Bob Menendez

This budget allows us to advance to those challenges.

I particularly support the $953 million to improve democracy and good governance and anticorruption and promote European integration.

We must do more in order to make that country safe.

China today is beginning to militarize, if you will, the gains they have made in the South China Sea.

I do not think Russia believes that anything is going to happen. I think that is why they continue to make the gains.

I think their confidence level is at an all-time low. I think they are concerned about what Russia is doing to destabilize the area, using refugees as a weapon of war.

When I sit on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and I see what is happening with China and other places in the world, context matters.

I think you do an outstanding job.

I hope that your department will do everything you can to take the administrative steps that are possible within your wherewithal on the health-care crisis in Puerto Rico.

Last year, in New Jersey, heroin deaths in our State were up 160 percent since 2010.

I am concerned because I understand, and my understanding may be wrong, that this has not even been started.

If confirmed, this is going to be a central part of what the committee's interest is going to be in Malaysia.

What would you consider to be effective implementation of those amendments?

Because there have been a few prosecutions, but interestingly, none from within the country itself.

Will you commit before the committee to pressing the Malaysian government to undertake a full investigation of the mass graves and holding the perpetrators, including any Malaysian government officials, accountable?

Now there are serious concerns that Malaysia was upgraded to Tier 2 Watch List last year and retained this year based on political considerations and not an objective evaluation of Malaysia's actions.

I hope that that is a sense of consultation because I know I would like to tell my friends at the State Department that, for me, speaking as one Senator sitting on this committee for better part of 10 years now, that there is a difference…

I think that in our push to hope that Ukraine will deal appropriately with corruption, sometimes it sounds like we are pushing them harder than we are the Russians.

I just hope we do not get to the point that it is a unilateral obligation that the Ukrainians are expected.

Clearly, you are correct that Russia and the separatists have obligations as well.

Greece has been an extraordinary ally throughout, one of the handful of countries to be with the United States in every 20th century conflict.

I was free to call it an invasion, which it was.

What makes America a beacon of light unto the world is what it stands for in human rights and democracy.

You accurately described the situation in Panama right now.

Will you make it one of your priorities when you are at post to continue to work with the Salvadoran government?