Photo Gallery

I spent a weekend on the Texas-Mexico border to see the “construction” that has restarted on the border. It is embarrassing and a waste of taxpayer dollars. President Trump built a wall, Biden is putting up “guard rails.” One fence is designed to keep people out, the other is designed to encourage people to come in.

The Enid Rotary Club is a remarkable gathering of leaders. Thank you for the invitation to join you.

Got an opportunity to honor the hard work of the great folks at the Lawton Pregnancy Resource Center. Thank you for how you serve moms and dads! There are children alive today because of you.

Cindy and I enjoyed an opportunity to tour the remarkable Mountain Country Foods facility in Okeene. It is a growing international business that makes Oklahoma proud.

I was honored to stand up for the value of each child with my fellow Oklahomans at the Oklahoma March for Life. We marched from the Oklahoma State Capitol steps to mid-town Oklahoma City. I will continue to stand for our most basic of rights, the right to life.

Enjoyed lunch and great conversation at E’s Hideaway restaurant in Eufaula to hear from local leaders and provide an update on the issues we all face in Washington, DC.

I was glad to see the great folks at Sallisaw Health and Wellness. Thanks for how you take care of our friends and neighbors in Sallisaw and all of the surrounding counties.

Got to catch up on issues facing southwest Oklahoma and the agriculture community at the Walters Cotton Electric. We are all grateful for the great work they do to provide power to so many homes, churches, businesses, farms and ranches. We provide the food and fiber to the world, but we can’t do it without power.

Dear Oklahoma friends and neighbors:

We’ve had some cold weather across the state, but it was followed by some beautiful weather this week. I hope you and your neighbors were not impacted too greatly by the recent snow storms, but if my office can be of help, please reach out. In the meantime, let’s all pray for rain. 

This week, the Senate held votes on mostly low-level nominations to the Biden Administration, but next week, the Senate will debate long-overdue US Postal Service reforms, a controversial FDA nominee, and yet another continuing resolution to maintain funding for the government at current levels. 

I am still going through the text of the postal proposal to make sure it is fair for taxpayers and for the thousands of postal employees who work incredibly hard everyday. I talked at length with Postmaster General DeJoy and multiple others to get the facts on the proposed legislation. As I mentioned already, major reform of the postal service is long overdue, but it has to be right. I will oppose the FDA nominee who has supported allowing mail-order chemical abortion kits to be shipped out without a woman seeing a doctor. Not only does a chemical abortion take the life of a child in the womb, it also puts a mom at risk for serious complications and long-term sterilization. 

I will also oppose the continuing resolution, which once again ignores the $30 trillion debt our nation has pilled up. If you want more detail, I told Lawton’s local KSWO-ABC station this week about my opposition to the continuing resolution. CLICK HERE to watch the segment in which we also discussed the situation in Ukraine and the US southern border.

$30 trillion of debt is one of our nation’s biggest threats to national security. All the money Democrats have pushed in the name of “COVID relief” has caused inflation to make everything from gas to groceries to building materials more expensive. This week, our national inflation rate hit 7.5%. That is another multi-decade record. Half of all Americans have never experienced inflation like this in their lifetime. 7.5% inflation is especially horrible for people in poverty, on a fixed income, or for senior citizens. 

I recently spoke to Newsmax about the ongoing debt problem in our nation and what’s causing it to escalate. CLICK HERE to watch my interview.

I remain attentive to what’s happening in Ukraine through multiple classified briefings and ongoing discussions on Russian sanctions. I am hopeful for a peaceful resolution for the people of Ukraine against Russian aggression, but Putin is an irrational dictator that is more interested in his prestige than his country’s economic security. 

We should be ready to impose overwhelming sanctions on Russia if they invade and be willing to help supply the free people of Ukraine with the tools to defend themselves. Our Oklahoma National Guard several years ago spent months in western Ukraine training their military so they could protect their families and their border. They need to know that the rest of the world stands behind them as they push against Putin and his lethal military. Unfortunately, President Biden’s soft foreign policy approach has emboldened bad actors like Russia and China. In the first year of his presidency, President Biden has lifted sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 Russian pipeline, delayed small-arms shipments to Ukraine, and stated that the US would respond differently if Russia only had a “minor incursion into Ukraine.”

It is easier to stop a war that has never started than it is to end a war in process.

UPDATE: Situation at the Southern Border

We are 13 months into this Administration, and they still have no plan or intention to secure our southern border. Two weeks ago, I went again to the US-Mexico border to assess the ongoing situation there as part of my oversight duties as the lead Republican on the Senate Subcommittee on border management. Our law enforcement, including Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and others, are trying to do their jobs, but the Biden policies at the border handcuff federal law enforcement and cut loose thousands of people crossing our border illegally every week. 

I started in Brownsville, TX at the parking garage that is used as a transfer station to release mostly single adult males into the US. I then went to the legal Port of Entry to see the security methods in place to screen for drugs or people moving across the border in cars and trucks. I met with CBP leadership to discuss the reinstatement of Migrant Protection Protocols, known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which President Trump championed and now federal courts require. It is a massive facility designed to handle thousands of people, but the week I was on the ground, it only had three people in the process (even though almost 50,000 people have illegally crossed our border in that area in the past month).

I drove to the Donna, TX, migrant holding facility to see firsthand another location where families, children and single adults are processed into our country. Later I drove to McAllen, TX, to see the short fencing the Biden Administration is constructing to “close gaps” in the fence. It is only slightly higher than a typical guard rail along a roadway, rather than an actual real barrier to entry. 

That kind of short guard rail allows the Biden team to say they are doing something, when they are actually doing as little as possible. At the end of the day, I went on an aerial ride with CBP as they identified people illegally crossing the border, then a vehicle ride along late at night to watch people come across the Rio Grande river over and over into the United States. Border Patrol agents told me about the Syrians they picked up the night before. In that area of south Texas, Border Patrol has encountered people from over 60 countries already this year including Russians, Syrians, and members of the Nicaraguan military that were cut loose into our country by the new Biden policies. 

It is a frustrating experience to see first hand the effect of Biden’s catch-and-release policy, but it is essential to know the issues as we fight to stop it. The national media has moved on from the border issues; I have not. 

CLICK HERE to watch my Facebook Live from Biden’s border “fence.”

CLICK HERE to watch my Facebook live from my night ride along with Border Patrol.

CLICK HERE to watch my update on the Senate floor about my travel to the southern border.

It is chaos on our southern border. I recently highlighted a report issued by CBP that a staggering $3.31 billion in counterfeit goods were seized last year, up 153% from the previous year. Heroin seizures were up 113% as the cartels continue to send drugs across our border. Border Patrol encountered 178,840 individuals along the southern border in December 2021 and over 2 million individuals total during 2021. Almost 12,000 unaccompanied minors and 51,000 family units were encountered at the southern border in December alone.

Biden's open border is a tremendous profit-maker (in the billions of dollars) for the Mexican drug cartels. CLICK HERE to learn more about how his policies are helping the Mexican drug lords bring more drugs into our nation.

Holding the IRS Accountable

Oklahomans tell me often that they don’t trust the IRS with their privacy or their personal information, especially in light of recent data leaks, the ProPublica publication of so-called “wealthy” people’s private tax information (it’s a felony to do that, by the way), and targeting conservative groups.

As a member of the Senate Finance Committee, I recently raised serious questions and concerns with the IRS announcement of a major expansion of its collaboration with ID.me to require taxpayers to have an ID.me account to access key IRS online resources. In order to register with ID.me, taxpayers would need to submit to ID.me tons of private information, including sensitive biometric data, starting in the summer of 2022.

Following my push to stop outside vendors from getting American’s data, the IRS announced they would stop using a third-party service for facial recognition to help authenticate people creating new online accounts. CLICK HERE to learn about my work to secure this victory for privacy over the IRS.

Parents’ Rights in Education

I support parents’ rights in their kids’ education. There is an increasing concern about making sure parents have the right to engage peacefully at their kids’ schools. Upset parents are not domestic terrorists. 

Investigations have shown multiple coordinated efforts between the Biden Administration, the National School Boards Association, and the National Education Association (NEA) to silence parents protesting school policies related to COVID-19 and Critical Race Theory. The latest development involves the NEA, the nation’s largest teachers' union, which wrote to social media companies requesting they censure parents’ social media posts. CLICK HERE to read more about my work to stand up for the right of parents' voices to be heard.

I introduced a resolution to recognize the need to stand up for parents’ choices in their children’s education during National School Choice Week in January. The resolution recognized the need for school choice as a tool to empower parents with the freedom to choose the best educational environment for their children, particularly as it relates to COVID-19 and to combat destructive ideologies like Critical Race Theory promoted in many public schools. I am proud Oklahoma continues to provide new ways for parents to take control of their child’s education; more parent involvement is better for everyone, especially the kids. CLICK HERE to read about the resolution I introduced.

It was also recently revealed that US Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona coordinated with the National School Board Association on its letter to President Biden where it equated protesting parents to domestic terrorists. I demanded answers about where that came from and who started that push. CLICK HERE to read more about my demands.

UPDATE: China

The decision to hold the 2022 winter Olympic Games in Beijing was wrong. The Chinese Communist Party does not represent international cooperation—they are proven serial human rights abusers, intellectual property thieves and they stopped any investigations into the true origin of COVID-19 that has cost millions of lives. 

The Olympic Games should be a positive experience for our champion US athletes to compete on the world stage. The choice to hold the Games there was not the fault of our athletes, but that doesn’t mean it should go unanswered.

The Communist Chinese continue to commit horrible atrocities against Uyghurs. Uyghurs are a Muslim religious minority in China that the Communist Chinese have driven into forced labor and taken away their religious liberty. We must stop their horrible human rights abuses, including genocide, forced labor, and crimes against humanity, in a direct attempt to forcibly “assimilate,” or eventually eliminate, vulnerable ethnic and religious groups such as the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region of northwest China. 

I raised the alarm. I introduced the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which was signed into law, and ensures that goods made with Uyghur forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region do not enter the US. CLICK HERE to read more about my bill.

I was grateful so many Democrats joined us in the work to speak out against forced labor in China, but unfortunately they are also pushing new “China” legislation that includes billions of dollars for the UN Green Climate Fund, provides green cards to businesspeople with Chinese Communist Party ties, requires dozens of woke “discrimination” studies that have nothing to do with China, and does nothing to address our dependence on China for critical minerals.

CLICK HERE to watch more about the bill Democrats are trying to push for the federal government to drive our economy, just like they try to do in China.

I introduced a bill to impose sanctions on China 90 days after enactment, if the Chinese Communist Party fails to allow for a credible and comprehensive international investigation into the origins of COVID-19 at laboratories in Wuhan that engaged in risky research involving bat coronaviruses. Specifically, the bill would sanction the leadership of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and its affiliates, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology. CLICK HERE to learn more about my work to hold China accountable.

I will continue to stand up against the Chinese Communist Party. 

Next week, I am sitting down with a friend and long-time China expert on my podcast, The Breakdown with James Lankford. It will be a deep dive into Chinese expansion, their economic threat, and their military threat to the region. China intends to dominate the world; we should not ignore their communist ambitions. If you are not a subscriber to the podcast, sign up now for it on Spotify, iTunes, Soundcloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Keeping You in the Loop

• The Biden Administration is so obsessed with their vaccine mandates that they refuse to even evaluate or release information on those who have acquired natural immunity to COVID-19. Natural immunity is a component of reducing the spread of COVID-19, along with vaccines. In our simple bill, the Natural Immunity Transparency Act, Senator Braun of Indiana joined me to push the Biden Administration to provide Americans with the most up-to-date and accurate natural immunity data for COVID-19, so Americans can make their own decisions and better understand the reality of our current COVID circumstances. Americans want to make decisions for themselves. CLICK HERE to read more about my bill.
• I am once again taking on the overreaching Environmental Protection Agency as they and the US Army Corps of Engineers proceed with another new federal rule on the “Waters of the United States.” This issue was finally settled during the Trump Administration, but this administration is determined to change anything from the previous administration, even if the American people broadly agreed with it. Continuing to redefine the “Waters of the US” makes life harder for Oklahoma farmers and ranchers since they have no assurance that a small pond or low spot on your farm or grazing land needs to be “monitored” by the federal government in the name of climate-change extremism. CLICK HERE to learn more about my push-back on this ridiculous process that causes uncertainty for our agriculture community who are working hard to feed and clothe the world.
• The nominees to serve at the Federal Reserve, the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Electricity under the Department of Energy and the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Land and Minerals Management at the Department of the Interior have been outspoken about limiting American energy exploration, which makes us dependent on nations like Russia and the Middle East for our energy needs. They have made clear this Administration’s priority is to drag the oil and gas permitting and leasing process in the US to a grinding halt. That means higher prices for gas and more dependence on foreign sources for energy. We should support American energy needs, not just climate-change activism. I remain opposed to their nominations. CLICK HERE to watch my speech on the Senate floor discussing why I oppose these nominees and their policies.
• I called on the Senate to pass my bill, the Conscience Protection Act, to protect the conscience rights of all Americans, including health insurance plans, from government discrimination if they decline to participate in abortions. Sadly, the Democrats blocked my bill from passing by unanimous consent. But I am not giving up. I will keep working to ensure Oklahomans’ and all Americans’ conscience rights and religious liberty are preserved. I am joining a “friend of the court” brief to support court cases seeking to protect conscience rights, standing against Biden’s rules and requirements that “promote” abortion, and standing up for people around the country who are fighting for their own conscience rights. CLICK HERE to watch my call on the Senate floor to pass my Conscience Protection Act.
• I introduced the End Human Trafficking in Government Contracts Act of 2022 to ensure the US government is not funding or participating in human trafficking of vulnerable third-country workers through our contracts overseas, including those in defense and national security. The bill terminates contracts found to be involved in human trafficking and prevents them from trafficking people with US taxpayer dollars ever again. CLICK HERE to learn more about my important bill.
• I launched the Senate Abraham Accords Caucus last month to build on the success of the historic Abraham Accords signed by President Trump in 2020. The Caucus will strengthen the Abraham Accords by encouraging partnerships among the existing Abraham Accords countries Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. We should work to expand the agreement to include other countries that don’t currently have diplomatic relations with Israel to build on the progress toward peace in the Middle East. CLICK HERE to learn more about our Senate Abraham Accords Caucus.
• Oklahomans have been clear—we do not want federal control of our elections. The Democrats have tried five times in the last year to run our elections from Washington, DC, and I voted to stop them each time. We were successful. Their election takeover bills have pushed for taking power from each governor, state legislature, and state election official and giving it to Washington, DC. I strongly disagree with taxpayer-funded campaigns, same-day voter registration, gutting voter ID laws, and forcing states to seek permission from the Department of Justice before making any changes to their voting laws. CLICK HERE to read more about how we stopped the federal election takeover, again.
• Inflation just rose to 7.5%, caused by Democrats’ reckless spending and bad policies. We can’t allow the federal government to overspend and create even more inflation. To combat even more federal spending, several Senators joined me to introduce the Inflation Prevention Act. We’ve seen record government spending over the last two years, and Oklahomans face higher gas, grocery and housing bills each week. My bill would prevent federal bills from moving forward that are estimated to increase inflation until the year-over-year inflation rate drops below 4.5%. CLICK HERE to read more about ways I’m working to stop inflation for Oklahomans.
• I voted to impose US sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany running through the Baltic Sea. Biden waived sanctions on those involved in the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which threatens US and European energy security. By contrast, President Trump imposed 25 sanctions on the pipeline during his presidency. Now with what’s happening in Ukraine, Biden suddenly wants to use Nord Stream 2 as foreign policy leverage when the Russians know he’s not serious about it. CLICK HERE to learn more about my vote to sanction those involved in pushing Nord Stream 2 forward against the world’s energy security interests.
• I sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin demanding to know why he has ignored requests for religious exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine. Despite 19,979 known requests for religious accommodations from the COVID-19 vaccine, the Department of Defense has granted basically no requests for religious accommodations among the service branches. The US Marines reportedly have two religious accommodations—out of 3,367 requests, for example. This is entirely unacceptable, and I am not letting this go. Our service members have a right to religious liberty just like any other American. CLICK HERE to learn more about my work to call this out and get answers. Thankfully, it looks like we are on the backside of the pandemic, but our freedoms still have to be protected for now and for the future. 

In God We Trust,

James Lankford
United States Senator for Oklahoma

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If you would like more information on these topics or any other legislation currently before the US Senate, please do not hesitate to call my DC office at (202) 224-5754. My Oklahoma City office can be reached at (405) 231-4941 and my Tulsa office at (918) 581-7651. You can also follow me on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram for updates on my work in Congress.
     
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