Wednesday, March 26th on the regular podcast, I interviewed Oklahoma Senator David Bullard about bills in the Oklahoma Senate. Of course, the discussion delved into a bit more, but we talked about a couple of really bad bills that need to go away. You can find the full version of the interview on our Rumble and YouTube channels.
This is nonsense. Simply a whole lot of grandstanding and virtue signaling by your Oklahoma Senate. Truly, if a person is injured by another person – for any reason – or if property is damaged – for any reason, there are laws that bring perpetrators to justice and our law enforcement divisions are empowered to do that. It shouldn’t matter if someone used a racial/ethnic slur or not. THAT IS THE POINT. When the government begins to tell the people what they can and can NOT say – for any reason – we have descended into a tyranny. And, as Senator Bullard says here, if it’s anti-Semitic to say that Jesus was killed by Jews, all of Christianity is now called into question. No. Just no.
Just so you know, here are the VOTES on these bills (SB991, SB942):
These bills will go on to the House and they need to be stopped there.
We also talked about a House Bill that will be coming to the Senate that is exceedingly bad – HB2298 which will allow nurses prescribing power, “independent of supervision” by a physician. Although this will apply to Certified Nurse Practitioners, Clinical Nurse Specialists, and Certified Nurse-Midwives, these are still positions disallowed from prescriptive privileges without physician oversight currently.
There are several things wrong with this bill and Dr. Randy Grellnar also talked about this particular issue at the beginning of our interview with him when he was on several weeks ago, if you’d like to check out his perspective.
Here, Senator Bullard is talking about some of the issues that he’s concerned about with the bill – and mind you, this bill was run LAST YEAR and VETOED by the Governor.
Hopefully, between Dr. Grellnar and Senator Bullard, you get the idea. THIS IS A BAD BILL because it’s – again – government overstepping the bounds of its job – to protect our liberty – and trampling on issues that are best left to the oversight boards and the doctors themselves.
During the interview, we expanded on that topic – the topic of government trampling the liberty of citizens – and gave numerous examples of wherein the government is ruling us from the top down instead of allowing ourselves to govern ourselves from the bottom up – at the local levels of government where we have the most control. Essentially ‘top down’ systems DON’T WORK and that is what we talk about in the clip below. THIS is the concept ALL our legislators must be made to understand!
Please make a note of these bills and contact your Senator and Representative and tell them to be on the lookout for these bills and to vote NO when they see them.
Friday, March 21st, former Oklahoma Representative Jason Murphy came on with Michael and I to talk about legislation making its way through the Oklahoma legislature. I would really urge you to watch this particular FULL video (Rumble or YouTube) because we talked about a number of bills. Here, in this synopsis, I’ll touch on the ones we felt were most important.
HB2289 is the one Jason calls, “the thin-skinned congressman bill” because it sounds like one of our elected congressional whiners (that would be all of them but Josh Brecheen and Kevin Hern ) made it up and asked leadership to run it. It basically gives an entire list of things you can’t do/say about our elected federal officials. Bad. And NO. Please contact your Senators at this point and ask them to watch for this crappy bill. Here’s Jason talking about it.
Feel free to go directly to this video clip on YouTube and share to friends and Senators from there.
Another thing Jason wanted to stress, is that the grassroots is rising. More and more people in Oklahoma are paying attention to the games being played at 23rd and Lincoln and who holds power and why. This is such a great thing because it will allow us to finally get our LIBERTY back – finally control our destinies a bit as our forefathers expected us to do. So many of us – like Jason and ROPE – are creating Substacks and media channels that tell the public what is actually going on and not what the legacy media is telling us is going on. The spread of this kind of information is VITAL to an educated populace, so SUBSCRIBE to as many new media authors as you can stand, get educated, educate others and stand up against the global mindset that wants to subjugate us!
As I said, check out the full video where we talk about what happened with new Representative Jim Shaw – absolutely ZERO of his bills were heard in the House this year as payback for beating out entrenched RINO Kevin Wallace – and other bills that weren’t heard, as well as those that were heard but voted down. He even had a few GOOD ones in the mix, like HB1162 – to allow raw milk sales – and HB1515 – the one by new Rep Molly Jenkins that would have allowed absentee voting for only those Oklahomans who had a reason to vote absentee. Interestingly a number of conservatives voted against the bill.
Rep. Steagall and I have been arguing back and forth most of the day over the bill – though it’s too late for this session. My argument is that we KNOW – certainly in Edmond – that absentee ballots have changed election results. Having absentee ballots sent out in the mail indiscriminately (which has happened) allows nefarious people to use the ballots toward their end. In addition, having as many absentee ballots as are used now, over the days that they are allowed to turn them in, poses real issues for chain of custody. It used to be that, unless you had an excuse as to why you couldn’t turn up at the poll, you had to turn up at the poll.
Rep Steagall believes that it’s no one’s business why anyone votes absentee and that it’s a security risk to the family of the deployed to have to disclose that they are not in the country or otherwise deployed. We’re still arguing…LOL.
The bottom line here is that this session – certainly in the House – has been very difficult to follow with the ‘new’ (old) committee system of ‘oversight’ committees (that didn’t work the last time they were used) and that leadership still seems to have the same lock on legislation – cutting out “we the people” – that they always have. We’ll continue to ask Jason back to give us updates when he’s able. In the meantime, make sure you’re following people who are following legislation and follow Jason’s substack at OklahomaStateCapitol.substack.com! We’re only half-way through the session.
Wednesday, March 12th, among other things, Dr. Randy Grellnar spoke with us about his thoughts on SB569 and the House companion bill (HB2298) which would allow nurses an expanded scope of practice to include prescribing medication. You can find the full video on our YouTube and Rumble channels.
Dr. Grellnar and I started speaking about the scope of practice bills at about 13 minutes. I suggest you tune in if possible. It is a very interesting topic. We neglected to mention (I think) that one of the ways we know that leadership (not the people) want a bill is that the bill is introduced as BOTH a House Bill and a Senate Bill. This is kind of a bet hedge. If the bill falls in the Senate, it could pass in the House and if it passes in the House, then Senate leadership will get the caucus on board so it’ll pass the second time around. Yes, it’s gross, but this game is played quite consistently with bills leadership wants to pass.
I wonder if the Oklahoma Medical Association is behind this bill. They are a huge lobby at the Capitol and leadership tend to push the bills lobbyists want. Who knows – but this is a bad bill. Here are just a couple reasons why:
Governor Stitt vetoed the bill last year, why bring it up again?
The authors are asking for the ability of nurses to give Schedule II drugs – which are opioids – with no oversight. Didn’t we just try to stop the opioid crisis in our state, and stop pill mills. If this bill passes, overnight there will be hundreds more prescribers.
The bill’s authors also ask for nurses to be able to prescribe schedule III-V drugs as well.
some of these can kill unborn babies
ARNP’s and certified midwives will have to carry 3 million in malpractice coverage per year at 1 million/incident because in 2019 the Supreme Court found unconstitutional the 350K cap on pain and suffering adjudicated during Oklahoma’s torte reform legislation. What nurses can afford that?
Why have a State Medical Board if the legislature is just going to pass laws for doctors to follow? This bill usurps local control of health care.
Please, tell your Senator and your Representative to vote NO on these bills.
Dr. Grellnar also gave us some great, conservative thoughts during the podcast that more legislators at the state capitol should share.
This was my favorite – check it out – “the only way to protect freedom is to choke off the government”. YES!
Here, Dr. Grellnar talks about how important it is to take PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR OUR HEALTH, but people aren’t because, well, ‘science’. Today, so many Americans treat science as if it’s a God. How many times during COVID did you hear something stupid like, “respect the science”? Here, Dr. Grellnar talks about that.
Don’t forget to call your Senator and Representative about these bills and keep watching…we’re almost halfway through the session already!
Carolyn McLarty was our guest, Friday, March 7th. She has worked with the Oklahoma Republican Party where she was the State Committee Woman for 12 years, but she’s also worked with Eagle Forum, a citizen lobbying group begun in the 1970’s by Phyllis Schlafly of ERA fame. Check out the full video, here on YouTube and also on Rumble.
This year, Carolyn is working to ramp up Oklahoma’s Eagle Forum group again. This is great news.
Over the years, I’ve met so many people who want to get involved with ‘politics’, but don’t know how to begin. I saw COVID wake people up to the realization that other people were running their lives, and that those people were in our Government. Many of those newly-awakened decided they wanted to get their lives back by getting involved beyond just posting angry screeds to social media and yelling at the television. Now, with the influx of the green agenda and serious issues like eminent domain coming to the forefront of their everyday lives, lots of people are getting interested in legislation and who is representing them in the state and Washington, D.C.. Unfortunately, since Oklahoma quit teaching civics long ago, many of them aren’t quite sure how to do that.
I’ve known Carolyn many years. She was active in the Common Core fight and provided so much guidance and help toward finally getting that repealed.
On Friday she gave a bit of a breakdown on things that Citizen Lobbyists should do.
She even shared with us a poem she’d written about lobbying:
If you’re interested in getting more information on lobbying from Carolyn – and/or helping her get Eagle Forum back up and going again, please email her! She’d LOVE to hear from you – carolyn.eagleforumok@gmail.com.
One day, while surfing the web for information relating to green energy, I stumbled onto the fact that Oklahoma has the largest carbon capture plant in the United States and the second largest in the world.
Immediately, I contacted friends in Osage county – where the plant is located – and no one I spoke with knew anything about it at all; from long-time politically active folks who get around in their community regularly, to the two County Commissioners I spoke with, to the outgoing Sheriff, to the county clerk. NO ONE had any idea that the LARGEST CARBON CAPTURE PLANT IN THE NATION was right down the road in Shidler off an old oil company road.
Interestingly, neither the Corporation Commission nor DEQ knew much about it either according to the employees I spoke with and neither one of them knew who regulated the site to keep Oklahomans safe from accidental discharge of CO2 (which has injured people in Satartia, Mississippi).
This all makes complete sense when reading a Senator Dave Rader-authored bill that passed through the Energy Committee this session to give the Corporation Commission jurisdiction over carbon capture facilities. So who’s monitoring the CO2 capture facility now? Does our Governor just do these deals on his own and not worry one little bit about the safety or security of Oklahomans? It surely seems that, in Oklahoma, it’s the ‘green’ energy wild west where everything goes so long as we’ve got an “all of the above” energy policy to push forward.
In fact, I only learned anything about the facility at all because I found a video of Governor Stitt excitedly congratulating the company Heimdal for the creation of the carbon capture plant, ‘Bantam’, on Heimdal’s LinkdIn page. Heimdal is the brainchild of a 30-something named, Marcus Lima – a chemist from Norway.
Lima created Heimdal’s carbon capture technology through Y Combinator in 2021, specifically to take advantage of green energy handouts such as the IRA’s $180 per ton credit of CO2 that is captured and stored through at least 2032. Yes, you read that right. He started the process SPECIFICALLY to get the ‘free’ money.
After my article about Oklahoma’s carbon capture fame came out in the Federalist, a post on Marcus Lima’s LinkdIn page, caught me by surprise
These remarks were made after he read a serious article in a national online magazine.
Because I’m me, I commented on the post:
Not long after I posted this, I received a reply in my message box from Lima:
Either he’s a very considerate European, or someone suggested he respond to me and then delete the post. Either way, the original post has been deleted from his LinkdIn page. Note that in his response he mentions only the Native American populations. What about the ‘regular’ folk? Again, no one I spoke to knew anyone who knew anything about this ‘groundbreaking’ plant. This is telling.
I noted that in his post he lists his “fellow secretive luminaries” as Kevin Stitt, Scott M, Victoria Tran, John Podesta and James Lankford. We know Stitt, Scott M. is either Scott Mueller (briefly Secretary of Commerce and Workforce Development, who now works for Goldman Sachs), or Scott Mitchell (an Oklahoma broadcaster). Victoria Tran was the Deputy Secretary of Oklahoma Secretary of Energy & Environment at some point, but I can’t find her listed in that position any more. John Podesta is the creepy democrat political operative who’s worked for everyone from the Clintons to the Obamas and who served as Senior Advisor to President Biden for International Climate Policy from 2024 to 2025 after which he became the Chair of the leftist Center for American Progress. Then, of course, there’s our liberal Republican Senator Lankford, who has a lovely picture with Lima still up on Lima’s LinkdIn page.
He also has a photo of himself with the AG – “We discussed CLass VI well permitting and primacy for the State of Oklahoma, as well as Heimdal plans for DAC facilities in the State, with the launch of Bantam, as well as our expansion plans. It’s clear direct air capture (DAC) and carbon management broadly has an ambitious future and home in Oklahoma.”
I’m not sure what the AG has to do with any of that, but this was upsetting. He wants MORE Direct Air Capture (DAC) facilities in Oklahoma. Why? This has nothing to do with oil and gas exploration (although there is experimentation with injecting liquid CO2 into old wells as a way of fracking out new oil, instead of using salt water). This has everything to do with carbon credits and ‘sequestering’ CO2. In fact, in an article posted to Heimdal’s website but released by Bloomberg News, Lima says, “The world must cut greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible, and research shows reducing the use of fossil fuels is the fastest way to do so.”
Why in the world are we chasing after DAC technology in Oklahoma? This is the entire basis for the Carbon Credit scheme and the Green New Deal. This should be upsetting I would think – especially to REPUBLICANS as this whole thing is just a way to usher in a new economy based entirely on NOTHING. This whole technology is about nothing more than investors creating investment projects to make themselves more money.
We can almost forgive the Altman’s and Lima’s – as Rush Limbaugh is quoted as saying, “If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.” But our Governor should be expected to DO better – if not KNOW better – if not for his age, but for the fact that he should have advisors to dispense topical thoughts and a pulse on his constituency, listening to their desires. Yet he doesn’t. He rules Oklahoma like a King – on his own with advisors he picks himself and changes depending upon whether or not he likes what they have to say – look at the State School Board, the Oklahoma Health Care Authority, his Energy and Environmental Secretary and the Oklahoma Veterans Commission – and these are but a few examples. This history does not at all indicate an affinity for Oklahomans, but a myopic, self-centered, elitist view of governing that can only acknowledge his constituency as “the little people”.
Here in Oklahoma, the only ones crying out about the continued shoving of the Green Agenda down our throats in a Red State are the CONSERVATIVE little people; land owners and rural people effected by CO2 pipelines that can break and discharge their deadly gas onto their livestock and families – farmers whose land can become ruined from the oil and fiberglass thrown down to the soil by fractured wind turbines – communities whose farmland is being usurped for huge solar panel installations that seed the ground with glass and toxic chemicals should they catch fire or be damaged by hail or a tornado, preventing local food from ever being grown there again.
Unfortunately, Oklahomans have tended to love these authoritarian types of Republican Governors, we can only hope to learn from our history and be wiser in 2026.
So enjoyed having Don Spencer on the program Friday morning! I have to say, once Constitutional Carry passed, I thought there really wasn’t much left for OK2A to do! Boy was I wrong! Catch everything we discussed on the full live video on Rumble and on YouTube.
When I said that on the program, Don laughed and then set me straight!
I have to say, I really enjoyed the history lesson! So, please, don’t forget that Don and OK2A have a few bills that need your attention this session. Go to Don’s channel on YouTube and hear all of them specifically. Also, as I’m sure Don would like to have me remind you!!! You can sign up for an OK2A membership – it’s only $25 – and you can get all his updates via email, video and text! Just navigate to his website to do that!
Before we talked to Don, we talked to Michael’s brother Mark about his recollections of Travis Combs – the guy who was a Branch Chief at the Department of Education who was outed by Project Veritas talking about how he and his group were covering for illegals. In the course of that conversation, Mark – who used to be a Professor at UT in Austin – talked about some of the crazy things that drove him out of teaching. It’s sad. So many people know what’s wrong in college education, but actually getting anything done about it in academia seems to be an absolute non-starter. Here Mark is giving the HATED answer to the liberal talking point that schools/teachers never have enough money.
Finally, at the end of the show, Michael and I talked about some news of the day and I brought up the interview that Governor Stitt gave to Politico – the one I made a video about because it was so contradictory. The one where he basically says that – no matter what Trump says – he’s moving full steam ahead on the green agenda and he needs the subsidies Biden put in place for that to happen. Not. Enough. Eye. Rolls. I also managed to get Gateway in there too for good measure. Someday, I hope to see Oklahoma have a TRUE REPUBLICAN governor, but I wonder – do any of us really know what that means anymore?
Over and over again, Governor Stitt has touted his “more of everything” energy policy as he welcomes everything from the (possibly very dangerous) carbon capture facility Bantam in Shidler, Oklahoma, to an Italian green energy company (Enel) who’s intent it was to build a one billion dollar solar cell factory around the Port of Catoosa – a project which now looks as though it won’t get off the ground – even with 180 MILLION in legislature-approved tax incentives specifically for the project.
They’ve had enough of the endless millions of dollars worth in TAX BREAKS AND GIFTS that are given to ‘green’ companies like Canoo, and NextEra – the latter so they can effectively employ something like 50 workers – many of whom are seasonal, or maintenance workers.
In fact, Oklahomans have had so much of ‘enough’ of it, that 100’s of them gathered in February on a single-digit temperature day at the state capitol to push back against the green energy agenda.
There’s even a petition signed by THOUSANDS of Oklahomans asking Governor Stitt to declare a MORATORIUM on green energy projects to at least get a handle on the projects going up today – many of which no one seems to know about until the first windmill shows up!
And yet, here’s our REPUBLICAN governor, giving an interview to the very left-leaning Politico (you know the one that had over 8 million in very expensive subscription fees canceled by DOGE?) where he WARNS PRESIDENT TRUMP not to “break contracts” with green energy companies and continue the subsidies from the IRA pouring in!! How in the world does Governor Kevin Stitt have an R by his name? What does that R stand for? RAPING and RUINING farmland in pursuit of a “all of the above” energy policy?
Okay, maybe not that, but certainly, from the recorded interview with POLITICO our takeaway has to be that Governor Kevin Stitt cannot define the concept of free markets and has no clue what it means when he talks about the government picking winners and losers. Unfortunately, for Oklahoma citizens, this is an enormous problem. Whether we like green energy or not, it will likely be shoved down our throats by a man who thinks he’s somehow doing us a favor.
In a surprising upset, Shaw – with an army of grassroots rural Oklahomans worried about all the same things – beat Wallace in the primary.
This was unheard of. No newcomer out of nowhere beats the House Appropriations Chair running for this 5th term. And so the RINO forces gathered.
Governor Stitt put out numerous messages urging voters in the district to vote for Wallace, including this video, where he called those advocating AGAINST Wallace “Political Animals”.
Everyone from the Speaker of the House Charles McCall, to the Speaker-Elect of the House, Kyle Hilbert, came out to little ‘ole District 32 to churn up support for House Appropriations Chair Wallace.
Here, you see Kevin Wallace in the background with then-Speaker-Elect Kyle Hilbert (foreground) stumping for Wallace at a campaign event in HD32.
Here is Wallace (L) with (in order), Speaker of the House Charles McCall, Governor Kevin Stitt, Thomas Tillison (broadband and other business owner/Wellston) and Grant Green, Senator for SD28, which includes Shaw’s.
With that much ammunition behind him, Wallace must not have been poling well. And then came the point where Wallace apparently got desperate, and doxed Shaw, toward the end of the campaign, posting pictures of his residence to his Facebook page.
Unfortunately for Wallace and his campaign – funded nearly 100% by special interests and business professionals – none of these measures helped. In the end Shaw prevailed in the general election by a wide margin (3,291 to 2,764).
But then came Shaw’s first day on the floor. Organizational Day, the day on which the House rules would be voted on by the House for the 2025 legislative session.
Shaw had read the rules and didn’t approve of the two-tiered Committee structure and other issues. He had studied the rules in the few days they were available to him and began to debate them on the floor, when he was tersely debated (bullied?) by Counselor to the Speaker (a new leadership position just added this year), Representative Chris Kannady – the same Chris Kannady who openly admitted to working to oust 12 Conservative Republicans from the House in 2018 for being too conservative. The same Chris Kannady attached to the Conservative Alliance PAC – used to fund the campaigns of the Conservative’s opponents – which was fined 45 thousand dollars for, among other things, not filing spending reports.
Here is the Kannady/Shaw exchange on the floor February 7th, 2025. You can find more here in the full live video on YouTube where everything that happened on the House floor during Organizational Day is broken down.
Can it be proven that leadership has blocked Shaw’s bills from hearings? No. However, a simple look at the history of the HD32 election in which Shaw challenged Wallace provides ample support of that contention. In fact, people may look at the clip of Wallace and Kannady on the floor and feel that Kannady was NOT trying to intimidate Shaw, but it is well known that Representative Kannady hates conservatives so much that he actively worked to remove 12 conservative Republicans from the House in 2018 using a PAC eventually fined for unethical actions.
In the end, it matters not the actual reasons Shaw’s bills weren’t heard in Committee because the end result will ALWAYS be the same – the people that voted Jim Shaw into office deserve to be heard. In point of fact, that concept is the MAINSTAY OF OUR REPUBLIC. One would think an attorney with the self-appointed Constitutional knowledge of Chris Kannady would know this. Even young kids know that taxation without representation is the reason colonists dressed as Native Americans and dumped tea into the Boston Harbor in December 1773.
And so it stands that because none of Representative Jim Shaw’s bills were heard in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, the effect is none other than that ALL of the citizens of HD32 have now been TAXED WITHOUT REPRESENTATION and that IS UNFORGIVEABLE.
If this is the way House leadership intends to act for the duration of the session, Oklahomans had better commit to removing each and every one of these individuals for impeding the Constitutional rights of an entire county’s worth of citizens. And just in case you don’t know who these individuals are, here is the list and the link to find them on the House website. It behooves all Oklahomans to get very familiar with these elected Representatives now and to start looking for their replacements as June 2026 looms on the horizon. Included next to the name is that Representative’s 2024 conservative index according to the Oklahoma Constitution. Without a Boston Harbor, removal and replacement will be the only way to get our point across.
Recently, Senator James Lankford has been Tweeting (X’ing?) about the number of US tax dollars our government is wasting. He points to the fact that he’s released his 8th ‘Federal Fumbles’ report this month (2.25) and includes some kind of instance where the government is screwing over taxpayers.
This is frustrating and I clapped back on a couple of the posts I found.
Our government has dropped the ball. We need to start repairing and restructuring the way it works—saving taxpayer money and restoring efficiency. It is time to stop fumbling and start scoring.
Americans work hard for what they earn—that money shouldn’t be wasted by the government and careless agencies. In Federal Fumbles, I outline exactly where the government can cut waste.
I helped start a group called the OKC912Project in 2008 after Barrack Obama was elected. In 2010, when Lankford ran for his first office, he appeared before the OKC912Project to interview. At that time, he assured us he would help stop Obamacare. He also indicated that he was in favor of smaller government, but that he felt it important to work with others toward consensus. Most of us were very keen on removing government-controlled health care, so I don’t think we worried too much about the idea of consensus as we were expecting that to mean that he’d work with other Tea Party-elected legislators to stop what we felt was the socializing of our American government.
The first year he ran for Congress, I voted for Lankford. I have not darkened a single oval for him since that time for numerous, numerous reasons – I’ve just left the space for ‘Congressman’ or ‘Senator’ blank in the general election after having voted for another candidate in the primary.
Because I want to be fair, I took some time and reviewed every Lankford vote listed on Vote Smart. It was eye-opening. Now let me say this as a disclaimer – there are a LOT of votes listed there in the 15 years he’s been in DC – I’ve done my best and I may have missed a thing here or there, so realize that as you read. I’ve mentioned a few single votes, but the most important thing here is the pattern of voting.
At first I thought his votes were all over the place, but then I realized there was a pattern (I’ve included some of the votes at the bottom of this post FYI).
Here’s the pattern: solid support against socialized medicine (Obamacare), solid support for 2A, solid support against abortion, solid support for funding the military – a pattern almost right out of the Republican playbook, though the military funding issues is more than problematic.
This funding is funding with no oversight. This is funding because “I support our military”. Well, ok. A good chunk of Americans still support the military, but to an extent – they’re certainly not for throwing money at the military without oversight or reason. Part of the reason we have the military industrial complex stoking our national debt is votes like Lankford’s.
But here’s where we really diverge. Lankford supports the continuation of government funding.
He’s voted for nearly every budget and nearly every continuing appropriation over the years. What’s worse, he’s solidly for bills that strengthen the Patriot Act and/or government spying on its citizens. For Pete sakes, he voted for the COVID-19 HATE CRIMES BILL and then justified it by saying that he and Inhofe and another senator added an amendment to protect life! Would these bills have passed even if he had voted no? YES. But the fact that ‘my no vote doesn’t matter’ is not the reason to add a ‘good’ amendment and then vote for a bad bill.
Then there are the votes to keep the military stationed in Iran, Iraq and Yemen. And possibly worse than anything to so many Americans, are the votes to fund OTHER NATIONS while American taxpayers foot the bill. Examples here include voting to aid Syrian opposition, voting yes on the 95 BILLION foreign aid package last year and sending aid to the US border to help the illegals swamping the country.
Of course, for many Oklahomans/Americans, the fact that Lankford voted to certify the Biden election was the nail in the coffin of their support.
Yet there are just as many souls who support Lankford on the basis that he is a Christian and a ‘sweet man’ who worked for a short time at one of the largest Baptist summer camps in the nation. Their analysis of his votes aren’t necessarily important, he keeps babies safe and loves his fellow man. In the face of opposition, or confrontation with his votes, these people often claim that he couldn’t have done anything because ‘Republicans weren’t in control then’.
Here are the number of years Republicans have been in control since Lankford was elected.
There were at least a couple there with Republican control, where Republicans could have worked together to make some lasting changes protecting the American people, but that’s not really the point. The point is the ideology at play here.
It doesn’t matter whether he could have ‘done’ something or not, Lankford’s votes tell the tale. That, and the 3 and 4 page explainers that respond to criticisms from constituents and other citizens that justify every vote as though any criticisms are silly because, well, he knows better. He has always seemed to believe that Oklahomans sent him to DC to do what HE thought was best, not to do what the CITIZENS thought best.
Lankford’s votes tell us that he trusts government. They tell us he thinks the military is great – whether there are generals protecting a soldier’s right to wear dresses or not. They tell us he thinks government is trustworthy and would never spy on its citizens without provocation and if there was provocation, the citizen probably deserved to be spied upon, or that it’s a shame they were ‘accidentally’ caught in a net that caught a very bad person. They tell us he thinks all life is precious – and so much so – that he must vote to send Oklahoman/American taxpayers dollars to other countries to protect their citizens, even while liberals here scream that America is bad and President Trump should be impeached. And all the while the debt clock keeps ticking, whether Americans see the amount of debt piling up around them or not.
Is James Lankford a nice person? Yes – even when people aren’t kind to him. His office even helped our family get one of our children out of a National Guard deployment during COVID that became abusive and unjust and I’ve been one of his biggest critics since his first term as a Congressman.
Does Lankford vote wrong every time? No. He certainly came out strong for all of Trump’s cabinet picks this year and has definitely voted against some very destructive policies over the years. But these are exceptions to the pattern and the pattern is destructive to American sovereignty, national debt and the right of citizens to their privacy.
Unfortunately for Lankford, it’s time for Oklahomans to understand this and to ask him to let someone else take a stab at the job after 15 years. It’s time for James Lankford to move on.
Here are some of James Lankford’s votes according to Vote Smart:
2011 he voted for ‘various extensions of the Patriot Act’
2011 he began voting to continue federal appropriations
2011 he voted for the budget
voted against Obamacare
2012 he voted to continue federal appropriations
2012 he voted for a stop-gap spending and disaster relief bill
2012 he voted to both raise the debt ceiling with certain spending limits (after voting no in 2011) and for the budget
voted against Import/Export bank reauthorization and against Obamacare
2013 he voted to continue federal appropriations
2013 he voted to approve the budget
voted against disaster relief appropriations and Obamacare
2014 he voted to aid Syrian opposition
2014 he voted to continue federal appropriations
2014 he voted for the budget
voted against Obamacare
2015 he voted to continue appropriations
2015 he voted for the budget (with Obamacare repeal and other ‘conservative’ items added)
voted against the Budget Act that would have extended the debt ceiling
2017 he voted for the budget
voted against disaster relief appropriations and for health care freedom bill
2018 he voted for continuing appropriations
2018 he voted for the expensive farm bill
voted against consolidated appropriations, sanctuary cities, bipartisan budget act and removing the military from Yemen
2019 he voted against removing military from Yemen
2019 voted yes on an enormous/costly bill related to reducing recidivism in the prisoner population
2019 voted for appropriations that included all kinds of money for the Census, other items and extended the Patriot Act
2019 vote to send millions of dollars to the border for humanitarian aid
voted against the bipartisan budget bill with an extension of the debt ceiling and other pork
2020 voted for the CARES Act
2020 voted to keep military in Iran
2020 voted for the USA Freedom Act increasing surveillance on Americans
2020 voted for continuing appropriations
voted against impeaching Trump but then voted yes to the impeachment procedures
voted for John Ratcliffe
2021 voted to certify Biden’s election
2021 voted for Biden’s picks for Treasury, Sec. of Defense, National Intelligence, Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs, Secretary of Agriculture
2021 voted for Merrick Garland as Attorney General
2021 co-sponsored the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act
