Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, it is my honor to represent my family, my neighbors, and the millions of people in my very diverse State of Oklahoma. I am an ordinary Oklahoman. I do not come from a prominent political family or from any kind of political machine. My wife of 23 years, Cindy, is here in the Gallery today. We have walked through life together and have raised two incredible girls who love God and love our Nation. Stepping into this body was a high cost for my family. We took this on together.

We have a tremendous staff, both here in Washington, DC, and in Oklahoma, who sacrifice incredible time and energy for the future of our Nation. Every day they work incredibly hard to solve the issues that we face as a nation. I am grateful to serve in this Chamber and for this to be my very first time to be able to speak in this Chamber. There are a few issues that I want to be able to raise and address in our conversation today.

I have the opportunity to be able to live in a heritage of distinguished Oklahomans who have served in this Chamber. I serve alongside Senator Jim Inhofe, who has stood for conservative principles in this body for two decades. I am humbled to follow the irreplaceable Dr. Tom Coburn. For those of us who are Dallas Cowboy fans, my coming here is kind of like being Danny White after Roger Staubach.

There have been 17 other Senators from Oklahoma, great names such as Don Nickles, Henry Bellmon, Robert S. Kerr, David Boren, and Mike Monroney, just to name a few. I have the honor to sit at the same desk on this Chamber floor used by fellow Republican Senators Tom Coburn, Dewey Bartlett, and Edward Moore.

In the 1930s, Oklahoma's favorite son and humorist, Will Rogers, said:

Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens, and then everybody disagrees.

This is my first official moment to join the ranks of those who step up to speak, but I want to speak about a few things that I consider essential to the work ahead for all of us--what I call the three Ds, which I talk about all the time: debt, defense, and directives.

Let me take those in reverse order. The directives. People ask me all the time: What do Oklahomans want from their Federal Government? The answer is simple. They want to be left alone. They do not want someone else, over 1,000 miles away, telling them what to do, how to run their business, and how to run their lives. It is not that people in Oklahoma are antigovernment--far from it. We have a strong patriotism that drives us to serve our Nation and honor those who give their lives to public service.

Twenty years ago, Oklahoma and the Nation were devastated by a truck bomb in the Oklahoma City Federal building, killing 168 people, most of those Federal employees. We are grateful for people in government who serve faithfully every day.

But we also understand that our Federal Government has a task, and it also has a territory. Federal officers should do their task efficiently with great transparency and accountability, but they also stay out of other people's tasks and do theirs with great effectiveness. When I step into a restaurant, I may have an idea for a new recipe. But I cannot just wander back into the kitchen and start cooking and changing the way the restaurant works. Neither can a Federal regulator drift into every business and decide they are going to redo how that business is done. That is not their territory. That is not their job.

But today in America, if you want to start or run a business, you will find out that the government has already made most of the decisions for you about how you will run your business. Well, an Oklahoma company recently paid a fine for not reporting to a Federal agency that they had nothing to report. Now, I am fairly confident that the Founding Fathers, when they were envisioning a country of the people, by the people, and for the people, were not envisioning that citizens of the country would pay fines to their government for reporting they have nothing to report.

In the past week, I have started a bipartisan initiative called the Cut Red Tape Initiative to try to identify ways to streamline government, to return decisions back to individuals and local governments, and clear the clutter of regulations that benefit the government but slow down business. Just so that people would know that this process is difficult, I have faced weeks of red tape here in the Senate to start an initiative called Cut Red Tape. We will work through that.

In the past few years, over 30,000 pages have been added to the Federal Register. Nothing in American life does not face a Federal regulation. To make sure the government considers the cumulative effect of all of those regulations, agencies are required to do a regulatory lookback to evaluate problem regulations each year. But most don't take it seriously.

The Department of Labor has 676 regulations and rules. This year, their regulatory lookback includes 4 regulations--4 of 676. That is not a serious review. The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has no accountability to the American people, and it has no limit to its authority. They are becoming a fourth branch of government with no checks or balances.

The EPA spends their time looking for gray areas of law in places where they can reinterpret old laws to fit their new agenda. Consent decrees and novel interpretations of statutes have superseded consistent rulemaking and statutory and State primacy of enforcement. Agencies now write rules, interpret their rules, enforce their rules, and establish the punishment for not following their rules. Many people want to blame this administration. I disagree. This administration has become expert at pushing the boundaries; that is true. But the rise in the regulatory state is not new. For decades, the Congress has delegated responsibilities to agencies and given them very few boundaries.

Since the 1970s, in the Chevron case, the courts have increased the power of the regulatory agencies by allowing them to have deference to determine their own rules. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. It is an American issue, which will not improve until this body demands its constitutional authority back and clarifies to the courts that the Constitution states that all legislative authority shall lie in Congress--not in an agency.

The American people want to give the Federal Government their own directive: Leave us alone. Now, I am willing to work

with anyone who is willing to work on some of these issues. So far this session, I have coauthored or cosponsored bills and worked on ideas with Ted Cruz, Elizabeth Warren, Gary Peters, John Cornyn, Heidi Heitkamp, Dianne Feinstein, Orrin Hatch, Mike Lee, Steve Daines, Tim Scott, Rob Portman, Tom Carper, Angus King, Rand Paul, Jeanne Shaheen, John McCain, Mike Enzi, Kelly Ayotte, Mark Kirk and Ron Johnson, just to name a few.

I did not have to sacrifice my conservative values, but I did have to admit that anyone can have a good idea. Just because we disagreed on one thing does not mean I have to belittle people. I told my wife several years ago, when I first came to the House of Representatives, that I had this deja vu moment, thinking I had felt this way before. I have never been in politics or Congress, but I know this feeling. After about 6 months I called her and I said: I finally figured out what this feeling is to be in Congress. It is the emotion you have in middle school lunch. It is that feeling that I get more popular by sitting at my table and making fun of everyone else at everyone else's table. And if I ever say something nice about someone else at another table, my table shakes their head and says: Why would you do that? But if I ever say something unkind, everybody says: Way to go. Welcome to Congress.

Only we can turn this around. We will strongly disagree on areas, but we should find the areas of common ground where we do not have to sacrifice our values and be able to find ways to work together.

The second issue is defense--directives and defense. Our freedom is foreign to most of the world, and it is a threat to them, not because the United States is an aggressor nation--far from it--but because the liberty we export is so powerful they know well it can depose their dictatorships and weaken their control. Many government leaders around the world would rather keep their people poor and closely managed than allow them to be prosperous and free.

Iran is on the rise. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has exported terrorism around the world. I am convinced that some individuals--even in this administration--trust Iran's words more than they trust history, the facts on the ground or even their own intuition. We cannot allow the largest exporter of terrorism in the world to have nuclear weapons. We cannot do that.

Dictatorial governments around the world and totalitarian Islamic leaders consistently test our mettle, probe our infrastructure and computer systems, test our passion for freedom and our resolve for the dignity of every person. By the way, that is one of our core values. Every person--even people we disagree with--is valuable. It is why the issue of race--just as a side note--is so important to us in America--because we understand that in many parts of the world if you are from the wrong family, the wrong tribe, the wrong race or the wrong faith, you cannot get a job, you cannot get government services, you cannot get housing--all of those things.

That is how other places do it. That is not us. We have chosen not to be like that as a nation. Where injustice exists, we want to bring freedom and equality--within our boundaries or around the world.

We believe every person is created equal and is endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights--every person. When brutal thugs attack innocent nations, we have the moral high ground to call out the aggressor and to stand with the oppressed. We always work with resolve to solve the issues peacefully. We understand this proverb: ``A gentle answer turns away wrath.''

Our diplomacy leads the way. But when nations and philosophies will not stop their aggression, they learn that we do not bear the sword for nothing. I have the privilege--and I do count it as a privilege--of serving thousands of men and women and their families who faithfully protect our Nation every day in all branches of the military--first responders on our streets, in the intelligence community, at our ports, in the air, training, equipping, and protecting hundreds of thousands in Oklahoma. In fact, without Oklahoma, just so this body will know, our Nation could not sustain our Air Force, train our pilots, rearm our munitions, fire artillery or rockets, talk to our subs, train our young soldiers, refuel our aircraft, control battlefield airspace or deliver supplies. So you are welcome for what happens in Oklahoma every day.

Our Guard and Reserve units have fulfilled everything that has been asked of them by their Nation, some of them to their last full measure of devotion. But in Oklahoma our patriotism also challenges us to deal with military waste when it takes money, especially directly from the warfighter. Why would we call waste in defense patriotism? Let's solve it. We want the intelligence community to be well equipped. We want them to be attentive to the issues around the world, but we also want our Fourth Amendment freedoms protected. Remember, Oklahomans like to just be left alone.

The third issue is our debt--directives, defense, and debt. Our economy runs on increasing debt. That is how we are actually managing life day to day nowadays. We gamble every year that interest rates will not go up and the rest of the world will still want our bonds. This year we paid $229 billion in interest payments. Think about that for a minute--$229 billion.

The highway trust fund is short just $10 billion, and we are spending $229 billion just in interest payments this year. CBO estimates that we will spend over $800 billion in interest payments by the end of the 10-year window. That is more than we spend on all defense spending, education, transportation, and energy combined--what we will do just in interest payments in the years ahead.

We need to fix two things in this budget hole: efficiently manage Federal spending and a growing economy, duplication in programs. All these things need to be resolved.

Let me take a couple of these things. Efficiency in the Federal Government. We need to deal with the tremendous fraud and waste and duplication. Where we see it, we should go after it. For the past 2 weeks, I have held a bill that funds a grant program for bulletproof vests.

I am not opposed to the program. I am opposed to the fact that we have two programs that do the same thing--two different applications, two different sets of processes, two programs that do the same thing. If we see it, we should solve it. Yesterday, we marked up and passed a bill in committee that I authored called the Taxpayer Right to Know Act, which will identify duplicative programs, the administrative cost, the number of full-time staff, and how and if programs are evaluated.

It is a commonsense thing to do that, and it passed by a voice vote out of the committee. In the days ahead, I hope we will use that tool wisely to be able to actually identify where we have duplication, and instead of complain about it, we solve it as a body. The goal is to find those and eliminate them.

A friend of mine in Oklahoma is a former marine. His name is Hank. Hank runs a small business.

Hank is a guy who if you see him, you need to brace yourself because when he shakes your hand you know it. Hank runs his small business from a desk in his unair-conditioned garage.

When I think about the way we spend money, I often think of Hank. Hank is not a guy who wants to have our government suffer or our Nation do something weak. Hank is an incredible patriot, but he wants us to spend money wisely, and when we find waste, he would expect us to get rid of it. He does. He would expect that we do.

A good example of that may be Social Security disability. It is a difficult issue for us to talk about because we want a safety net for the truly vulnerable, but we all know there is incredible waste in that program, and there are people who are ripping off the system. To have a strong safety net for the vulnerable doesn't mean we allow people to freeload off the top. Disability is designed for people who cannot work in any job in the economy, not someone who just doesn't want to.

Let's find a way to protect our vulnerable but incentivize those who are freeloading off the system to engage them back into work. We need people to work.

The earned-income tax credit is another one of those. We read the reports every year: a 24-percent fraud rate, the highest fraud rate in the Federal Government. Last year, there was $14.5 billion in loss; one program, $14.5 billion.

We have to pay attention to this. We have to get the economy going or we will never fix the debt. We can't just fix it by reducing spending. We all know that well. Tax reform seems to be the elusive dream of our economy. I can only hope that as a body we will not continue to strive for large-scale tax reform and fail to do some things that are significant and possible.

Banking reform must be done. Dodd-Frank is choking out lending. Now, I don't want to attack any individual who voted for it, but I am very well aware that there are many unintended consequences that have come down, especially on community banks.

People can feel our economy tightening and the lending tightening. They don't know why. Main Street community banks are dealing with uncertain regulations. We have to get our community banks back in business. We can do that by exempting traditional banks from heavy regulatory burdens that complex banks face and replacing simple capital requirements. This isn't controversial or complicated. We just need to work on some simple things while we still work on the complex.

Trade. We are a nation that believes in trade. Quite frankly, our Navy was created in the infancy of our Republic to protect our trade. In fact, one of our grievances that we had with King George in the original Declaration of Independence was the King was cutting off our trade with all ports of the world. Trade has been a big deal to us as a nation since before we were a nation.

Currently, this ongoing debate about whether we will be a nation of trade seems to be a little odd to me. Yes, we are going to be a nation of trade. We always have been. Let's work it out and let's continue to grow our economy.

Energy issues. The past 6 years the brightest star in our economy has been energy. If we want to have the economy grow, energy is going to be a major part of that formula. If anyone disagrees with that, I would love to get a chance to meet them because I can show you all the job growth that has happened in America just circled around energy. But we all know EPA policies make energy development harder and increase the energy cost of everything for every person in America.

Energy jobs are great-paying jobs, but they are suddenly fading away because of this mixture of low oil prices and bad energy policy. A few years ago, America was led to believe they were running out of oil and gas and our supplies were going away. Now our supplies are at record numbers and we keep finding more.

In the past 6 months, America has lost 100,000 jobs because we have stopped drilling because our tanks are full and the prices have collapsed. If we could only sell that oil, what a difference that might make to our economy. You see, we can sell our coal and we can sell our natural gas, but for whatever reason we as a nation are still thinking we can't sell oil. Now, we can sell gasoline, just not oil. It would be kind of like saying you can sell flour, but you can't sell wheat.

Currently, we import about 27 percent of our crude. Most of that is heavy oil that is imported. Most of that is done by foreign ownership, foreign ownership of refineries. They are bringing in their own oil. Most of our new finds are in light sweet oil, a different type of oil that our refineries don't need. Do you know who needs this? Mexico needs it, Canada needs it. So, literally, while our storage tanks are at maximum capacity and the prices continue to drop in America, the rest of the world is craving our oil, and we are debating whether that is a good idea. It is the ultimate irony right now that the administration is in negotiations to open the sale of Iranian oil to the world market, and we cannot sell oil from America on the world market.

Let's pay attention to American jobs. Let's get our economy going. There are some basic things we can do.

All this talk about security, economy, and liberty boils down to one thing, though--our families. Nothing is bigger in our Nation than our families--nothing. We are not a nation of wealth, we are a nation of families. The rise of government is directly connected to the collapse of families. It is not that government is pushing down families, it is that families are collapsing and government is trying to rise to fix that. It will not fix it. Government can't fix a family, but we can make sure there is no marriage penalty in our tax law. We can make sure we don't incentivize broken families and our social welfare programs. We can actually use our moments in our times when we speak to state the obvious. America is strongest when American families are strong. Let's not be afraid to step out and protect what we know works. We don't live in a nation with no hope. We live in a nation of incredible hope.

The seeds are all still there. It is a matter of how much we are going to engage in those things, whether we are going to be an exporter of freedom and of our basic values. That is what I think we should do.

We should export our freedom to the world. We should export our values to the world. We will do that best as we protect our families and as we rise to speak about the things we know are right.

There is a tremendous diversity of American opinion, freedom of speech, but before the Framers even mentioned free speech, they mentioned the free exercise of religion. It is popular culture now for people to be intolerant of people of faith and people who live their faith. You can say you have faith, but you are pushed down if you actually practice the faith you say you have. I served 22 years in ministry before I came to Congress. I have a little different perspective than some on that. I see our Nation with a great spiritual hunger. I don't criticize Washington, though, in the process. Quite frankly, I believe Washington perfectly reflects our culture, and to people who are frustrated with what Washington has become, I remind them, this is who we are as a nation.

What we are going to do about it becomes the big issue. What are we going to become? While we beat ourselves up, we lose track that the rest of the world still looks at us, and they still want to be us.

Last September, I was in Central America for a few days meeting with some of the leaders there talking about immigration. I don't know if anyone has noticed, but there are a few issues about immigration now. We had this conversation about immigration and started talking about what are we going to do and how are we going to limit the number of these unaccompanied minors coming in and what is actually driving them to come.

One of the leaders there said: Sir, I don't know if you have noticed, but you are the United States of America. Everyone in the world wants to go there. There doesn't have to be a driving factor to go to your nation. Everyone wants to be your nation.

We do not have open borders, nor should we. But it was another lesson learned that while we argue among ourselves, we have the opportunity to be able to serve in the greatest Nation, in the greatest body in the world. We still lead the world with our values. We should represent that well. That is our greatest export, our values.

This is the National Day of Prayer, and I thought it would be entirely appropriate to be able to end this conversation with both a reminder to call our Nation to prayer and to remember Psalm 46:1-2:

God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear.

So we not only remember that, but let us actually call this Senate to pray.

Let us pray.

Our Father, I pray for our Nation. I pray that You would give us wisdom and direction. I pray for this body, incredible men and women who have set aside their families, their careers, and their life, to come serve their Nation. I pray that You would give us unity of attitude and diversity of opinion and that You give us the capacity to be able to solve the issues ahead of us.

I pray for President Obama, for Vice President Biden, the Supreme Court, for the House of Representatives, for the men and women around the world right now who are serving quietly in ways of intelligence, publically as first responders and leaders, and our military scattered across the Earth. God, would You protect them and would You allow us, as families and as leaders, to represent You and the values of our Nation to a world that needs our leadership still.

God, use this time. Use us. As broken as we are, we know that You are an ever-present help in time of trouble, and we will not fear.

Thank you, Jesus. Amen.

Madam President, I yield back the remainder of my time.

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