Good morning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome, welcome.
It's time now to speak with our US senator from Oklhoma, James Lankfrit.
How are you doing today's Senator, You know what I'm doing. Well,
Good morning to you. We got the State of the Union coming up
tonight. What do you expect and kind of give us a little bit of
a scenario of what you'd like to see in here. What I'd like to
see in here, I very likely will not here tonight, but it is
pomp and circumstance. It's a constitutionally mandated event to be able to gather together.
The president either addresses by paper or addresses publicly what his vision is for
the country. My concern is east cast a vision before about unifying the country,
about securing the border, about a growing economy, about more freedom and
opportunity for us as Americans. The problem is we've had exactly the opposite for
the last three years. So I expect that President Biden will lay out a
public agenda, but my fears the actual agenda will be very very different.
Senator. Budget things that come and go. We've been doing a lot of
these continuing resolutions. We've got to get off that train. One agree on
that this has been a frustration. The budget was set to be done,
their twelve appropriation bills, they were set to be done in September the thirtieth
of the last year, and they've yet to be done. We've just done
a continuing resolution, which just is take the previous year's budget, change the
numbers, and move forward, which is exceptionally inefficient. Every time you do
a CR continuing resolution, it means you can't stop programs, you can't start
new programs, so things that expired the year before are still getting funded.
It's incredibly wasteful. So the House passed yesterday six of the twelve appropriation bills
that they've been working on individually. We have also did the cent have been
working on three of these we've already passed before. So the House passed those.
They're very strong. They hold funding down and in fact they keep the
it's called domestic funding flat, so there's no increases in that. That's very
helpful to us. And so they pass those six overwhelmingly yesterday. They come
to the Senate either today or tomorrow. We'll also have those to have the
opportunity at least get six of the twelve done. We've got to get the
other six done individually in the next three weeks, so that'll be the next
battle is to be able to get the rest of those done, to be
able to finally get us off by continuing resolution, which we should not have
at this point. But the big ones are still coming. Deal with national
defense, deal with healthcare. There's a lot of issues that are still coming
with These are significant. They deal with ag, they deal with transportation,
highways, all those things. So it is important that we get these done.
Now, when you talk about military, we're talking about not only salaries
for our people in military service, but is this also a defense thing where
it might be tied to funding efforts to support Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and
things like that. Yeah, this bill doesn't deal with Ukraine or Taiwan,
Israel, and none of those items are actually included in this. This does
deal with what's called military construction. So you think about construction of new dormitories
and ENID. You talk about the new hangar at Tinker Air Force Base,
what's happening at McAllister Army Ammunition Depot. Some of the facilities there are at
Fort Sill or even for the one thirty seventh or one thirty eighth National Guard.
Those are all included in this bill that's actually coming today, but there's
no four in anything in this bill. I understand you're going to be in
the neighborhood pretty soon. Can you tell us a little bit about it.
Any chance i'd get to be in the neighborhood I'll take. Actually, I've
got several weeks from now, I'll be traveling around the state when we don't
have a week of voting in one of the spots I'm playing to come,
mister Bartlesville, get a chance just to be able to spend time with people,
to be able to listen. It is my joy to do that because
we have about five weeks in a row that will be in Washington, d
C. And then usually have a week that we're not in Washington, DC.
And I'll take that time to be around the state and planning in one
of those to be in Martelsville. Very good. I'm going to go back
to the border here a little bit. You know. I just the bill
that you worked on very very hard. I didn't quite make it progress in
any form, shape or whatever taking place there in either House there's really not
right now, and the frustration is that the White House has been determined that
they're not going to do anything. The bill that I actually put forward actually
put mandates on the White House to be able to do things and cut funding
from them if they didn't do it. So a lot of people say to
me, this White House is not going to do anything about it. I
said, they will if we actually take funding away from them, and so
that was a key item that we were trying to get them to actually implement.
The border. We're running between sixty four hundred and seven thousand people illegally
crossing the border every day, including yesterday. It's still the continuing problem.
This White House has the ability to dramatically reduce that number by changing what they're
doing on parole, by implementing a lot of the things that took away during
the when the Act from the Trump administration into now. So this White House
could make a bad situation better. But to actually get the numbers down where
they need to be, we've got to have additional law as well. We've
got seven thousand people a day that are legally crossing now, but remember in
twenty nineteen, during the Trump administration, we had days of four forty five
hundred, even forty seven hundred in a day during some of that time buried
in twenty nineteen. So even with an administration that's strictly enforcing the law,
you're still going to have days that are higher days. I'm trying to be
able to get it to where we never have high days like that. We
actually enforce our border by increasing the strength of the law, increasing the ability
to be able to turn people around faster, so we don't have a slow
screening process. That's the key for me at this point. So, but
we need this administration to step up first and actually start implay, meaning the
law they already have. We're speaking with the US Senator James Lank Senator,
anything else that you like to convey to the audience this morning, Well,
I would tell you it is spring forward this weekend, and it's one of
the weekends that I absolutely don't like. I don't run into a lot of
people that love spring forward in this time period. It's actually something I've worked
on for years nationally on changing this clock change back and forth. It's a
remnant still of World War two actually that during the war we were trying to
be able to save oil for our lamps and such from World War One and
World War Two. We need to be able to just lock the clock on
it. And parents that I talked to, folks that handle livestock all get
frustrated this time of the year with the time change. I actually have a
bill with Marco Rubio that we have for years where we lock the clock and
we don't have time change. And for folks that would that work, State
of Arizona has done this for years. State of Arizona does not change their
clock and for some reason, their kids still get to school safely. Our
economy is still doing well. It's not a problem. They just don't deal
with the annoyance of clock changes twice a year. So I'd like to see
us have that ability to do that nationally as well. We'll continue to be
able to push what what I call the Sunshine Protection Bill to be able to
lock the clock. So that's change your clocks this weekend. But know that
I'm still working on trying to be able to get a law pass where we
don't deal with this every time. How good folks get ahold of your Senator,
it could always reach out to me. Lots of folks find the way.
It's Langford dot Senate dot gov. That's our website, Lanker dot send
GOVT. That's got our email address. That's got snail mail where you can
actually write us a letter. US Post Office would be excited about that.
It's got phone numbers there. You can also go to our social media at
Senator Langford. Just I ask you one thing. Don't believe everything you read
on social media.