Tom Coburn

Equally important to us providing consent on this nomination is our determination that you have a judicial philosophy that reflects what our Founders intended.

The American people expect their judges to treat all litigants equally, not to favor and not to enter the courtroom already prejudiced against one of the parties.

I believe that standard is antithetical to the proper role of a judge.

I would ask for certain that the record be left open.

I have great admiration and respect for him.

I think one of the things we do want to do is we want to make sure President Obama gets qualified judges and the ones he selects.

To me, that would tell me where to work, because if there is a correlation, you don't need to be spending your time in Minnesota or Iowa, where we know we have lower costs and better outcomes.

According to some estimates, the annual amount of fraudulent payments made by Medicare approaches $60 billion.

Making Medicare an even less attractive model for nationalized health care is that the program is rife with fraud, waste, and abuse.

As our Nation prepares for a historic debate over the direction of health care policy, hearings on waste and fraud in Medicare and Medicaid are vitally important.

What I am afraid is we are going to be 3 years behind on the recovery audits and we are going to be taking money from people that may or may not deserve it.

If, in fact, you defraud the Federal Government, consequently, there ought to be a harsh penalty for that.

We are going to be allowed questions for the record?

I do not consider constitutional amendments lightly. Modifying the Nation's founding document should only be done in the most compelling circumstances.

I consider it a high honor to serve in this role, as matters within this Committee's jurisdiction... are among the Senate's most awesome responsibilities.

Actually, the President, Senator Carper, myself, and Senator McCain put through USAspending.gov.

I am concerned about it and I know the President is concerned about it.

Part of your statement was the fact that you think this is going to change the way the government operates.

If you do not get a buy-in of companies' capital on research... they are not ever going to be as efficient.

I agree with the President. That is exactly what we do not want to do. We want fixed-price contracts.

I would suggest, besides what Senator Collins said, put Ad Council ads on TV for seniors about these scams.

One of the problems that we have in the Federal Government is Congress telling us how we budget.

The 7 percent figure bothers me, but the 10 percent figure on the Federal Government bothers me even more.

Thirty-six billion of it is wasted. The American taxpayer needs to know that.

What we ought to be doing is redoubling our efforts to where we get that down to about 2 or 3 percent.