Forcing free market plans to compete with these government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition.

Where we are now is we have resolved the revenue issue and the question is what are we going to do about spending. I wish the president would lead us in this discussion rather than putting himself in a position of having to be dragged kicking and screaming to the table to discuss the single biggest issue confronting our future.

I know how it feels when you're coming into a new situation, that the other guys won the election.

The classic example I've used - I'm sure you've heard me say it before - was Mark Begich in Alaska who was here for a full six years and never had a roll call vote on an amendment on the floor of the Senate, which Dan Sullivan tells me he used on virtually a daily basis. So the notion that protecting all of your members from votes is a good idea politically, I think, has been pretty much disproved by the recent [Barack Obama] election.

It is a statement to the obvious, however, that [Barack] Obama - of Obamacare - is the President of the United States, so I don't want people to have [unrealistic] expectations about what may actually become law with Obama - of Obamacare - in the White House. But we intend to keep our commitment to the American people.

What we do know is that the American people, regardless of how they feel about the abortion issue, don't think that taxpayer money ought to be used to pay for abortions.

All Citizens United did was to level the playing field for corporate speech. We now have, I think, the most free and open system we've had in modern times.