Jim Cooper

Ultimately, Congressional medicine is like veterinary medicine: It must be strong enough to work, and tasty enough to swallow.

First, the year 2004, the year past, the Comptroller General of the United States, David A. Walker, said that arguably it was the worst year in American fiscal history, clearly setting our Nation on an unsustainable path.

Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute have criticized Bush for his big increases in spending, which far exceed those of the Clinton era.

Bush may be a strong leader in the war on terrorism, but on budget deficits he is missing-in-action.

Equality under the law is the slow triumph of hope over history.

We need to take politics out of health care. Congress will cave to pretty much any special interest on the subject.

If Congress wanted to intervene with the Federal Reserve, well, we created the Federal Reserve. We could uncreate it. But would you want Congress regulating the money supply? We'd have drowned in inflation, or gone bankrupt, decades ago.

In Congress, it's all pork, all the time.

If taxpayers want better results from Congress, they must stop paying their elected officials for failure. After all, you get what you pay for.

Our nation suffers when Congress fails to pay America's bills on time.

The President's budget pays for only six months of the war in Iraq and completely overlooks the transition costs of Social Security reform. The Administration always lied about the cost of the Medicare drug bill.

True partisans draft legislation that gives themselves everything and their enemies nothing. They love bills that repulse and even disgust the other side. Today's politics have become an all-or-nothing, black-or-white, zero-sum game - it's not a contact sport but a blood sport.

The truth is that health-care reform will always be a nuisance, with version 2.0 followed by next year's 2.1. As long as it boosts productivity, it's worth it.

Immortality awaits the legislator fortunate enough to have a significant law named after him. Think of Pell grants or Stafford loans for students, Sarbanes-Oxley to regulate Wall Street, or the Hyde Amendment on abortions.

Any politician who's ever been re-elected knows that friends come and go; enemies accumulate.

Politicians are terrified of losing touch with folks back home but content to be clueless about government's failure to fix real problems.

Most of my folks back home think Social Security and Medicare are sacred commitments stronger than the strongest contract. And yet if you look at the details here in Washington, they're not even promises. They're scheduled benefits. I think we need to do all that we can to make sure those benefits are real.

The real problem with big issues like Medicare is that both parties have to be brave at the same time. Every pollster will tell you not to do that to get partisan advantage. Too many people here are willing to deliberately harm the country for partisan gain. That is borderline treason.

Members walk into the chamber full of hatred. They believe the worst lies about the other side. Two senators stopped by my office just a few hours ago. Why? They had a plot to nail somebody on the other side. That's what Congress has come to.

When I first came to Congress, the party was supposed to help you. Now, when a new member is sworn in, he or she is told what their dues are - how much they are expected to raise for the party for the next election. It's worse in the Senate. It turns the whole place into a money machine.

If you need to put your money in a safe and secure place and you want it to earn interest, Treasury bonds are safer than putting it in any bank as a deposit or putting it anywhere else, because they are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Government.

Aging nations have arteries clogged with obsolete laws, slowing blood flow and preventing oxygen from reaching all parts of the body politic. Physicians call this arteriosclerosis; historians see decline of empire.

Under the AHP approach, the average small business might be able to offer their employees one or two insurance plans, and that employee of the small business would have no idea whether their doctor was going to be a apart of one of those plans.

Congress as a whole is less popular than it's been since polling was invented.

With our national savings rate well below one-percent, it is imperative that the government embrace innovative and cost-effective means of boosting personal savings.