Until we deal with the entitlements, until you are prepared to raise the retirement age for social security, until you are prepared to pass something like Simpson-Bowles these programs will continue to get squeezed and squeezed.

If we don't do something big and grand and bold like that, and it troubles me, I have 16 grandkids, I worry about their future.

we have funded NSF at the highest level ever.

If we keep cutting the sciences and cutting the different things the Nation--frankly we had Niall Ferguson here who said great nations begin to decline very rapidly.

We need to stop taking the 'ocean' out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In 2010 the ocean economy contributed $258 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product.

The outline, Simpson-Bowles is not the ten commandments.

Our oceans and our coasts are among our greatest natural resources and largest public trust.

I strongly urge the House of Representatives to maintain $45 million for drug courts at the Department of Justice and $4 million for veterans' treatment courts.

I think hopefully we can come up with some grand bargain that eliminates the sequestration certainly for the next nine years and maybe even for the rest of this year.

Secondly, and Mr. Fattah and I are going to put in a bill for a national commission looking at the whole prison system.