Lessons from Town Halls

I’ve had the privilege of spending the past two weeks visiting with Oklahomans at a series of town hall meetings. At assemblies in Ardmore, Marietta, Moore, Chickasha, Norman, Ada, Lawton, and Duncan, residents of the Fourth District came out to make their views known. As always, Oklahomans had thoughtful, commonsense perspectives on the important issues of the day.

The most common theme running through all of the meetings was one of anxiety about the future. Oklahomans are very concerned about the direction of the country and justifiably worried that the massive national debt threatens everything they have spent their lives working for. In each and every meeting, multiple participants issued a call for spending cuts. A Duncan resident decried Washington’s “lackadaisical attitude toward spending” while a Lawton participant described the effects of big government as “fundamentally opposed to how we were founded.” Many have deep reservations about raising the debt ceiling and insisted that Congress not allow the limit to be raised again without significant spending reforms.

The second most frequent topic was frustration with high gas prices. With our state’s energy resources, Oklahomans know as well as anyone that America is not even coming close to fully developing domestic energy supplies. We all got a chance to see President Obama’s counterproductive energy policy in action again last week when he called on Congress to end what he called “wasteful subsidies” for the oil and gas industry. The tax deductions Obama calls “wasteful” are simply the same depreciation allowances afforded to every other industry, and they are essential to the survival of small producers. Eliminating these allowances would significantly limit production and exploration of the domestic resources that are essential to breaking our expensive dependence on foreign oil. There was widespread agreement among town hall participants that the nation must eliminate the barriers to American energy in order to bring gas prices down.

Oklahomans also expressed great disapproval of government overreach, from nonsensical EPA regulations to “unconstitutional” involvement in the Libya conflict to an outdated, sometimes unfair tax code. For the first time in years, I was happy to be able to report that Washington is actually making progress in reining in the growth of government and getting our fiscal house in order. After three consecutive years of $1.5 trillion deficits, Congress finally began reversing course by passing a budget for 2011 that cuts almost $80 billion from President Obama’s request. The Ryan budget plan we passed for 2012 would cut spending by $6.2 trillion over 10 years and make important reforms to save Medicare for future generations without changing benefits at all for those 55 and older.

This promising turn of events is actually due entirely to the efforts of Americans just like those who spoke out in town hall meetings. This time last year, the Pelosi-Reid Congress was moving confidently toward re-election and two more years of spending increases and regulatory overreach. But concerned Americans organized an extraordinary grassroots effort to kick the big spenders out of Washington. Now, Congressional debates center on how much to cut, not how much to spend. I am optimistic that Congress will continue to make rapid progress in bringing the country back to prosperity. I appreciate the dedicated Oklahomans – like those who attended the town halls -- who are holding Washington accountable and helping to change the direction of the country.