By the Obama administration's reasoning, it would be constitutionally permissible to make Americans purchase nearly any product (broccoli, gym membership) that improved their health and thereby contributed to lower health-care costs.

It doesn't hurt to show some empathy.

Unfortunately, the (budget) does not ... help Congress reform such programs as Medicaid and Medicare, which both grow at average rate of around 8 percent each year through 2015 and will continue to eat up more of the total federal budget.

The spread of democracy, the new foundation of the rule of law, and the creation of fledgling representative governments that honor and respect human rights-together these actions spell out the increasing marginalization of the terrorists, as they have fewer and fewer places to run and hide.

I don't know what 'operational control' of the border means, but I do understand the English language. And as I understand that phrase, that's not true. We do not have operational control.

I think many people simply feel like they don't recognize their country anymore.

This country has gotten seriously off track under the Supreme Court when it went so far as to limit the right of even private citizens to freely express their religious views in public.

I don't really think it's appropriate for me to be picking and choosing in the primaries. It's pretty dumb politics for a Republican to choose between Republicans in a contested primary because obviously you're going to be offending some people.

I just think the mood of the country is now that people don't necessarily want an elected official to tell them how they ought to cast their vote. Matter of fact, it's the opposite, and they want to express themselves, and they have a right to, and I'll respect their choice.

I don't know whether John Roberts has a twin, perhaps a sister or, uh, someone with a Hispanic last name.

The Senate used to be a place of great debate and accomplishment. Now it is run like a dictatorship shutting out the voices of millions of Americans.

I do not believe the border is secure and I still believe we have a long, long way to go.

I'm afraid, is that there are a number of groups who really don't want a fair-minded judge who has an openness to both sides of the argument. Rather, they want judges who will impose their liberal agenda on the American people; views so liberal that they cannot prevail at the ballot box.

Depictions or expressions of sex, violence, crime are all permitted virtually without limit; but religion, it seems, never.No wonder many in America seem to believe that the court has become one more inclined to protect pornography than to protect religious expression.

Most people in America don't believe that God is a dirty word, but the sad fact is that some Americans are left to wonder whether the Supreme Court might have greater regard for it if it was.

A Supreme Court nomination and appointment is not a roving commission to rewrite our laws.

A vast majority of Republicans are on the record saying that they believe the Violence Against Women Act should be reauthorized. Let me be clear: I believe that Violence Against Women Act must be reauthorized.

The Violence Against Women Act has been a true bipartisan success story since it was first enacted in 1994. In my home state of Texas alone, its programs have helped hundreds of thousands of victims to break free from the terrible cycle of domestic violence.

Nobody else in the world can do what we can do. And nobody else is willing to do it for altruistic reasons. I mean, we don't go into places like Iraq to grab their oil or colonize their country. We go there to deliver, as George W. Bush said, the blessings of liberty.

Nothing makes the minority leader more mad than when his side is forced to play by its own rules.