We can't be playing around with these issues [Zika disease], because this can become very serious very quickly, as we have seen in Brazil and other countries. The funds are going to be used at the state level, but it is important for the federal government to cooperate in the federal government's role.

My mother was one of seven girls whose parents went to bed hungry so their children wouldn’t. My father lost his mother when he was nine. He left school and went to work for the next 70 years. They emigrated to America with little more than the hope of a better life.

Let me start by saying that I do not enjoy nor relish the partisan role of attack dog. I never found any fun in that. I don't think it's constructive. I don't intend to become that here in the Senate.

The federal government has the responsibility to protect the nation's public health, to protect us from foreign threats. And it [Zika] really is an illness that we are seeing arrive from abroad. So it is a threat to public health, and it is the federal government's job to cooperate in this.

We focus so much on how immigrants can change America that we forget that America has always changed immigrants even more.

I pray the Pope [Francis] can use his moral authority to inspire true religious freedom, and bring us closer to the day when freedom can finally take root on the island country; because only then will the people of Cuba prosper and have the opportunity to live out God's plan.

All human life at every stage of its development is worthy of protection.