The biggest problem confronting the country is our excessive spending. If we're not going to deal with it now, when are we going to deal with it? And we've watched the government explode over the last four years. We've dealt with the revenue issue.

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.

We all know that Social Security is one of this country's greatest success stories in the 20th century.

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.

And this year, when we end the cruel, defeatist practice of passing children who cannot read into fourth grade, and when our most diligent students begin to graduate from high school in 11 years, and get a head start on college costs with the dollars they earned through their hard work, others will take notice of Indiana yet again.

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 biggest problem confronting the country is our excessive spending. If we're not going to deal with it now, when are we going to deal with it? And we've watched the government explode over the last four years. We've dealt with the revenue issue.