When I first came to Washington in the 1960s, even at the height of the Vietnam War, until the end there in '68 there was a certain climate of cooperation. And then in the late sixties and in through the seventies, politics began getting more mean. And then from the eighties on it seemed to be institutionalized, this personal attack business. And I just hate it.

We will lower the tax burden on middle class Americans by asking the very wealthy to pay their fair share. Middle class taxpayers will have a choice between a children's tax credit or a significant reduction in their income tax rate.

. . . unfortunately, we can't control the actions of everyone.

Sometimes there is a difference in what is legal and what ought to be done.

Work organizes life. It gives structure and discipline to life.

If you wanted to create jobs in a way that has minimal effect on the deficit but has government action, the two best things you could do are the infrastructure bank and a simple SBA-like loan guarantee for all building retrofits, where the contractor or the energy-service company guarantees the savings. So that allows the bank to loan money to let a school or a college or a hospital or a museum or a commercial building unencumbered by debt to loan it on terms that are longer, so you can pay it back only from your utility savings. You could create a million jobs doing that.

It simply doesn't make any sense for us to have illegal aliens in our custody in our courts and then let them go back to living here illegally. That's wrong and we should stop it.