Congress

One, we need to grow jobs. We need to have more jobs for our people. We need to grow our economy. The second was, we are very concerned about the deficit. I agree with both of those conclusions in this election. I think we need to do both of those. In the short term in order to grow the economy we have to invest in the economy and we need not take money out of the pockets of consumers...

Obviously, the purpose of the meeting, which I thought was a constructive meeting, was to see if we can find common ground. Lawrence, I think we have common ground on the fact that I think all of us want to make sure that middle income Americans do not receive a tax increase on January 1st. I'm hopeful that we can move forward on that on which we have found common ground...

Exactly what he says on this is he's for the 250,000 and under. That's his position. That's our position. Let me say that this election, as we know, was in my view essentially about two things. Number one, we hadn't grown jobs quickly enough. We hadn't grown the economy and concern about the deficit. Now if you're going to try to balance those two things one of the things you don't want to do is have average working americans have an increase in their taxes...

It was an issue we lost the majority, therefore we have one less leadership spot, and Mr. Clyburn and I had discussions about it. We're good friends, we've been friends for 45 years, we're still very good friends. We're going to work together. It was obvious that we had to do something other than run against one another and that happened and I'm pleased about it and look forward to working with Jim Clyburn who is a very effective leader of our caucus, well respected within our caucus...