JEFF MERKLEY

Imagine if Congress always put the interests of polluters ahead of the health of our families. Our rivers and lakes would be choked with sewage. Acid rain would pour down from smog-filled skies. Hundreds of thousands more of our neighbors, friends, and loved ones would be victims of cancer, heart disease, and asthma.

What matters most to me is doing what I was elected to do: help make life better for Oregonians and making America work for working Americans again.

Too many Americans who are uninsured or under-insured do not receive regular checkups because they can't afford coverage or their insurance doesn't cover enough of the costs. The lack of preventive care results in countless emergency room visits and health care disasters for families.

Real choice is clear information and the right to walk away from a bad deal without leaving your wallet behind.

We have a duty to ensure that patients don't have to worry whether they'll be dropped from their coverage if they get sick. Small business owners shouldn't have to break the bank to provide coverage to their employees. And families should not be forced into bankruptcy because of a medical crisis.

There are two ways of looking at the talking filibuster. My way is as a form of unanimous consent.

I won't stop fighting to make life better for working Americans and give those who are just trying to find a decent job the opportunity to do so.

A budget should be judged by whether it creates a foundation for the success of American working families striving to buy a house, or to send their kids to college, or to save a little for retirement and, if they're lucky, a vacation.

Over and over again, I hear from Oregonians that we need real health care reform that provides every American with access to quality, affordable care.

For too long, tricks and traps in mortgages, credit cards, and other financial transactions have stripped wealth from working families.

Budgets are nothing if not statements of priorities.

My way of viewing the talking filibuster was as a way of doing unanimous consent with your feet. You object by going down and talking.

It's time to level the playing field for small business owners and give them the same health care choices that large corporations have. Because they don't have as many employees, they have little ability to negotiate lower rates.

There are thousands of capable Americans who would pursue a degree in nursing if we had room in our schools for them.

We can no longer continue with a status quo energy policy. We must create sustainable clean energy jobs and leave the planet to our children and grandchildren in better shape than we found it.

We can have the best health insurance options in the world, and people still won't get needed care if we don't increase our supply of primary care physicians and nurses.

I grew up in Southern Oregon. My father was a sawmill worker and a logger, and his job put food on the table.

Decades of scientific research has proven that carbon pollution is harmful to human health and causes global warming.

When you use the word 'filibuster,' most of us in America - and I count myself among them - envision it as the ability to hold the floor on rare occasions to speak at length and make your point emphatically and even delay progress by taking hours.

There's an enormous amount of corruption, and as one American adviser put it to me, "The police in Afghanistan are thugs. We equip them, we train them, and now they are equipped and trained thugs."

The economy, virtually all the new income has gone to the top 10 percent, and we need to find those areas where we can actually make a change in that. And that includes enhancing manufacturing jobs in this country, it includes the ability to go to community college for free, it includes the ability to have debt-free higher education, it includes career technical education in our high schools. It also includes taking on the pharmaceutical companies on the extravagant prices that they're charging for the drugs. Americans need to stay healthy.

What [Bernie] Sanders has done is he's focused the nation on the fact that these things are not inevitable. They are the result of policies. We can do better to create an economy that works well for working Americans.

That's a question best put to Bernie Sanders himself, but I think that he will probably put forward ideas that are related to the corrupting role of Citizens United and Buckley versus Valeo court decisions and the need to restore a by-and-for-the-people republic envisioned in our Constitution instead of the of-, by- and for-the-most-powerful system that we have right now.

We have our nominee, and it's is Secretary [Hillary] Clinton. I do hope that Secretary Clinton will take into account the huge resonance of the vision that Senator ["Bernie"] Sanders was putting forward.This has inspired millions of citizens - a style of campaign we've never seen before winning 22 states, extraordinary number of caucuses. Now the challenge is to bring the two halves of the party together.

Americans have powerfully sensed that we're off track. There is a structural challenge in our economy that needs to be addressed.