Mr. President, as we speak--as I am speaking on the floor of the Senate--in an act of stunning partisan politics, President Obama, the Commander in C… - John McCain

After a while, we must have thought the distance between our desks too great for either of us to hear each other clearly or that the presence of the clerk transcribing our exchange had become too distracting. And as if we had both heard some secret signal, we set down our microphones simultaneously and walked briskly to the well of the floor, where we could continue in closer quarters, and in language perhaps too…familiar…to be recorded for posterity, which, regrettably was still audible enough to be overheard by a few reporters, who were now leaning over the railing of the press gallery trying to ascertain just what the hell was going on between McCain and Kennedy. After we both were satisfied we had sufficiently impressed upon each other the particulars of proper senatorial comportment, we ended our discussion, and returned to the business that had brought us to the chamber in the first place. And, I'm happy to report, we succeeded in discouraging our colleagues from continuing their intemperate argument. They both had deserted the chamber with, I was later told, for I did not notice their escape, rather puzzled if not frightened looks on their faces.

Could I also emphasize that the violence is worse than it has ever been. Mr. President, 22,000 Mexicans have been murdered on the Mexican border. American citizens have been murdered on our border. This is no longer a situation where someone from Mexico or some other country decides they want to cross our borders. These are highly organized, highly sophisticated, well-equipped, well-trained, armed cartels. Drug and human smuggling cartels coordinate with each other through these corridors. They have better communication than our enforcement agencies due to our lack of interoperability. They have sophisticated equipment. They are even sending drugs over using ultralights. This is a struggle for the existence of the Government of Mexico. This is a struggle on our side of the border for the fundamental obligation any government has; that is, to provide its citizens with secure borders. Right now, our citizens are not safe, and therefore the Federal Government should be fulfilling its responsibilities to provide the necessary equipment and manpower to secure our borders. As my colleague from Arizona just pointed out, it can be achieved. It is now a massive failure on the part of the Federal Government. They should also fund it.

When the President says: If you like your health insurance policy, you can keep it, that is not true either. It is not true either. Because if you had a government option, and it looked more attractive to your employer, and your employer decided to select the government option rather than the health insurance policy you now have, then you cannot keep it. So it is simply not true that under the government option, if you like your health insurance policy, you can keep it. But the real point is, why don't we sit down--which we did not do; we did not do that at the beginning of this process--why don't we sit down with the smartest people on both sides of the aisle and say: OK, what can we get gone? What can we get done here together and go to the American people and say we are going to make significant progress in eliminating this problem of out-of-control costs in health care in America. I recall when I first came to the Congress of the United States--and it was pretty partisan then--Ronald Reagan had only been elected a couple years before that time, and Social Security was about to go broke. Social Security was going broke, and two old Irishmen--Tip O'Neill, a liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, and the conservative from California--sat down together and said: OK, we are going to sit together. We are going to fix Social Security. And they did. There American people were not only proud and grateful but they benefited. Let's go back to square one. Let's sit down together and get this issue resolved.