Reducing our dependence on foreign energy - that is critically important to America's economic future. Excellence in education - if we're not the best educated, we're not going to be the most powerful for very long.

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.

We shouldn't just live for today; we should prepare for tomorrow.

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

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.

So I put that all together and I find it makes it hard to justify a filibuster.

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.