Conversation 781-029

Transcript (AI-Generated)

This transcript was generated automatically by AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite this transcript as authoritative. Consult the Finding Aid above for verified information.

Well, heads of households is a technical term now, and that's 3.3%.

Not to be confused with adult men.

Or male heads of, how does that one go?

Married men, heads of families is the one that's happening at 2.6%.

There's so many unmarried men who are heads of families.

That's the problem.

But these are perfectly, I mean, most people, when you talk about overall countries, have

They have no idea of these facts or of the proposition that they have a duration of the trial.

So they think of people, you know,

these were the facts, because it was in the Times, I don't know, a week ago or so, because I had said that we were in the 2% range, but actually it was 3.3% for heads of household.

What she did was to take the manual definition of heads of household and insert it in the article as what I intended to mean, which I thought was a little bit routine for her.

If you'll reach for anything, she can get you out, but ever since we got out the...

news uh briefings down there she is a rough happening to be honest everything is done as far as i was concerned

John, speaking of email, I read a letter to the Star the other day.

I've written a letter to the Star, which is a twister for offering the opportunity by demagogic devices to exploit.

But I said I'm not going to undertake a point-by-point response.

I would like to emphasize one key aspect of this, which is the

The experience under phase two in health care costs, which I said has been a very much under-recognized chief success story, in fact.

It is impressive that hospital costs, the rate of increase in hospital costs has been reduced from anywhere from 13% to 7%.

And the rate of increase in doctors' fees has been reduced from around 6% to about 2.2%.

That's pretty damn good.

Are you excited?

I think John should conquer some people.

I was noting under phase two of the orderly economic policy, the rate of increase in hospital charges has been cut from 15% a year to about 7%.

And the rate of increase on doctor's fees has been cut from about 6% or 7% to 2.3%.

And of course, this has a significant effect not only for

for every family health book and for health insurance fees.

But it also represents an opportunity for very substantial savings to the federal government under Medicare and Medicaid, which, of course, had to project cost increases proportional to increasing charges.

Because if you could do better, that's more than

slightly more than half in both categories in phase two when it was effective.

That's a pretty good result.

That's a compensated point.

Sure, of course.

particularly, Mr. President, for the fact that I was out of this chair.

I know I've earned you the moving prize again.

Yeah, you get the chance to tell us what to do.

Whatever you think you ought to know.

Well, I'd love to try to outline the situation.

Last time we talked about it, I was here as an abound advocate of a particular course.

This time, I think we already have a few more, like a reporter on the situation with a diagnosis of a problem and some possible approaches to it.

I'm not sure.

what I think is the great result.

Many things that happened since last time have been, of course, the passage of time.

And the somewhat stronger emergence of an emphasis on fear, even more than in the past.

I think your Labor Day speech responded to and helped to reinforce this.

Now, the passage of time

has the right to accomplish that there will be great temptation on the part of the Senate to duck out on the welfare reform part of H.R.

1 entirely.

Long, in a talk we had on the floor the other day with Hartke, said the fact that he thought that Title I of H.R. 1

which is the part that deals with further amendments of the income benefits, might take four or five days or a week.

Title II, which deals with Medicare and Medicaid, might take another week.

Title III, which deals with the adult category of aged, blind, and disabled, might take up to two weeks.

That is a total of four or close to it.

And he added

Title IV welfare reform could very well take the rest of the time from Christmas.

Now, in the circumstances, there will be strong pressures to push through the Senate a bill that contains Titles I, II, and III minus welfare reform entirely.

This might come either because after a period of debate, perhaps some filibustering on welfare reform,

sent it by test consent, agreed to drop it, and perhaps to substitute a test-only amendment.

One has been offered by Roth.

Or perhaps if it would be sidetracked, they might take up the debt ceiling bill, and Title I, II, and III could very well then be offered as amendments to the debt ceiling bill.

In any case, the

Time between now and the election would have run out without actions on welfare reform.

And I think that, without any definitive actions on your part, this is the likelihood that you would get delivered to you a bill which contained Title I, II, III, whether

under H.R.

1 or as part of a debt ceiling bill, or possibly added to some other bill.

So the question then is, what might be done?

Of course, the option of not doing anything or not very much, other than to ever support Title IV when it comes to the floor, is itself one option.

A second would be to make very clear that you did not intend to accept or acquiesce in any movement to send to you the first three titles minus welfare reform.

And to be understood, perhaps, as a way of reinforcing this, that rather than

The only remaining possibility would be to seek to determine what base there would be for agreement among a range of views in the Senate representing both the Finance Committee

the supporters of the HR wanted to pass the House, as well as perhaps some of the supporters of the River Cross now.

We have given some talk to what that kind of a possible approach might look like.

And in broad terms, it could involve a work relief provision, which

in effect provided that able-bodied, employable persons on welfare could be required to take a public service job for the amount of their welfare benefit at the prevailing wage, that is, they would work at whatever the prevailing wage is, enough hours to earn the benefit, with some perhaps additional modest payment in order to reinforce the general proposition that, in principle,

A family with a working head should be better off than a family where no one is working.

This could be done for an additional payment of, say, $100 a month.

At the same time, it would be possible to meet the principal concerns of the senators who have joined in the rip-off

and a good many senators, truly good many senators on our side, like Scott, for instance, by agreeing that the bill would provide for maintaining present benefit levels, that is, if no state would participate in the program, it would cut those levels, with all the present benefits raised, and perhaps a provision for

and updating the minimum benefit given the lapse of time since $2,400.

This could be done, maybe move to $2,600, which would be somewhat less than the actual cost.

And possibly a provision which restored the work incentive

from 50%, from 67% to 50%.

That is, that the rate of the benefits would decline on the basis of $0.50 for each dollar earned.

This would be an objection that the family now would not be enough better off with earnings, because 2 thirds of the earnings would be taken away, in effect.

These features are the kinds of things that could be done.

It would be in some sense a move towards the Finance Committee in the form of work relief, a move towards the Rivercoff support in the form of these names have been defended levels and $2,600 minimum.

On the cost side, this combination would actually bring us out

our last published estimates for HR-1 has self-passed form.

And this is because wage rates have increased in the meanwhile and because the, because there are U.S.-Mississippian food stamps.

All of these, any of these alternatives that are realistic at all, whether it's HR-1 has passed or this kind of combination, would, we think, cost less than

current law in fiscal year.

And that brings me to really the concluding point in this exposition, which is that we may well be in a situation where if we don't get a bill in this Congress, we may not get welfare reform until the Congress after this coming one.

Mills has

And in fact, one after .

Yes.

Bill has pointed out that any committee will have before it tax legislation, trade legislation, and then federal insurance.

And these will constitute a very full platter for the committee.

I just had my trouble with this afternoon.

following up on public statements on the lines he made last week.

He said, in fact, that he would see how the committee could get to it.

In any event, he felt that with the House having twice faced up to it was actually a tough issue.

And having an act of the bill, Rome called those

Senator twice in a row, ducked out on, that he would be disinclined to force the House to again.

And so we may then face, given the need for two years between date of enactment and the effective date of the family programs, may be faced with the prospect that the actual

going into operation of the welfare reform program could be as late as, say, two years from June or July 1975 at the earliest, which would take us over into the calendar year 1977.

And the next is

already overpowered, and the situation is one in which the morale of everybody involved has been deteriorating progressively, as costs escalated and as suspicions of fraud and security and maladministration have grown.

I think the existing situation is one which is inherently incapable of being as well.

but it is split up effectively into 1,762 jurisdictions.

And they operate file systems out of shoeboxes.

Dick Nake, if you remember, came over to H&W a year ago to develop plans for the Administration of Welfare for a program.

He and people who have been working with him have done an outstanding job going into all the details of what the computerized system would look like.

But in the process, he's traveling around looking at what we have now.

And it's bad.

So is it.

The alternatives are to play out the screen, more or less, utilizing the opportunity that comes along to reiterate support for the welfare of all kinds of HLMIs, but really not believing that anything will happen to it.

Two, to take an appropriate time to reinforce our commitment to the urgency of dealing with the coronavirus.

I think it would be in effect bringing it back, which of course has a number of negative consequences.

So, or thirdly, perhaps to break the long gap by

introducing as an act of self-introduction and approach to that operating base and compromise.

If you felt that the latter was a possibility you wanted to consider at all, more would need to be done by way of exploring the reality of this possibility, which I have not done.

There's where we are.

That seems to be important.

And now they're going to turn this over to review these things, give you a chance to take a look at the picture.

Well, there aren't a lot of choices, actually, in the real process.

I have, uh, I have serious doubts that you can get me to be responsible on other questions.

Uh, again, before the election, for reasons that we've, we've got the, we've got quite a lot of sharing.

But, uh, in terms of, uh,

changes in the Congress.

There will be numbers of new Congressmen elected.

Several will retire.

And then we have after the election, we say, well, I'll call you back.

And this Congress will get busy.

But first of all, I don't threaten many.

Second, I don't get it wrong.

I think that once the voters decided on the composition of Congress, they looked to the newly elected Congress to carry out whatever mandate voters have indicated, rather than the old Congress.

I hope that the leaders up there, the Democratic leaders, can yak around about the fact that they'll come back to the session and do these and that, and we ask them to and so forth.

I do.

Well, it's easy.

While I get some work, we'll talk about it.

I'll bring it in the back.

I feel, too, that as we look at the situation, I'm not as, I'm really not as optimistic, obviously, as you are, with regard to what's going to happen from the next Congress.

I'm also talking as if things are going to be the same.

They might not be.

First, there is always the possibility, not probability, but certainly a very good possibility

by reason of what happens in the election.

He might not be a driver.

Also, there's the possibility that there is no change in the control of the House, that the majority could be substantially reduced, and that the election could have changed the mood of the Congress due to the fact that the country would have fought very strongly.

My guess is that assuming the president turns into someone along their same lines, you know, a little bit of both now, but assuming that the election comes out the way that we expect it will, that whatever we make up of the Congress and the Congress

He's going to have to pay a great deal more attention to the president than he has previously.

These are things that I think we should just consider at this room.

I don't want them to be said publicly too much, for obvious reasons.

Here's the way I see the data coming out.

I know that some of our people believe that there's a chance to win the Senate.

There is.

But we've got a couple of soft spots.

Those areas where we have a chance to win.

But there's a chance.

It could be very close.

We could come up and the Senate could be won.

We could get up to 50.

We could get to 49.

We could already have 50.

We're something that could go along with that.

So that's the composition of the Senate.

The House is tough.

cut in half the present margins that appear in the race as they affect the northeastern block of states.

And it's where the idiocy of our campaign committee in the House, which is something that got to be changed sometime after the election.

It accepted the idiocy to run candidates in many places where if you just put a chimpanzee on the ticket, you would win.

Because you're not going to carry, when you're going to carry a state like Alabama, well, he's one of the callers in here today, and he said, well, he said it would be 70%, it's a question, but it's going to be 70% or 75% Mississippi.

Alabama, the same.

Georgia, maybe 68 to 70, so forth and so on.

Do you remember Goldwater's people down there?

We learned about his son, Mark Minesh.

trying very desperately to, you know, teach people how to speak English down there, you know, because they damn well don't want to be part of the Democratic candidate for president.

And when you've got, just as an example, in the state of Mississippi, you've got Calhoun's administrative assistant running for his seat, and he tried desperately to get him elected,

So there's things happening there, which would indicate some significant shifts.

I haven't said that there's some weak spots, because we lost a number of Republicans by retirement.

It's hard to hold some seats.

We don't know what will happen.

We're there for that reason.

And in the Midwest, the farthest telephone is probably a law.

You might pick up one or two net, and we do reasonably well.

But so much for that.

But looking at the, looking at the general situation, the way I would examine it, or the way I would look at Congress, because it's important to look at what kind of a Congress we're going to have and what the election will cost, I'd sort of examine it this way.

Everybody knows that the present poll spread is a distortion, it's unrealistic, because it's, because of the enormous number of government mistakes that it's made.

If you see a 64, or whatever it was, in Gallup, or approximately the same amount in Harris, you have to take into account the fact that no president has ever won 2-1 in this country.

So that is my hope.

You've got to realize that they go in great sweeps in times past.

They're one that's been sitting in these days, and they're trying to approach a lot of things.

That's about maximum.

Now, for a Republican, isn't that high?

The highest Republican margin, or possibly, which might have been a bit better in the last major race, I'm not sure.

But there was a very hard situation in 1924, where it all fell victim by four and a half people.

But looking at Republicans in the modern period, we all thought the decision was being a sweep.

15 whites.

Eisenhower had 57 and a half.

Stevens had 42 and a half.

That was enormous, the Republicans.

We did not go and carry the House and Senate that year.

We were very close.

We gained 54 and we didn't carry it.

One of the reasons why we lost the Senate actually.

Yeah, we had the Senate and lost it by a vote or two.

So what we have now is a situation where if we get what I would consider to be the optimum Republican candidate, starting with a base that is much smaller than the Democratic candidate with approximately 24 Mr. and Mrs. Democrats starting with 45 Mr. and Mrs. Bates.

The optimum is the Eisenhower of 1956, where we had good times, as you recall, on the planet, about 4.5%, and where we had a good international issue, healthiness and collapse, and Suez and Ontario crises.

So we got 57.5%.

So if we knew that, that 57.5%, I would say that what we would be looking at, and these are important, we would be looking at gain.

House of Representatives, the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives,

If he is elected by very much, that means that it is time.

It is time.

The margin is going to be around 12 to 13 million votes.

Now, when a president is elected by that amount, he has one hell of a mandate.

He has a mandate to do things in the domestic field, just as he has been doing in the international field.

He has a mandate, for example, in the field of health, where, of course, we're stuck in the field

of welfare reform.

I was in the organization in many other areas after graduation from Michael Ford, where the Congress is going to be very hard put to oppose the President's leadership.

There will be, and people like Mills, Democratic leadership,

are going to have to watch these election returns.

They're going to have to worry about a hell of a lot.

Even if we don't carry it, that's my point.

So my own view is that it's like to say to you, I have no taxes.

We have some ideas about taxes and non-taxes, at least when it comes to some reforms.

But if you would be the first to agree, we want to write a tax bill on this Congress.

No way.

It would be gone beyond any belief.

There is a time.

A responsible tax bill would have to be written by the next Congress.

But I think that, so therefore, we're not pressing for it.

We've just bluntly said, look, we're not here to make suggestions about taxes.

We're discussing that at the new Congress.

We're not going to propose to the Congress any tax legislation until the new Congress comes here in January.

And, frankly, that is a statement of my position.

Now, let's come to how we look at this.

I had, I had reached a conclusion.

This Congress now, now it is so man-holic, and this Senate is so boring, that we can't get through a decent welfare proposal.

I know that

Then the argument is, well, at least why not propose one in a Congress where the monkey will be in there, bad for not having acted?

The difficulty we have with that is that having proposed one, we then get the Congress to take us on for proposing something new, something different, even though it isn't very new.

very far from where we were.

I think you agree that one of the major weaknesses of a government welfare act is not the amounts, but the fact that you show that it's $1,000 a person and $6,500 a family of four, and now it's $4,000 for those who are in no position to work in court.

And so to get all through it, people say, cool, huh?

What they really say is that what he wants to do is to pay more than he needs for lazy bastards on welfare.

And that's a powerful thing.

He's going to give that more than he gives people who work.

And in terms of our own position, I think that I take four weeks before they get to the heart of HR.

There's no chance they're going to get it each other before the election.

This is the 17th of September.

The Congress should set its goal of getting out to the 1st of October.

Probably won't be reaching it.

But the Republicans are going to spy, and might let it go.

They might develop things up enough that they may want to get out.

I think what I come down to is this.

If you look at it in two points, you look at it on the merits

If we were to resign as two Indian farmers, and on the merits, I think your proposal would have a great deal of merit.

I think it's reasonable to save the men, gets our principle going, and save the rest.

So on the other hand, if we consider it in terms of politics, I think we have to recognize that there really isn't a good chance, a reasonable

get anything that is responsible through this Congress all under reform.

Odds and ends, bits and pieces, may be hung onto a debt ceiling.

But they're not going to tackle this.

It's highly volatile issues.

People are stirred up about the work ending or whatever.

That's true in a recent number.

I think from the standpoint of our position, I think politically, that we, that I have to take a position that we have made a reasonable proposal.

We believe it's right.

And we're not going to let a party problem in our country go further in terms of increasing the amount

We will be glad to look at work requirements and that sort of thing.

We will be glad to look at the agent and so forth and so on.

But in terms of our welfare proposal, we're sticking with H.R.

1.

The weakness in that, of course, is that Rickard Cobb and a few others and Ray tell about it and say, well, we kill welfare reform.

But he would have come on it.

We've had the damn thing down there since August of 1970.

in August of 69, that's a pretty hard case to make.

At the main point, rather than having that be the issue, unless we've got goals in our head, we make the issue, not our will, but their will.

If they want to have $1,000 a person, $6,500, or $4,000 a family, they can pay all that.

here for an asylum welfare program and don't have any idea about that.

How this could be wheeled is, I don't know.

You're really on the spot, because you've got to testify.

And you've got Scott, of course, some hard-earned money, some hard-earned political money, as well as a number of Democrats that say, gee, can't we get a little here and there to get something?

I am convinced that from a practical, political standpoint, we can't get anything.

If we can't get anything, I am convinced from a political standpoint, we shouldn't offer anything.

I think we should say, all right, we're sticking to H.R.

1.

But I would not take, within your own shop, and it's very important for you not to take, the people who talked to you, the idea of throwing our hands up and said, well, this kills welfare reform for this session and the next session of Congress.

I think we should talk about the fact that we're not going to try to win as big of a jury as we possibly can.

That is our goal.

Having won the majority, then we believe that the next administration will have a mandate that this one did not have, a mandate to move on its responsible programs in the field of welfare, in the field of taxes, in the field of health, which it did not have before.

And then we now are going to get it.

I think that that mainly

and the kickoff of the handshaking bit that I did in Cleveland on Saturday.

But whatever we can do to build the mandate will reinforce your vision for the next Congress.

I think it's a very strong pitch.

I think it is true.

And I think it's a good way.

And Republicans all of a sudden see the fall, and they see, they feel from their own contact with their friends and neighbors that you are strongly in the lead.

But it's a way both of us, regarding against overconfidence and giving an objective foreword directed toward the building up of the maximum possible vote,

It's a hard way to come to it.

I know you fought this battle on a great scale and great dedication.

I know, too, that you were under enormous pressures.

But, you know, looking at it from a political standpoint, we had a miserable time in this Congress.

Look at the foreign policy area, how they hacked around.

Every time we turn around, it's just been one thing after another.

and had to fight welfare out sometimes before this election.

I just don't see it coming out good.

I think it might come out very, very bad.

And I think the worst of both worlds would be for it to pass on half-assed, and I can send it down here, and I have to veto it.

And I'm going to let them follow it up right there, not themselves, if they can't.

At least, that's my question.

There is the problem, for many of us together, with retitles.

But people who could very well, and which

in the sense that religions are expensive and have bad features, they would be more palatable as part of the prices of the bill that included welfare reform.

They would be politically hard to veto.

And I think in any event,

The general outline of what you've said, it seems to me, points to holding hard the proposition that you want to build as Title IV in it.

Because the effectiveness of that fight could well contribute to assuring it didn't have to be a bill.

It might.

I think it's the best chance, anyway.

It's important to listen to Bill's adherence.

He talks to us right now, to be honest with you.

I'll be sure that we will later.

So that he wouldn't fall later on.

He now, his line now is that he doesn't want, he would be disinclined to agree to any bill that compromised with the other three titles minus Title IV.

And he just assumed that the bill would go.

If the time came, he might weaken on that.

There are, in the Senate version, in both versions, the Title II extends Medicare to the disabled.

In fact, the Senate version brings prescription drugs under Medicare.

which we oppose.

I have one and both reasons, including your proposal originally for liberalizing retirement as so-called under us, you know, the one which cuts off income after something that Social Security gets up to a given level.

For your proposed liberalization of that, which increases the minimum to $2,000 and then reduces earnings only 50 cents per dollar earned, above that, it definitely isn't the bill.

It equalized widow's benefits with the benefits that his spouse would have had if he had survived, and a number of other relatively attractive features.

Let me suggest one of mine that I think you should follow, particularly you, and generally the extension afterwards.

In my opinion, and to our interest, to get the Congress out as quickly as possible, I think it's important that we low-key our disappointment with regard to the Congress' failure to act on welfare reform, health,

the other initiatives that we have there.

And I would like to take them on too hard.

The point being is that if you take them on too hard and they're inclined to stick around and try to do something, I would try to be reasonable and say we're trying to work with you and all that sort of thing.

There will be plenty of time to take them on naturally.

But I would like everybody to be very reasonable at this point in time and not crack open their head.

Now, our Republicans,

Well, actually, we did in another line to .

But I don't want the administration to be in that line.

I don't want us people that are considered to be close to the president.

You could just, in other words, be a very rational, reasonable person and so forth.

And that'd be political as hell once they get out of town.

And I think it's the right thing to do.

I think they must be terribly concerned.

House and Senate leadership, they feel that they may have a bad issue if they don't answer some of these fields.

But all of that really is going to wash away my view of the

magnitude of the presidential conference, the Congress becoming an issue in a campaign.

The classic case of the Congress becoming an issue was almost true, including the time it was declared close elections.

And it was one where

It was, it was close all the time.

And we talked about Dewey having an insurmountable lead in that same way.

He, Gallup's polls, which I did a couple of weeks ago, Dewey-Trummel held.

At the time, Gallup quit polling.

His lead, Dewey's lead over Trummel was six points.

He quit polling and said, Dewey's done it.

It was a piece of shit.

And so we have a situation here where running against Congress is probably not needed as a... Well, understand, I think the main...

I think that's good strategically as well.

Get as much as you can.

Get them out.

Get them home.

There is another point of view that we should keep them here and so forth because that keeps them from going home.

We still got a big deal over here.

Huh?

You still have a few bills that you couldn't get.

I did?

Yeah.

Vocational rehabilitation, older Americans Act, which they have, in fact, gone along pretty much with our recommendations.

We've got a change of legislation, legislation on how to vary people's bills.

All right.

That's good for us.

Yeah, that's right.

Much better.

We want to get, I would say this, that what we would like to get is the decent stuff that we are putting in, the responsible stuff that we are for, the best we can, and get that out.

That we should have that with, and hit it hard at the beginning of the next session of Congress.

And that hit it very hard in the election.

I've got a chance of getting it in our forum.

I just feel, and I'm listening, I can't, I repeat again, this idea of having a session of Congress, I think so much of it is ridiculous, totally ridiculous.

Mr. Lawrence has been the one who would come back.

I can see him coming back.

They've done it before.

They've done it, and they never do anything then.

And they aren't going to.

particularly if you have significant shifts in the House and the Senate.

That's the way we should play it.

We should say, no, there should be nothing done.

We should all stay home now and get ready for the battle of January.

But probably not necessarily, because there's so many leaders who are retiring.

They're galloping.

They're competitive.

They're retiring.

They're retiring to die and so forth.

It's a very, I guess, melodramatic perhaps.

It certainly reflects that.

We're not there.

I never got a convention.

Do we have a candidate?

Why would we have a candidate?

80%.

As a matter of fact, we had a candidate two years ago, and he came close to, he ran well against Bellarmine.

We got anybody?

I don't believe so.

Well, they ought to run.

Well, they can.

Sure, that's right.

If they didn't have the money, they would give them a free ride.

Oh, they only had that money, yes.

We had it all.

We had a woman in Kansas City who was a woman in Kansas City.

She was a lawyer.

She's like, I understand that she's like the secretary of H.E.W.

's first class of honor.

But she never won her class.

Did you tell me that earlier?

No.

I don't know much about it.

She's very smart.

We have some official policy restrictions.

I couldn't believe it.

I saw it.

I didn't believe she was that smart.

She doesn't always agree with it.

But...

Well, I'll tell you.

Can we agree as far as the press line is concerned that we remain for each our own?

Our line is one voter for them, right?

And that we don't think it's dead.

Somebody's putting up a line around the voters dead in this Congress.

I think that's a tough line for us to push.

And there may come situations where, in order to protect the issue and the record, it would be important for you to... Oh, I'll call you after the... Oh, sure.

But what you should say is what the press wants to do.

We've got a meeting on it, and we're going to continue to fight for each other on it.

I would start the statements by some leaders that it's finished.

You don't accept that.

You don't take it.

There'd be this attitude that you could say this, but you wouldn't remember your mindset.

You wouldn't remember.

Many were saying that weaponry sharing was dead, and now it's very much a lie.

And we were taking the same attitude on Earth.

There will be an upsurge this week.

I think the finance committee will get it out probably Friday.

The fact that this meeting is not now, it will not be.

I think it might be just as well not to indicate that we have a meeting, but just that the resolution remains the same.

Let it be reflected.

Well, I think that's it as far as I'm concerned.

that they know the president's views.

In other words, they would have to say that.

But I would say we had a big strategy meeting and decided something.

In other words, we just lost .

I certainly would love to get away with the idea that the personal leadership of the Congress could speak to the next Congress.

Thank you very much.