Heidi Heitkamp

Now we have all these kids that we do not know what to do with and we cannot find their parents or their parents may have left without them, and they are in facilities where they are being abused, sexually assaulted.

If we can just kind of take away all of the layers and say we are going to focus on keeping children safe, because children had no choice on whether they were going to come to the border.

You know, I wonder where he got the idea democracy is for sale. Huh, I wonder.

I want to publicly thank Ms. Verma for working with my office and working with me to talk about rural health care delivery.

It is disingenuous of this Administration to say they believe in preexisting conditions, protections in Federal law for preexisting conditions, when they are currently in court arguing that they are unconstitutional.

We need to spend every dollar critically, but at the end of the day, that is not going to solve our problem with this explosion of Medicaid costs.

I do not think anyone should put any blame. We had 13 years of inattention, but we have an opportunity today to take that first step toward solving this problem.

We should be talking about the increased cost of health care, and so if we could all just turn away from our politics for a minute and go directly to solving the problem, we would go a lot further.

But one thing that gets absolutely lost in the back-and-forth on Obamacare is we should be talking about health care.

So no one here should pretend that we do not have a problem.

This should concern everyone. There is no doubt about it. The question is can we afford it, and if we cannot, how do we solve this problem?

There is an approach avoidance on what you guys do, and it just seems to me that when you have your boot on the neck of a bad actor, you should keep it there.

This is a real problem.

This is very problematic.

We have to have paper ballots.

This sickens me. It sickens me that these children have been put in this position and in harm's way, and that we in the U.S. Government have responsibility for these children.

That program is failing by all accounts.

I think that we should have some pretty high expectations at $45,000 per child.

You know what would be good is for you to backtrack on your original statement that kids in your custody are safe, that there is no mismanagement within custody, within those facilities of what is happening with these kids.

There have been 125 reports to law enforcement of child sexual assault in detention centers that are run by HHS or at least contracted to run by HHS, does not that concern you, Commander?

I am concerned even beyond what happens with these kids when they are out of your custody, and we cannot seem to agree on whether you have any responsibility for them.

If this were a IV-E investigation of a State foster care system, they would fail, and you basically would withdraw Federal money because there would be inadequate protections for kids.

A couple of things, and I do want to get into this idea that the children are safe when they are in your custody because that is certainly not what we are hearing.

I think this is fascinating. I think this will be one of these introductory meetings.

I do not know what that is going to look like in 5 years. I do not know what it is going to look like in 8 years.