US SENATOR JAMES LANKFORD  3-7-2024 - podcast episode cover

US SENATOR JAMES LANKFORD 3-7-2024

Mar 07, 20248 min
--:--
--:--
Download Metacast podcast app
Listen to this episode in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episode description

The podcaster did not provide a description for this episode.

Transcript

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.

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android