When Pope Francis addressed Congress last month, he called on all Americans to "keep in mind all those people around us who are trapped in a cycle of poverty. They too need to be given hope."

Getting things done is coming back in fashion in Congress, as the body begins to rack up achievements like the first major entitlement reform in decades and making progress on a budget. This month, House and Senate leaders of both parties reached an agreement on the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act (TPA), landmark legislation that will pave the way for achieving 21st-century trade agreements with Asia and Europe.

Today, the U.S. Tax Code is a mess. Various loopholes leak billions of dollars each year and are easy to exploit, while other provisions fall hardest on families and small businesses trying to make ends meet. This doesn't support the long-term health of our economy. Instead of creating pathways for individuals to succeed, we are destroying opportunity.

Sometimes, it almost seems like Washington doesn't want America's small businesses to succeed. Every year, the government piles on pages of new and burdensome regulations, imposes fines and fees on providing healthcare to employees, and makes it more and more difficult to grow a business. Small businesses are often so overwhelmed with this onslaught of paperwork many are forced to hire armies of accountants and lawyers just to ensure they operate in compliance with the law. There's no time these frustrating realities are more evident than in the lead-up to Tax Day.

Our enemies want to believe that America is in decline. Unfortunately, this President has employed a feeble and listless foreign policy, rushing from one crisis to the next without developing a strategy for threat prevention or containment. Just look at Vladimir Putin's textbook takeover of eastern Ukraine. He bet we would do nothing as he boldly strode in and annexed part of a sovereign nation with strategic and diplomatic ties to the United States. The most infuriating fact of the matter is: he was right.

In Washington, it tends to get noisy. It's easy to get caught up in the heated debates, political posturing, and poll-tested rhetoric flying back and forth aimed at one interest group or another. It's chaotic. Too often we spend time and energy yelling at each other instead of rolling up our sleeves to get important work done - one reason I'm convinced the American people are so frustrated with Washington. It takes something truly special to cut through the noise and bring everyone together.

Legendary Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." With recent revelations that Hillary Clinton routed all of her sensitive emails as Secretary of State through a private email server located at her New York residence instead of through secure servers at the State Department, the political chattering class has been consumed by questions of transparency and accountability. Certainly, this situation presents alarming security risks – raising questions about whether private or even classified information was made more vulnerable to our enemies. But equally as troubling are implications that we live in a time where public servants are either afraid of transparency or believe they're simply above the law.

ObamaCare could finally be on the ropes. That's because oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the King v. Burwell case have begun. This important case seeks to establish whether the Obama Administration's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has the authority to rewrite the ObamaCare law to allow the federal government to distribute subsidies directly to healthcare consumers through a federal exchange. That's a wordy argument – but in reality it's pretty simple. The case asks: does the Obama Administration have the right to change laws passed by Congress to fit its own ends?

The United States sits on the precipice of a global energy revolution. Since we began increasing domestic production by utilizing new and innovative drilling techniques like fracking, oil-producing nations like Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia have begun to fear losing global market share, putting the United States in a prime position to lead. But we can't become the global energy leader if we leave common-sense, job-creating energy infrastructure projects on the table. Yet the President's total lack of leadership this week, acting to veto the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, is threatening to do just that.