With the President set to focus on the economy Tuesday night in his State of the Union address, your Democratic Senator hopes he tackles the issue underlying that problem as well.

“It’s time for us to stop the nonsense of this excessive partisanship,” says Florida Senator Bill Nelson.

For Nelson, Washington has never seen this level of extremist views and partisan divide.  He says getting lawmakers on the same page- or at least one where they can work together- needs to be a priority.

“If you can do that, you can solve all of the problems,” he says.

Nelson tells me he has never seen a divide this deep, affecting foreign policy debates and the deficit.  And the impact on the budget is getting more focused as we near the sequestration deadline.  Nelson says those are automatic cuts that simply cannot happen.

“It will be like a meat cleaver that will come down instead of a scalpel in extracting cuts,” he says.

But so far Congress has proved incapable of setting aside its differences to fix the problem, only postponing it to the deadline we now face.

“That’s clearly the problem that bedevils us,” Nelson says.

He believes a call to end partisanship is something the American people want to see as well.