitutional. On the eve of the second war, which we now call World 
War II, we were in the throes of the Great Depression, and not only 
were we not spending much on military preparedness, we were not 
spending much on anything.
  Mr. SKAGGS. The gentleman is well aware that the then sitting 
Congresses were sharply divided and we could barely muster a majority 
vote to start the preparations that were ultimately necessary for this 
great Nation to fulfill its international responsibilities and to 
protect itself. That is exactly the kind of corner this language is 
likely to put this country in in some future difficulty if it were to 
become part of the Constitution.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. But, of course, the response to that is that 
living in the future, living in the present, we are the world's 
greatest military power. No one questions that. We spend a higher 
percentage of our GNP today on military preparedness than we did before 
World War I or World War II. We are not in the dismal shape that we 
were in terms of military defenses.
  Mr. SKAGGS. As the gentleman knows, if we put this in the 
Constitution, it is likely to be there for all time.
  Mr. BARTON of Texas. We hope.
  Mr. SKAGGS. Maybe the gentleman's crystal ball is clearer than mine 
in understanding now what lies ahead. If I can inquire of the Chair how 
much time remains.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Ewing). Six minutes remain.
  Mr. SKAGGS. The gentleman from Virginia.
  Mr. MORAN. I might remind the gentleman from Texas that one of the 
reasons why we are the strongest military

[[Page H3249]]

power is that we spent money that we did not have, particularly during 
the 1980's.
  But what I think is more important to remind the gentleman is that 
none of the budget reconciliation measures proposed by President Reagan 
would have passed during the 1980's. None of them got two-thirds of a 
vote.
  There is only one budget reconciliation measure, which was a minor 
one, in 1989 that passed with more than two-thirds. But it passed 
because it was minor. It was an easy vote. These others were not easy 
votes. It is never an easy vote to balance the budget, to come even 
closer to balancing the budget than we are doing today.
  It certainly was not an easy vote to vote for the budget 
reconciliation measure in 1993, even though it raised money from the 
top 1.2 percent of Americans and, in fact, through any number of other 
measures actually reduced our deficit for 3 years in a row, generated 
over $500 billion of deficit reduction. That passed, as was suggested. 
If one Member of Congress had switched their vote, it would not have 
passed.
  Now if you think that any responsible budget balancing measure is 
going to get through this House with a two-thirds requirement, you do 
not understand the dynamics of politics in America today. But that does 
not mean that we should not try to be, to propose votes that will 
require political courage, to try to continue to work to balance our 
budget, to reduce the amount of indebtedness, to reduce that interest.

  If it was not for the interest on the debt created during the 
1980's--because we cut taxes and did not cut expenditures, if it were 
not for the interest accumulated during that period of time--we would 
have a surplus in the budget today. We cannot raise taxes. We can cut 
them very easily. We can do it at the drop of an eyelid, and this is 
the kind of easy vote, to vote against the possibility of the Congress 
acting responsibly on budgetary and tax matters. But that is why it is 
wrong. It would be the irresponsible thing for the Members of this 
Congress to vote for today.
  Mr. SKAGGS. You know, we look at history not just because it is 
fascinating to know where we have come from, but because it is also 
often instructive about the present and the future. And I think it is 
very useful to again go back to the debates in the Constitutional 
Convention about just this sort of provision, when the Framers 
seriously deliberated on the question of whether certain legislative 
subjects should be, should have a requirement of supermajorities to 
legislate. They understood because of their experience under the 
Articles of Confederation that this was a prescription for gridlock and 
paralysis. That is why we had a Constitutional Convention, to get us 
out of that problem.
  One thing I believe we can always be sure of, we cannot predict the 
future. We do not know on April 15, 1996, what a Congress in April 2096 
is going to be facing. And yet we are basically saying we do not trust 
them to have the tools that they are going to require to be good 
stewards of this Nation's future, that we are so arrogant this year 
that we will deprive them of the fundamental tools of governing this 
country by virtue of passing an amendment such as this.
  I think it is extraordinarily ill-advised, even if we understood, 
which clearly from the debate over the last hour we do not understand, 
the meaning of the specific words being proposed to be put into the 
Constitution.
  But even if we did, it is clear that this is impractical, ill-
advised, and would be an extremely foolish and, as the gentleman has 
pointed out, really an irresponsible act for this Congress to take.
  I yield to the gentleman from Virginia.
  Mr. MORAN. The only remaining remark I have to make is that we do not 
act independently here. We have a responsibility to act in the best 
interests of our constituents. The worst thing this legislation does is 
to take away the equal representation of our constituents, the American 
people. The vast majority of the American people will lose the right, 
the power to determine the legislation of this land. The vast majority 
of people, two-thirds of the American population, will not have equal 
representation if this legislation passed because one-third plus one 
will have the controlling power over what this body, this body of 
Representatives of the American people, is able to do with regard to 
tax policy, with regard to balancing the budget, with regard to funding 
the necessary means of conducting our activities in whatever sphere we 
are talking about. It is irresponsible. And it is unfair to the vast 
majority of the American people to pass this today.

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