David Thomas: “I thank the Senator for arranging to have this discussion and talk about where we are going. That is, after all, what it…”

“I thank the Senator for arranging to have this discussion and talk about where we are going. That is, after all, what it is about. I listened to my colleagues state their impression, their interpretation of last night's State of the Union Address, and it is right on target. What we really are faced with--all of us--is a vision of where we are going in this country, a broad vision in the long run of where we want to go and what we want to achieve and what it takes to cause that to happen. That is really the challenge that we have; the long-term goal in a broad sense of things like freedom and opportunity and security, job security, business; smaller government rather than more, moving government back to people in communities. Those are the long-term goals that we ought to have so that as we then put our agenda together, we have to ask how do these things fit. When you talk about the things the President mentioned last night, 45 or whatever it was, how do they fit in this business of freedom, how do they fit in making Government smaller? So each, then, has a challenge to transfer our goals into the specifics that we talk about. Collectively, we need an agenda for ourselves narrowed down to those things with which we really need to deal. Of course, we all have other issues, but there ought to be some priorities, and that is what we are doing and that is what the Senator is doing in setting an agenda. We need to talk about Social Security and make it work.”