Well, my wife, Cathy Gillespie, worked for Joe Barton, who was running for Congress in 1984.

George W. Bush is not only a great president; he was a great candidate.

I'm a dedicated Republican and a proud party man.

I believe we're the party of small business.

The fact is that we as a party at the Republican National Committee registered 3.4 million new voters in the past two years and brought them into the political process. The president won by 3.5 million votes.

The highest percentage of African Americans own their own homes today than ever in our nation's history.

The Democratic Party is getting very angry, and that came through clearly in this election.

Our party may have swung too far right at various times.

And so it was interesting for me to find myself very enamored of a Republican president, but Ronald Reagan was someone I thought captured the spirit of America.

If Ralph Nader runs, President Bush is going to be re-elected, and if Ralph Nader doesn't run, President Bush is going to be re-elected. We're going to run on the president's strong and principled leadership and his positive agenda for a second term.

I don't believe we're the party of big business.

Well, my wife, Cathy Gillespie, worked for Joe Barton, who was running for Congress in 1984.

People like passion in politics.

I don't think we're as divided as many in the elite would have us believe.

I think one of the problems the Democrats have today is that they are an elitist party.

But I think there was a sense amongst the House Republicans especially that we didn't just want to be opposed to Bill Clinton; that we wanted to tell the country what we were for and to brand ourselves in a more positive manner.

Politics swings like a pendulum.

We are in favor of greater free markets.

I think Karl Rove saw that in George W. Bush early on and understood the impact that he could have on Texas politics and probably on national politics.

I do not believe the American people are going to confuse hatred for passion.

When you were a volunteer for the Bush-Cheney campaign, you came in the morning; you had a supervisor who gave you a list of calls to make and a time to do it in.

If you're a governor of a big state, people sense your presence a little bit, even your fellow governors.

So I think that our foreign policy, the president's strong and principled leadership when it comes to the war against terror and foreign policy is going to be an asset.

We are seeing at the Republican National Committee a phenomenon that is worth noting this week; maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe Wednesday, we will have a million first time donors since the president took office.

Well, I think the Republican Party is the more populist party.

When you look at where the Democratic field is going relative to foreign policy, they are increasingly moving away from a policy of pre-emptive self-defense that the president has adopted since September 11.

I'm an American first, and I think that's how most people are.

Texas is now a cornerstone of the electoral college for Republicans.

Frankly, I thought we would have lost the House by now.

They do believe that if we do not wage this war against terror in places like Baghdad and Kabul, we are more likely to have it waged in Baltimore and Kansas.

One is that President Clinton, in his first two years of his term, did not govern as he had campaigned.

Even as a partisan Republican, I'm not sure a 40-year run is healthy for either party.

I don't want to be disrespectful of the president of the United States, but as a political person, one of the things I appreciated about this president, in the past year especially, is he is a fantastic candidate.

I accept people for who they are and love them. That doesn't mean I have to agree or that I have to turn my back on the tenets of my faith and reject the tenets of my faith when it comes to homosexuality.

On the other side, I do believe that the rhetoric we are seeing from the Democrats today is unprecedented, is a new low in presidential politics and goes beyond political discourse and amounts to political hate speech.

All we're getting from the Democratic majority in Congress and from this White House is more bailouts, more spending, more planned stimulus, more deficits and debt, and the American people have had it.

But the Congress has made the determination that certain kinds of information can be protected even though the American people may want to have access to information.

Promoting job creation and economic growth in the Hudson Valley is one of my top priorities in Congress.

Copyrights have not expired, and will not expire, so long as Congress is free to be bought to extend them again.

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.

I have seen the times when the grassroots has moved the Congress. We listen way more often to our constituents than the lobbyists. And the grassroots are going to have to do it.

We in this Congress have a choice. The American people have a right to exercise a choice on this issue, as to whether our men and women will continue to fight and die in a war based on deception and fantasy, or to start bringing the troops home.

While Kuwait is not a democracy, giving only half the population a voice in their government is not a policy this Congress should support and one that I am glad that Kuwait's leaders are changing.

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

The decision to go to war is the most important decision that I can make as a representative in Congress. As a veteran, I see any potential military action first through the eyes of the young men and women who volunteered to wear the uniform and would carry out such a mission.

In 2001, Congress passed much needed tax relief to allow Americans to keep more of their hard earned money and spend it as they see fit - rather than how the federal government sees fit.

The Middle East is literally going up in flames, as is California, and Katrina's problems haven't been solved, and Congress' response is to criticize Federal judges.

We have seen that, in another unfunded mandate, the so-called No Child Left Behind Act, which created tougher standards, and we all support that, but Congress did not provide the money to attract and hire the best teachers.

Obama's health care plan will be written by a committee whose head, John Conyers, says he doesn't understand it. It'll be passed by Congress that has not read it, signed by a president who smokes, funded by a Treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese, and financed by a country that's nearly broke. What could possibly go wrong?