Tim Kaine

I truly hope--truly hope--we can move forward with going to conference and working together.

It would be comforting to say that the President and the administration is to blame for this.

I do not think that is a good solution and we do not want anybody, including Tea Party Republicans, to push us into a crisis.

The Congress agreed, the President signed off on, that we would have this mechanism that would reduce spending by $2.1 trillion.

It is squarely on the shoulders of Congress.

We are not going to repeal the Affordable Care Act and we should not repeal the Affordable Care Act.

We had a February vote in the Senate to avoid the sequester completely.

If left unchanged, the President's health care law could deal a devastating blow to the Federal budget.

I just believe we owe it to the American people to come together around some solutions that help our economy grow.

We need to be strong as a Nation and we need to have that national defense that is both strategic and funded at an appropriate level.

But there is no way that the world is going to stay the same if the United States plays a lesser role in the world.

They held the economy hostage over the debt ceiling in 2011 in an effort to create enough chaos to force their ideological agenda through Congress.

The Senate wants to go into a budget conference, to sit down at a conference table.

The role of the Congress in appropriating money, it is a congressional role.

There is bipartisan agreement that sequestration is the wrong way to cut spending.

We agree--we agree--we need to address this significant part of our Federal spending.

We are the first of the three branches in the Constitution.

I learned that again and again in working on early childhood education issues in Virginia that just a little bit of early intervention for youngsters who have a developmental delay might mean years where they are not in special education…

We ought to be committed to investing in our kids, and we ought to be committed to making sure that the investments are done the best possible way.

Your feeling today is that when she starts kindergarten she will be--

I think the testimony of the witnesses... sheds some light on one of the challenges... that we are having about trying to get the Senate budget into conference with the House.

The House Republican Budget takes a very different approach. It does not simply accept sequestration; it makes it worse.

If we cut out investments in them, we diminish our ability to lay down a foundation for long-term growth and prosperity.

It seems to me that repudiating our debt should be off the table.

I think Senator Sessions was in those hearings--and I was really struck and impressed by the bipartisan spirit of those hearings.