I won't support pension legislation unless it does that. We need any relief to be targeted, timely and temporary.

Protecting retirement security was one of the purposes of the bailout of our financial system.

Every one of them had been with that company for 30 years. For every one of them, their situation is not what was promised to them during their work lives.

For many workers and retirees in Ohio and across the Nation, there is a crisis of confidence in our social contract.

I want to thank the Chairman for his leadership on the wide range of legislation we are discussing today.

Over and over, the discussion turned to they cannot get credit.

We must cut through the bureaucracy and focus on delivering both help and hope to men and women and their families who served our Nation.

Scientific certainty should not trump human decency.

We should all be outraged by the behavior of KBR and like-minded contractors who take the money from our taxpayers.

When there is doubt, we must take the side of the servicemember.

Do we save a few bucks or do we save a few lives?

The VA is firing many of its blue collar workers, and replacing them with private contractors without going through the competition process that Congress has called for again and again.

I really do believe that if we had not done a lot of things we did, contrary to what some in my State and some in the Senate and House think, it would have been significantly worse.

I hear consistently, as we all do, from particularly small and medium-sized businesses about the difficulty of getting credit.

A service-connected disability should be rated the same whether the veteran is in Dayton, Ohio, or Daytona Beach, Florida.

Any change to the system must make it more fair.

Transparency must be an overarching goal.

By providing a fully-integrated system from the Veterans Health Administration to the Veterans Benefits Administration, we could make VA run more efficiently.

The system must be designed to maximize earned benefits for veterans, not to minimize compensation awards.

Trust in the VA is eroded when a complicated, subjective formula spits out a rating and a dollar amount.

the most egregious institutions found an agency that was too easy on them.

I am pleased to offer my strong support for the nomination of my fellow Ohioan, Daniel Elliott III, to serve as Chairman of the Surface Transportation Board.

That's little consolation to someone going through the process, but I understand that.

Veterans are not just frustrated but there's the difficulty of survival for some number of veterans that are in this process, who have to wait and wait and wait.

We believe if you change the work credit system--I do not care where the location of the regional office is--work credit system changes to require accountability, both up and down for good work, take it away for work that is not as good…