The biggest problem confronting the country is our excessive spending. If we're not going to deal with it now, when are we going to deal with it? And we've watched the government explode over the last four years. We've dealt with the revenue issue.
We all know that Social Security is one of this country's greatest success stories in the 20th century.
Are we still a country that takes risks, that innovates, that believes anything is possible? Or are we a country that is resigned to whatever liberty the government decides to dish out?
We didn't make much progress on the country's agenda. And in my view it's because the Senate basically hadn't done much of anything, with a couple of exceptions, for the last four years [of Barack Obama's presidency]. And that's going to change.
If you believe one of the biggest problems confronting the country is overregulation by this administration, the single most effective way to begin to rein in the aggressive regulators, who in my view have done great damage to this economy, is in the bills that fund the regulators.
We [Democrats] are looking for things that we think would make a difference, improve the country, and enjoy some bipartisan support.
Syria and Iran have always had a pretty tight relationship, and it looks to me like they just cooked up a press release to put out to sort of restate the obvious. They're both problem countries; we know that. And this doesn't change anything.
It took us in this country 11 years to get from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution.
