Oklahoma U.S. Sen. James Lankford came away from the State of the Union address by President Biden Tuesday night in disbelief at what he heard and didn’t hear.
“Well—that was interesting,” he said in recorded comments afterward, adding he was pleased to see the President at least started the speech talking about Russia and Ukraine.
“But it went downhill from there.”
On energy, the Senator noted the President’s boast of helping release 60 million barrels of oil worldwide in order to bring down energy costs in America wouldn’t go far. Lankford said the U.S. uses 20 million barrels of oil a day so the 60 million barrels worldwide would equal to three days in the U.S.
“What we really need to do and what he wouldn’t talk about tonight is actually put pressure on Russia by increasing Oklahoma and American oil and gas production to be able to send to Europe. You want to be able to hurt Russia long-term, you’ve got to be able to cut off their customers,” said Sen. Lankford.
He said the President’s whole focus “skipped” over the fact the United States is still buying oil from Russia.
“We need to cut off purchasing from Russia. We need to actually replace Russia’s customers around the world so that we can prevent Putin from having the money to be able to murder his neighbors.”
On starting the speech with Ukraine
Lankford: The biggest issues that I saw as we were going through the speech and I was kind of flowing through the argument—obviously that we’re going to stand with the people of Ukraine. Good, we should stand with the people of Ukraine. It was good that the loudest, longest applause through the entire speech was actually right at the beginning for the ambassador from Ukraine to be able to tell the world that we are standing with the people of Ukraine, and we should be standing with them for humanitarian, supporting them, cutting off Russia and isolating them from the world’s economy. We should do what it takes to be able to make it very, very clear to Russia that the world will not put up with their aggression and continue to be clear on that.
On Biden’s mixed message on addressing inflation when his American Rescue Plan caused it
Lankford: He talked about the American Rescue Plan and then talked about inflation right after that, which I thought was interesting because the American Rescue Plan is what directly led to the inflation that we’re facing today. He talked about inflation, and he said, ‘This is all because of COVID,’ basically, but what he conveniently left out is, this is not the kind of inflation they have in Australia or in Japan or in South Korea or in Canada or in multiple countries around the world that are western economies. They’re not experiencing seven-and-a-half percent inflation because they didn’t do a plan like what Biden put in place last year…
On Biden’s comments that we need to secure the border
Lankford: He talked about border security. Wow. That’s all I could say. While I was sitting there listening, knowing what they’ve actually done on border security, he started talking about technology and how they’re going to stop people from illegally crossing…I was just in Brownsville, just a few weeks ago. I saw the court rooms that he was talking about. Those court rooms that he was talking about were empty the day I was there. Zero people in them. 50,000 people had illegally crossed that border just last month. They had three different hearings in that, so while he talked about, ‘We’re going to do these court rooms, and we’re going to have these judges,’ I’ve seen it firsthand. They’re not actually doing hearings there. And he can talk a big game about what’s actually happening, but they’re not really enforcing it. So that was literally not true.
Every American knows we had 2 million people illegally cross the border last year, and then he has the audacity to stand there and talk about how we’re going to have strong border security on that. That’s pretty audacious to say the least…