“I have real concerns over Senator Harry Reid’s leadership in the Senate this year. We have had 14 substantive votes the whole year. We have had 15 political votes. The rest of it has been nothing”

“What we are saying is we are not willing to really make the hard choices now that are necessary to fix the problems. We would just push that off and take the benefit. That is what we have been doing for 20 years, under both parties, and that is why we are near a crisis now in terms of our budget.”

“The big problem today in Washington is the leaders of the parties are making the decisions so members of congress are protected from having to make a vote. In other words, I did not want my team to have to make a vote on this, so we are not — just not going to vote on it.”

“Arrogance leads to poor judgment. Power leads to arrogance which leads to poor judgment which we have seen a lot of. Our founders believed in the concept of rotation. None of them, with the exception of Alexander Hamilton, believed that people ought to make a career in politics. Most of them could not believe that anyone would be so stupid as to make a career in politics. This was about to be service for the country not for the individual.”

“One of the reasons we are in trouble as a country is not because we cannot get along but because we got along and passed bills that we should not have. Otherwise, we would not be running trillion dollar deficits and would not have a tax code that is disproportionate, would not be funding millionaires on unemployment and all of these other things which come to about $28 billion a year in terms of tax loopholes. We get along too well when it comes to helping our friends.”