The thing I'd want people to say about me is that, in some way, I helped bring the Senate and the Congress back to what it used to be, the people's branch of government, doing things that made a difference in people's lives. I have devoted my life to government.

The bottom line is very simple. You negotiate on this, they will up the ante for the debt ceiling.

If you have a sharp bold economic message, you can unite everybody.

An economic message, an economic platform unites the factory worker in Scranton, the young woman in Los Angeles struggling to pay her college debt and the single mom in Buffalo who's on minimum wage.

No one believed [the 1986 amnesty for illegal aliens] was tough enough on illegal immigration, and it didn't give enough flexibility on future legal immigration.

Soft money will find its way and seep into the political system and corrode it, unless we plug every hole.

The dome of the U.S. Capitol has fallen into severe disrepair... As the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which oversees matters of the Capitol's physical plant, I have serious concerns about the consequences of omitting this funding from the stopgap spending measure.