While introducing U.S. Sen. James Lankford to a roomful of area employers, Tulsa Regional Chamber President and CEO Mike Neal praised Lankford’s breadth of knowledge as a federal lawmaker.
Lankford then spent the next hour demonstrating that scholarship, tackling such issues as tax policy, immigration, the Chevron ruling and voting patterns during an informal discussion Wednesday at the Chamber’s Congressional Conversation.
He made a brief opening statement before yielding to business leaders and their questions.
A former Republican Congressman who has been in the U.S. Senate since 2015, Lankford said he and federal lawmakers will be focused on tax policy in 2025.
“For me, the best thing you can do for the state, for you, your business and the nation is to be able to share with me ideas about tax,” he said. “We will start working on this in January.”
Lankford said the three safety nets in the United States are family, nonprofits-churches and government.
“If we push all of our safety nets into government, we will never be able to do that,” the legislator said. “So, we have to have strong families, and we have to have strong nonprofits out there or our culture doesn’t work. If our tax policy disincentivizes engaging with nonprofits, we have to fix that.”
Lankford spent considerable time discussing illegal immigration on the United States-Mexico border. The U.S. Senate earlier this year voted down a bipartisan border deal that Lankford helped negotiate.
“My statement to my administration is enforce the border the same way President Obama did if you don’t want to enforce it the same way Trump did,” he said. “Under President Obama, we had half a million people illegally crossing the area. Now, we have two and half million people. They have levers that they could use but are choosing not to.
About 40% of people crossing into the United States from Mexico are from places such as China, Russia, Pakistan and India, Lankford said.
“It’s criminal organizations internationally that are creating real travel networks now, just like the cartels did, because they want a piece of that money to be able to move people,” the lawmaker said. “They are going to move some people in to be able to connect with jobs and family and move some people in for terrorism. And we can’t tell the difference at the border. If we don’t have a better screening process, we are leaving ourselves exposed.”
Lankford also spoke about what is known as the Chevron ruling, referring to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that cut back sharply on the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws they administer and mandated that courts should rely on their own interpretation of ambiguous laws.
“Everybody complained about President Obama’s executive orders,” he said. “President Trump did twice as many, and President Biden has done twice as many as President Trump did.”
The Chevron ruling, Lankford said, “will cause Congress to hopefully do its job, and actually when there’s a problem, write law based on that problem and not just say to the executive branch, “Figure it out.’”
Looking toward the presidential election, Lankford said one-third of the people won’t decide who to vote for until the final 72 hours.
“There are a ton of folks in America who are like, ‘I don’t pay attention to all this until the end,’” he said. “So, there will be real movement in this in the final days.”