Sometime in the near future we'll have a vote on repealing Obamacare, essentially the same vote that we had in 2015. I would remind everyone that in that proposal there's a two-year delay, a two-year delay which would give us the opportunity to work out a complete replacement on a bipartisan basis with our Democratic friends.
I honestly thought we wouldn't hold the U.S. Senate. I thought we'd come up short and I didn't think President Donald Trump had a chance of winning. Given my expectations, doubly exciting because I thought we'd come up short on the Senate. We had a lot of exposure. That was really something. But it never occurred to me that he might be able to win as well.
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.
I don't think there's any equivalency between the way that the Russians conduct themselves and the way the United States does.
It's important to remember that some of our best sources in the war against radical Islamic terrorism are Muslims, both in America and overseas.
If you believe one of the biggest problems confronting the country is overregulation by this administration, the single most effective way to begin to rein in the aggressive regulators, who in my view have done great damage to this economy, is in the bills that fund the regulators.
I think it is to the advantage of my state to have the opportunity to come to meetings occasionally and to vote in person, rather than just by proxy.
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.
It is a statement to the obvious, however, that [Barack] Obama - of Obamacare - is the President of the United States, so I don't want people to have [unrealistic] expectations about what may actually become law with Obama - of Obamacare - in the White House. But we intend to keep our commitment to the American people.
We're certainly gonna keep our commitment to the American people to make every effort we can to repeal [Obamacare].
We certainly will have a vote on proceeding to a bill to repeal Obamacare... it was a very large issue in the campaign. And, the reconciliation process does present an opportunity and we're reviewing that to see what's possible through reconciliation.
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 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.
What happens in committee if the committee functions, more often than not, not every time but more often than not, a bill comes out with bipartisan support.
We [Democrats] are looking for things that we think would make a difference, improve the country, and enjoy some bipartisan support.
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.
The worst experience any majority can have is that you convene and you look around and nothing's ready to go.
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.
I think it's not just Republicans who would like to see the Senate run differently. I think there are a reasonable number of Democrats as well.
If you've got a brand new administration coming into office you want to have, at the very least, a national security team in place on day one.
I know how it feels when you're coming into a new situation, that the other guys won the election.
Whether it's before the election or after the election, the principle is the American people are choosing their next president and their next president should pick this Supreme Court nominee.
As the leader of the Republicans what I'm telling that we elected the president to be president. It's time for him to step up to the plate and lead us in the direction of reducing our excessive spending.
We ought to make sure that the eligibility for entitlements meets the demographics of America.
I'm in favor of doing tax reform, but I think tax reform ought to be revenue neutral as it was back during the [Ronald] Reagan years. We've resolved this issue.
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