Sheldon Whitehouse

Health care expense is probably the number one part of our budget problem.

What concerns me is that the administration has never set a goal, it has never set a target...

The debt and the deficit is in practice much less important than protecting carried interest, much less important than maintaining Cayman Islands offshore shelters, and much less important than keeping big oil subsidies rolling.

When the economy gets trashed, because of the Great Recession, because Wall Street looted the economy, because of unbelievable tax favoritism in the Tax Code, and as a result of those very painful countrywide phenomena that we saw…

I think we should all bear in mind that those concerns seem to have an interesting characteristic, which is that they evaporate in proximity to billionaires and big corporations tax goodies.

I do not see how that is defensible, and we are going to continue to have that conversation.

I will just take this opportunity to again call on the Obama administration to please try to set a goal...

We are having an ongoing discussion in the Senate about extending unemployment insurance.

We have not addressed that yet. And I would like to ask the witnesses: Do we need to address the $1.8 trillion going out the back door of the Tax Code?

I think is a sad commentary on politics in Washington.

The Republican insistence on blocking even a paid-for unemployment insurance extension is costing this country a 0.2 percent GDP growth and is costing--will cost 200,000 jobs if it is not resolved.

I think for the President to set a hard goal would add a lot of focus to the effort that is underway.

What concerns me is that that passion and that militancy and that determination evaporates as soon as you are talking about benefits that go out to wealthy folks and to corporations through the Tax Code.

Which we have not done and we need to do.

I think we could get a lot done on the debt and the deficit if it was not more important to protect the carried interest loophole, to protect the big oil subsidies, and to protect offshoring in the Cayman Islands.

I urge you guys to improve your game on that, and if you are getting pushback from the intelligence communities and from the State Department and other people, push back harder, because I think an indictment has a clarifying effect.

I would hazard the thought that working well together and having the proper administrative structure are two different questions.

Chairwoman Mikulski of the Appropriations Committee...has put into the omnibus spending bill that we just passed a requirement that the Department of Justice provide a multiyear strategic plan for cyber within 120 days.

I hope that for folks who are watching this is really seen as an object lesson as to the vulnerability that we all have to a whole variety of Internet penetrations.

I think that we are a long way from having a clear sense of what our cyber law enforcement structure should look like.

I am advised to inform my colleagues that there will be up to four rollcall votes beginning at 11:15 a.m. tomorrow in order to complete action on the flood insurance bill. The vote on final passage of the bill will occur at approximately 2…

If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it adjourn under the previous order. There being no objection, the Senate, at 6:24 p.m., adjourned until Thursday, January 30, 2014, at 10 a.m.

One of the most prominent ones is George Shultz, who served with great distinction, I believe, under three Republican Presidents.

This is a systemic issue which should be fixed with an eye to the long-term health of our democracy.

I also have a bill, the Real Time Transparency Act, which would require Members of Congress, PACs, and political committees to report $1,000 donations electronically within 48 hours.