It's a shame that the president doesn't embrace the effort to reduce spending. None of us like using situations like the sequester or the debt ceiling or the operation of government to try to engage the president to deal with this.

What I said to the members [of Congress] who hoped they would be chairmen: let's don't have that problem. Be thinking now about legislation that you have, preferably that enjoys some Democratic support because we certainly didn't think we were going to have 60 and we don't.

This heinous crime should be of particular concern to all of us. . . . I know my colleagues will agree that the murder of Americans overseas cannot go unpunished. I will continue to closely follow developments in this case[.]

79 senators, including that great conservative Elizabeth Warren, said they didn't like the medical device tax, so we will go at that law - which in my view is the single worst piece of legislation passed in the last half century - in every way that we can.

More women are graduating from college now than men.

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.

We have a debt the size of our economy, which makes us look a lot like Greece.