We didn't make much progress on the country's agenda. And in my view it's because the Senate basically hadn't done much of anything, with a couple of exceptions, for the last four years [of Barack Obama's presidency]. And that's going to change.

I've often wished we had more women in the Senate.

I think there were two messages in last year's election. One is pretty obvious. People were mad as hell at the president [Barack Obama] - and wanted to send a message. We all got that. Our new members were also hearing, and I was hearing as well, that people didn't like the fact that the Congress was dysfunctional. Now they may have been confused about where the dysfunctionality was cause the president kept pointing to the House. Factually, that's not accurate. The dysfunction was in the Senate.

The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.

The administration still wants to govern from the far-left and that's going to produce kind a partisan result here in the Congress.

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'm not going to critique the president's every utterance, but I do think America is exceptional. America is different. We don't operate in any way the Russians do. I think there's a clear distinction here that all Americans understand, and no, I would not have characterized it that way.