I think I'm the last Democrat left in the Senate after Russ Feingold was defeated that won't take earmarks.

When you work in the United States Senate, and you are around people of all different ideas and beliefs, you realize that what our Founding Fathers did that was so genius, is that they made the Senate the place where compromises are supposed to happen because of the makeup of the Senate.

It's very hard from a distance to figure out who has lost their minds. One party, the other party, all of us, the president.

I don't think Democrats are ever going to get excited about cutting Medicaid to pay for tax cuts to wealthy people. I just don't think that's the direction we should be going in our country. The 1 percent's doing very well in America. They don't need more help. But Medicaid does.

I think there are certain folks in Missouri that don't trust government. And they haven't trusted government for a long time.

My first obligation is my job. It's very hard to really get into campaign mode when you've got to focus on doing the work.

You can be a victim of a crime and not exercise great judgment. And when women have been sexually assaulted, they feel like they have to have been perfect in order to have anybody believe them. They think nobody will believe them unless a stranger jumped out from behind a bush with a knife - not that they got too drunk and that a guy they thought they knew, you know, took advantage of them in a physical, assaultive way.