I've put pencil to paper... and I've said I would cut spending, and I've said exactly where. Each one of my budgets has taken a meat axe to foreign aid, because I think we ought to quit sending it to countries that hate us.

I'm a different kind of Republican. I've introduced a five-year balanced budget. I've introduced the largest tax cut in our history. I stood for ten and a half hours on the Senate floor to defend your right to be left alone.

Gun control is not part of a strategy to defeat radical Islam or take ISIL down. However it is a problem back here at home. A million people have been adjudicated a danger to themselves or to others at the state court level.

Many states and even many people who are in support of the death penalty question their support of the death penalty because of the imperfection of our courts. Through DNA testing, we don't always get it right, even with that.

I think there is some overreach in the sense that the EPA now says: if Congress doesn't pass greenhouse emissions regulations or testing, we'll simply do it on our own. I think that's an arrogance of a regulatory body run amok.

One of the reasons I come to California is that the Republican party seems to have given up on California, and my message to those in California is that we're going to compete nationally as a party, and that includes California.

The idea of foreign policy realism, I think, fits more neatly with President Trump. And with John McCain, the neoconservative label of let's make the world safe for democracy and we're going to topple every regime hasn't worked.

There is often variations of evil on both sides of the war. What we have to decide is whether or not regime change is a good idea. It's what the neoconservatives have wanted. It's what the vast majority of those on the stage want.

In our state, I'm really proud of the fact that the ones who overturned Jim Crow in Kentucky were Republicans fighting against an entirely unified Democrat Party. So I am proud to be Republican. I can't imagine being anything else.

If you think you have the right to health care, you are saying basically that I am your slave. I provide health care... My staff and technicians provide it... If you have a right to health care, then you have a right to their labor.

, I'm going to reserve judgment on [Rex] Tillerson. But I'll ask him the same question I've asked the others: do you understand the historic lesson that the Iraq war was a failure, a strategic mistake, that's what Donald Trump says.

We've had presidents that have put their stock into account and they didn't know what their stock mix was and I like that. And I think Donald Trump has agreed that he would do the same on his stock. He's either sold it or will do it.

I think the over-militarization of local police forces is also true of the over-militarization of the federal government, so I don't really run and hide from the comment that I think there are 48 federal agencies that have SWAT teams.

Let me be clear: I support the Civil Rights Act because I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws.

My worry now is that many people are talking about a partial repeal of Obamacare. If you only repeal part of it and you leave if some sort of Obamacare light, which some are talking about, my fear is the situation actually gets worse.

You have to decide in advance whether you're ready go to war. If you guys are ready to send a million troops into Ukraine and fight World War III, you're going to do it without my support because I think that's a really foolish notion.

The Life at Conception Act legislatively declares what most Americans believe and what science has long known - that human life begins at the moment of conception and, therefore, is entitled to legal protection from that point forward.

If you're white and you're rich in the USA, if you get busted for drugs, you get a good attorney, and you in all likelihood serve no time. But if you're poor, black, Hispanic, or poor and white for that matter, you can get put in jail.

In 1997, I, along with 200 other young ophthalmologists formed the National Board of Ophthalmology to protest the American Board of Ophthalmology's decision to grandfather in the older ophthalmologists and not require them to recertify.

I don't want my marriage or my guns registered in Washington. And if people have an opinion, it's a religious opinion that is heartly felt, obviously they should be allowed to practice that, and no government should interfere with them.

I think it's fair to point out that there is bias in the media on both sides, both right and left. And that it's very hard to find objective news because we have gotten, particularly as you watch cable news, it's so dominated by opinion.

The U.S. should never get involved where we have no clear national interest. We should not intervene militarily in a country like Syria, where we can’t separate friend from foe and might end up arming the very people who hate us the most.

To put everyone in government housing and food stamps and bring them in from around the world I think is a mistake. To give of your own money, I've given to my church. My church has helped people that came from Bosnia. That's a good thing.

Benjamin Netanyahu said that ultimately, they will be stronger when they're independent. My position is exactly the same. We shouldn't borrow money from China to send it anywhere, but why don't we start with eliminating aid to our enemies.

I think it's a mistake to downgrade and say surveillance is no big deal. It is a huge deal that we are collecting millions of Americans phone calls and that someone can go to a keyboard and put your name in and search it without a warrant.

ISIL is not the JV team. I cannot stress enough that there's a terrorist army in Syria and Iraq that wants to attack the homeland and we're not doing anything about it. So how do you defeat the ideology? Build up others? You reject Rand Paul.

The source of the problem is in Syria. Raqqa is the headquarters of ISIL, which is a lethal terrorist organization, now army. If you don't go after them over there, they're going to hit us over here, and there's no substitute for that in my view.

I worry that the Senate is working to consider a series of little-noticed provisions in comprehensive immigration reform that may provide a pathway to a national ID card for all individuals present in the United States - citizens and noncitizens.

The GOP of old has grown stale and moss-covered. I don't think we need to name any names, do we? Our party is encumbered by an inconsistent approach to freedom. The new GOP will need to embrace liberty in both the economic and the personal sphere.

How will we defend ourselves if the Patriot Act expires? Well, perhaps we could just rely on the Constitution and demonstrate exactly how traditional judicial warrants can gather all the info we need - and how bulk collection really hasn't worked.

Someone is an ignoramus who would say that, 'Oh, we had three hurricanes this year. This proves that somehow the climate is warming.' The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and you're going to say that we had four hurricanes and so it proves a theory?

One of the things that came out of the campaign, as I recall, was a high ranking [Hillary's] Clinton official, I believe, sent their password via email. We also need to learn how to protect our own information. And I think that's important as well.

I've thought for some time that the answer to a lot of problems in the Middle East, including Iran, include an active role with Russia. And I think, in some ways, we've taken show votes in the U.N. that are guaranteed to failure before we take them.

I think when people voted for Donald Trump, they realized he owned a lot of stuff with his name on it. I think the concern over conflict of interest seems to be higher in the media than the public. People saying, oh, he has to sell all of his stuff.

I think it's a real debate how big NATO should be and whether or not it's more provocative than good. Whenever there's a war fought, our soldiers fight it and our dollars pay for it. And, really, our decisions need to be about our national security.

There comes a time, there comes a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer. That time is now and I will not let the Patriot Act, the most unpatriotic of acts go unchallenged.

What I can say is, is that if you do a poll, and one of the worldwide polling companies did this, and they asked people in 50 countries, "Would you like to come to America," it's about 700 million would come next year. We would double our population.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the Patriot Act was rushed to the floor. Several hundred pages. Nobody read it ... But people voted because they were fearful and people said there could be another attack and Americans will blame me if I don't vote on this.

I’ve never argued against any technology being used when you have an imminent threat, an active crime going on. If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and fifty dollars in cash, I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him.

It seems the most common thing for serial interventionists to do these days is to lob the term 'isolationist' at anyone who does not agree with their latest folly, and then set up a straw man about those people not wanting to be involved in the world.

When I asked the president [Barack Obama], can you kill an American on American soil, it should have been an easy answer. It's an easy question. It should have been a resounding and unequivocal no. The president's response, he hasn't killed anyone yet.

I would argue that you're only going to get the conservatives, particularly a Republican House, to pass immigration reform if we, as conservatives, are reassured that the border is controlled and that we get to vote on whether the border is controlled.

I think it's a huge mistake. I think regime change in Syria, and this is what - I've been saying this for several years now. In 2013 when we first went in, I said, you are going to give arms to the allies of al Qaida, to radical jihadists? That's crazy.

The fundamental problem of Obamacare is the insurance mandates. When you mandate what has to be insurance, it elevates the price. And when you tell people they can buy insurance after they're sick, they will. And you get what's called adverse selection.

I'm not questioning Dick Cheney's motives. There's a chance for a conflict of interest. At one point in time, he was opposed to going into Baghdad. Then he was out of office and involved in the defense industry, and then he became for going into Baghdad.

As long as I sit at Henry Clay's desk, I will remember his lifelong desire to forge agreement, but I will also keep close to my heart the principled stand of his cousin, Cassius Clay, who refused to forsake the life of any human, simply to find agreement.

What worries me most about Trump, other than all of the other crazy things, is that I believe that he wants power and I believe from my point of view that power corrupts, and that the whole purpose of our founding fathers and America was to contain power.

I'm not opposed to letting people work and labor in our country, but we shouldn't provide an easy route to citizenship. We're the only country I know of where a person can come in illegally and that baby becomes a citizen and I think that should stop also.

What most Americans don't realize is there is an unholy alliance. They come together. There's a secret handshake. We spend more money on everything. And we are not stronger nation if we go further into debt. We are not projecting power from bankruptcy court.

[John] Bolton was an advocate for regime change in Libya, so was Hillary Clinton actually. And Donald Trump said it was a mistake. I agree it was a mistake to do regime change in Libya. We became more endangered and actually worse people took over afterwards.

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