the President's preference to work with Congress and that, wherever possible, he would like to get Congress to agree with him, to pass legislation that he would like.

But they have not misused or abused that.

Well, I think they exceeded its statutory mission.

Changes should not be measured on how much money they save, but instead, the true measure of any change should be whether it improves the way we recruit and/or retain a world-class uniformed force.

Avoiding difficult choices, in the name of serving our people or for any other reason, would ultimately risk a future in which our men and women could be sent in to harm's way with less than what they need to accomplish the mission.

Though well less than half of all military servicemembers will be eligible for this benefit, it is still an important tool for recruitment and retention efforts.

How important are retirement pensions for recruitment efforts and for retention efforts separately?

It seemed to me he was pretty solidly in support of really good trade agreements.

half of our engineering students are foreign students. So we are really not producing that many engineers, and that is a big problem.

Lane, I was thinking precisely the same thing about you.

I understand that a certain level of confidentiality must almost unavoidably surround many of the NSA programs that might be of concern to the American people, to ensure the effectiveness and to keep our enemy actors from working around…

This is going to create jobs. This is going to help them. This is not going to hurt them.

The Fourth Amendment stands to safeguard those rights, and even if one assumes for purposes of this discussion that currently the only people employed at the NSA are people with only our best interests at heart, we still run a risk, even…

I absolutely agree it ought to be a top priority, not just for the President, but for the Congress.

But even Irving Brown knew that we could not sign on to the conventions that the Soviet Union did all the time, but never lived up to, because we would have to live up to them, and it would throw a lot----

There does have to be a balance struck between achieving our national security goals and protecting the constitutionally guaranteed rights of American citizens.

Particularly given the fact that the NSA's mission is related to foreign intelligence-gathering, we need to make sure that we protect American citizens in their constitutionally protected rights.

I worry about the NSA's surveillance and metadata collection programs and the risks that such programs could pose to the constitutionally protected rights of American citizens.