Takeaways From the State of the Union Address

Dear Oklahoma friends and neighbors: It is almost time for many kids’ favorite week—spring break. Our kids are getting ready for a break from school, and I hope families are able to take a moment to pause and spend some time together. Go have fun with the kids, reconnect, and remember to be grateful for the many blessings we enjoy each and every day. We are at our best when our families are strongest, and Oklahoma is blessed with strong families. Enjoy the warm sunshine as well. We have missed it.

This weekend we switched back to Daylight Saving Time to “spring forward,” which some people say is their least favorite weekend of the year. Moms of young children ask me every year how to make the time changes stop and why we do it in the first place. Time change started a century ago during World War I to help America conserve lamp oil. It is time to end the twice-ayear time change and lock the clock. My bill, the Sunshine Protection Act, overwhelmingly passed the Senate a couple years ago, but the House never even debated the bill to put us in Daylight Saving Time year-round. We will eventually get it passed nationally as more and more people look at Arizona, which ended changing the clock years ago. Somehow their kids in Arizona still get to school on time, economic development occurs, and life continues without the annoying time change twice a year.

The State of the Union Address

The President’s State of the Union speech last Thursday was more of a campaign speech than a State of the Union address. From the very beginning, the address focused on dividing the nation. There is no question we are divided in many ways as a nation, but there was no reason to use the State of the Union address to divide us even further.

He focused on his ongoing push for more socialism in our nation with the narrative that if we just tax the wealthy more, tax big companies more, and give the government more power to give away more money, everything would be great. The President even asked for federal authority to control the number of chips in a bag of chips and the size of a Snickers bar. Most Oklahomans want more freedom from government control, rather than more government control. People know, if the government can control the number of chips in a bag, it can also control everything in their personal life and business.

President Biden encouraged what he calls “reproductive freedom,” the latest euphemism for abortion, which received numerous cheers from the audience. I think it is a sad commentary on our culture when people cheer when a child loses their life. In another moment of division, he spoke about in vitro fertilization (IVF), which has wide bipartisan support in Congress. But he focused on the situation in Alabama, which is carefully being resolved as we speak, as another way to divide us, instead of discussing the value of the lives of all children. Thousands of children, from every state, will be born this year through IVF.

The president brought up the border security proposal I worked on over the past several months. Some of the things he said about the bill were even true. The bill would have added many new Border Patrol agents, ICE agents, asylum officers, deportation flights, and fentanyl detection devices at the border. The bill would have built more border fence, ended the open border parole program, added detention beds, and dramatically increased the speed of deportations by changing the standard for asylum screening.

The bill did not have everything I wanted, but it also did not include any amnesty programs. The myth that the bill allowed 5,000 people in a day is just that, a myth. Under the new rules in the bill, the first person that crossed the border each day and every person after that faced a much tougher asylum standard and rapid deportation to deter the next person from paying a cartel to cross. But if the border was overrun with 5,000 people, like what has happened almost every day this year, the rules tightened even more to give law enforcement new tools to immediately deport every person who illegally crosses our border without any screening.

President Biden conveniently left out the numerous existing legal authorities he has already to better secure our border but refuses to use. If the President would enforce the border the same way President Trump or even President Obama enforced the border, we would not have the chaos we currently have in our nation. Both parties are currently choosing to play electionyear politics with our national security by blaming the other party for inaction. We should do everything we can to solve the problem now and allow the election in November to resolve the rest. Inaction when there is danger should not be an option.