Good morning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome, welcome.
It's time to check in with United States Senator James lank Dhand. Senator,
we just had the debt ceiling vote take place. What are your takeaways
on that. Yeah, it's frustrating because we needed to make progress as a
nation during that time period. The debt ceiling final vote was really a vote
to decrease the increase of spending, but not to decrease spending, if I
could say it that way. The Congressional Budget Office assumes Congress is going to
increase spending at least by inflation, though Congress had never voted on that.
The vote itself was, well, we're gonna increase spending this year and next
year, but will increase it less than the rate of inflation. And so
it was declared at big savings. That's not really cutting down our spending,
that's not really reducing the debt at all. And so my frustration was,
Hey, let's talk about what's really going on. I think Americans can handle
a grown up conversation. That's why I put up the Federal Fumbles Book every
year to say there are areas we can actually cut out of spending. There
are wasteful aspects in government spending, so let's cut those, and then let's
also be strategic and what we're going to try to do. But it starts
with that wonderful adult conversation to say, let's all talk about things like grown
ups here and admit what we really have is an issue, and let's talk
it through how to solve it. Other big things facing of course Congress and
the Senate in particular, of course, is the Southern border issue. It
seems like every day we just keep hearing more and more stories, and they're
not good ones. They're not good ones. I was down on the Southern
border three weeks ago now, and when I was down there, I always
asked the same thing every time. When I first arrived at the border patrol,
and I go on a regular basis what has changed since I was here
last, because there's always new trends, always new aspects. The first thing
that they said when I got there this time was we have a lot more
folks that are non Spanish speaker that are coming across the border. As they
described it, along the border, these are military age men coming in from
Russia, from China, from Pakistan, from the Middle East from Mauritania and
West Africa. These are individuals coming in where we have no criminal history on
them, We have no idea of the background. But it's men that are
coming across and saying, hey, I have fear in my country, but
we have no idea who they are, their real identity, or where they're
headed. And the Biden administration is still as of today, just releasing them
into the country and saying Okay, you can come in, but you have
to show up for a hearing three or four years from now in the future.
And there's no one tracking these individuals. They're just released into the country.
So my frustration is this administration says one thing, like they have said,
hey, the numbers have actually gone down, when in realities the numbers
are as high as they've always been. They're just counting them differently and putting
them on different lists and saying, oh, you want both lists, now
is going to give you one list. So they've literally split them into two
different lists and they're only given the numbers for one of them, saying the
numbers are down. That is incredible. That is absolutely incredible. These are
things that people were saying many many years ago. To watch out for foreign
nationals from other than Central and Southern America. This will be happening. Well,
in dribs and drabs, it has been happening, but it sounds now
like it's more and more common. No, Tom, it's accelerated significantly.
For instance, when I was down there, said three weeks ago, I
asked the border patrol gate talking about some of these populations where they're coming from
from West Africa, which is a fundamentalist Muslim country area, and they're in
Mauritania, that particular country. Just in two weeks, they'd had a thousand
men that come across in two weeks. In two weeks, so this is
greatly accelerated. If you want to go back to Mauritania, just two years
ago, there were about ninety people in two in a year that had come
across. So this is a big acceleration that's happening for that particular region.
And we're trying to be able to say hold on, these individuals have flown
through eight different countries to be able to get here. This is not just
fleeing for asylum. This is something else. What's going on. Well,
there are more than just these two issues, but they're very big ones going
on in Washington, DC, where you're doing the people's work there. Bring
us up to date on what's been happening legislatively. So, Chuck Schumer in
the Senate has tried to figure out how to be able to manage all the
absentees that he has, so he's not been able to move some of his
nominations through. We've got some really bad judges that they have brought up.
There's a judge they brought up this week. They tried to get past,
but because there were a couple of Democrats that were out this week, he
couldn't actually get the past, which I think is good for the country.
Quite frankently, what one of the judges that President Biden has put up actually
said, one of the threats to the Republic is the Senate and the Electoral
College. And he doesn't mean like the Senate how it votes. He means
the Senate how it's designed. He wants the Senate to be able to have
representation just like the House has. So basically his problem is the United States
Constitution. He doesn't like the Constitution and thinks it's a racist documents and so
he is trying to But the Biden administration is trying to put him on the
courts. Is one of our circuit court judges. So it is remarkable some
of the people that they're putting up right now. We're pushing back on each
one of them. And as long as the Democrats have some attendance problems and
actually getting here and having people out, it's we're going to get to you
to slow down this process. But unfortunately they outvote us if everybody else shows
up, and they're going to keep craying some of these nominations through. Well,
we got a lot of people running for president, and it's most people
who are in office often don't say too much during the primary. But what
do you think is the more the merrier for folks trying to run for the
highest office on both sides of the aisle. Yeah, the nice thing about
being a Republican is that we've got a very deep bench. We've got a
lot of really good people that are out there with good policy ideas, and
so my hope is that we'll I have this good conversation. I'm not endorsing
anyone. I'm staying out of this race, but I would tell you there's
a lot of good folks to be able to look out with a lot of
good ideas. We'll have our first debates in August, so they're coming up
quick about the time everybody's headed back to school. We'll have ten or twelve
people on stage actually having a debate about what can help us as a nation.
What's the right tone, what's the right direction, what are the right
policies, how do we get out of this Biden economy, how do we
actually secure our border? How do we have better standing worldwide? So I'm
looking forward to all the dialogue and allow us to be able to whittle the
field down anything we forgot to cover. Senator No, there's a lot going
on. I tell people that get frustrated about what's happening, none of these
problems are bigger than God. So I encourage people to pray, let's get
to work. Let's set the example for who we are as a nation.
There's no reason for us to live life angry all the time. When we're
angry, we actually focus and say, Okay, let's get to work and
try to be able to actually solve these things. And that's what I try
to channel my energy towards every day. Well, most pops know how to
get a hold of God, a simple prayer we'll get or done. How
do we get ahold of you if we need to get something across? Yeah,
well, be getting a hold of me is harder than getting old of
God, because you can reach out to him any places, anytime, anywhere
if you want to reach out to me. Lots of books do how to
call, because they do, and we get lots of calls, and that's
a good thing. But you can go to Lankford dot Senate dot gov,
Lankford dot Senate dot gov, and you can get all of our information or
email address, our phone numbers. If you have a stamp, you can
even mail us a letter. We'll have the address there. You can go
to social media at Senator Langford. But as always I encourage you not to
believe everything that you read on social media, and but if you're willing to
be able to go there, we can get more information there too. Thank
you, Senator Lankford.