Dear Oklahoma friends and neighbors: Yes, it has been a noisy week in Washington, DC. I have some thoughts on the week in Congress and the long-term challenges we face.
Keep praying for the nation.
Before I get to life in Washington, DC, I want to celebrate that fall temperatures have finally arrived in Oklahoma. The football and soccer fields are full around our state and basketball is around the corner. There are fun high school football games all over our state.
Families are about to get a “gap” during fall break. I hope you’re able to spend time with family and friends at some of our great museums and historical sites in Oklahoma. The Talihina Drive in southeast Oklahoma is a great fall road trip. My family has enjoyed hiking at Mt. Scott, time at Heavener and Roman Nose State Parks, and driving the sand dunes in Little Sahara State Park in Waynoka.
Strong families are our nation’s greatest asset.
Grown-up Conversations on Funding the Federal Government September 30 comes around every year at exactly this time. Yet this year, like many years in the past, we had another fiscal cliff threat because the work to fund the government doesn’t become a priority until the deadline is looming.
This year, three key issues dominated the latest government funding fight, all of them are significant: our national security/border security, our economy, including the $33 trillion in federal debt, and America’s role in the world. Those are significant areas where Americans disagree, and we should have a real policy debate to determine the direction of the nation. But if we have those fights during a government shutdown, the argument is about the shutdown and not about the economy, security, and foreign policy. Let’s have the argument about cutting spending, securing our border, and confronting authoritarian regimes around the world in the days leading up to a shutdown, not during a shutdown.
Shutting the government down makes a hard situation harder when our military is not paid, federal agencies get even less efficient, and federal law enforcement are not paid as they work massive overtime on our broken border. Federal workers and their families should not be used as leverage in a shutdown. The pressure should be on the leaders in Washington.
For the last five years, I’ve worked with Senator Maggie Hassan from New Hampshire on a common-sense solution to take shutdowns off the table for good. Our Prevent Government Shutdowns Act is a simple idea: if you don’t finish your work on time, you have to stay until it’s done. Every Member of Congress has to remain in Washington seven days a week, until the 12 appropriations bills have passed the House and Senate. That puts real pressure on Congress to do its work.
The House of Representatives The leadership fight in the House is a result of years of neglect, or as I call it, deferred maintenance. For years Congress and the president have been unwilling to balance the budget, secure the border, increase energy permitting, define our foreign policy, and much more because whichever bill contained the fix was not “perfect.” Now the problems have grown so large and increased so much that it’s easier to fight over who’s going to lead rather than fight over how to solve the problem. The problems that have grown out of control over decades cannot be solved in months, but we have to get started. We also cannot wait until we can solve every problem before we solve some problems.
We have an equally divided Senate and House, with Democrats barely in the lead in the Senate and Republicans barely in the lead in the House. In that kind of moment, both sides have to have honest, grown-up conversations about how to fix an issue so we can get busy working on the next issue.
The problems are getting larger by the minute. Let me give you two quick examples: Debt – From the early 1800s to 1983, our nation’s debt grew to $1 trillion. From 1983 to 2023 the federal debt has grown to $33 trillion—the problem is accelerating. We have the highest inflation in 40 years. In the past three years, the cost of everything is up more than 17 percent, with energy inflation much higher.
Border – Last year was the highest number of illegal crossings on our southern border in history. The previous high was the year before. There have been more illegal crossings in the last three years than the previous 12 years combined. The problem is getting exponentially worse.
We should not surrender our values and principles when we solve the problem, but we have to do more than just fight about the problems.