Mr. President, you want to speed the process up and deal with vacancies? Work with us. Nominate judges from the mainstream, consult with us and you will find these, your nominees, will go through like a hot knife through butter,

This process is getting a little more absurd the further we move,

The genie is out of the bottle, ... Once you start the trial process, you don't know where it ends. It's hard to see how it wouldn't go on forever.

Sen. Graham and I do not think it would be appropriate to vote on this bill while the president is there, so we have agreed to delay the vote,

My first reaction is a simple one: It could have been a lot worst. ... The president has not sent us a nominee that we've rejected already.

The president called for a bipartisan commission on Social Security in his State of the Union address, which I recommended he do last year -- but if he were serious about it, he would have left Social Security privatization out of his budget.