If you all and people like you let us get away with it, well, then bad things are going to continue to happen.

I think it is disgusting, I think it is awful.

Leadership, in my mind--and, again, this isn't directed at you; it is directed at the entire administration--leadership, in my mind, is having an opinion.

My difficulty, however, is that your leadership in both Houses completely abdicated their responsibility to govern this country when it came to the Nation's fiscal health.

To me, this sounds ACORN-esque. And I would prefer that the Department think about...we need people on the ground with money to transform the communities.

I think we need people on the ground with money to transform the communities.

I guess I am disappointed would be the word. Not in you, but this administration has joined the last administration in basically abdicating leadership in transportation.

I give President Obama, you and your Department very high marks for finally treating the Great Lakes as an entire ecosystem.

I was struck by the $7 million and 6,800 jobs, and you know, one of the satisfactions is the correlation of the dollars spent and jobs created.

If any agency is seen as an extension of either political party, it is not good for the agency.

This funding is a big deal to these areas of concern that really have choked the commerce and the commercial fishing in the Great Lakes.

The outdated subsidy cap does not reflect the current market reality.

I think we should build railroads all over the country because it not only helps the railroads, it puts people to work as well.

There is no such thing as a Republican road or a Democratic bridge.

I think it is demoralizing. What happens when you have a demoralized workforce is you get goofy things to happen.

transportation is a public good, and the mere fact that I have a monopoly position and no competition does not give me the right to get monopoly profit

I for one think that a trillion used to be a lot of money around here. It is not so much any more.

We are either going to make the societal decision that we are going to be in the passenger rail business, or we should get the hell out of it and close down Amtrak and be done with it.

I hope that part of the plan--and this is where the Senate screwed it up in the highway bill--is to fully fund the CREATE program.

I talked to the President's Chief of Staff in small, four-letter words that he understands.

If we don't approach this universally, and by that, I mean, not only do we have to have a national plan, I think all the interest groups have got to have some skin in the game.

300,000 Americans are not being treated fairly by these decisions, and they are not the fault of the administration.

The problem with this, and I invite your observations, without a national plan, we are not going to get this done.

A 40-cent-per-gallon federal tax increase is probably a nonstarter, particularly during an election year.