The President is not squaring with the American people as to the seriousness of our nation's fiscal condition. It is time for people to stand up and tell the truth.

I've had lengthy discussions with European farm leaders. It is clear they have an agricultural strategy to support their producers and gain dominance in world agricultural trade. They're gaining markets the old-fashioned way - they're buying them.

America was founded on majority rule, not supermajority rule. Somehow, over the years, this has morphed into supermajority rule, and that changes things.

The only possible role that I can see for reconciliation would be to make modest changes in the major package to improve affordability, to deal with what share of Medicaid expansion the federal government pays, those kinds of issues, which is the traditional role for reconciliation in health care.

The reality is no one knows how much it will cost us to wage war with Iraq.

Governments can inflate their way out of debt, but that has consequences, doesn't it?

Reconciliation cannot be used to pass comprehensive health care reform. It won't work because it was never designed for that kind of significant legislation; it was designed for deficit reduction.