and in that spirit, i came here to washington hoping to work with democrats and republicans to work on common sense solutions to the problems that we face. i reached out to jim early on. he and i serve on the financial services committee together. we started this group and we've just started to make some progress. >> now, congressman, this comes at a time when we have congressional approval at historic lows. you have a grim outlook, probably putting it nicely, for the super committee. what can a group of largely freshmen members of congress accomplish? what do you guys hope to accomplish and do you have any tangible signs of success yet? >> it's interesting. i think what we found out of the 12 to 14 members of this group is that we do have a lot of things in common. one of them is we want to make sure that we come down here and understand that we're all americans. these problems that america faces are not republican problems. they're not democrat problems but american problems.