News Stories
The Hill - Erik Wasson
Budget conference negotiator Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) on Friday warned that unless the leaders of the panel start putting together proposals soon, members will start “freelancing” their own.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) have been having discussions, but many doubt that a deal is going to come together by the budget committee’s Dec. 13 deadline.
Ada News
U.S. Rep. Tom Cole took time out of his busy schedule to visit Stonewall on Tuesday, November 5th. Cole’s purpose was to tour the new community medical clinic that is nearing completion and is expected to begin receiving patients in January 2014. Construction on the facility began in April 2013 under a contract with MacHill Tribal Construction, LLC of Ada.
The Oklahoman - Chris Casteel
Since first taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama has promised American Indians that his administration would listen to them.
Wednesday, five of his Cabinet secretaries sat on a stage in an Interior Department auditorium and listened to Indian tribal leaders vent — on issues ranging from tax reform and land issues to health care funding.
The Hill - Erik Wasson
There was no sign of progress toward a congressional budget deal as the new House-Senate budget conference met for the second time on Wednesday.
Republicans and Democrats are trying to forge a deal by Dec. 13 that at least replaces some automatic sequester cuts and sets a spending limit for the rest of the year in order to avoid a shutdown in January. The House and Senate are $91 billion apart in their spending levels for 2014 and more fundamentally divided on the role new revenue should play in replacing the sequestration cuts.
The Oklahoman - Editorial Board
Having worked in the trenches for decades, U.S. Rep. Tom Cole, R-Moore, is one of Oklahoma's most astute political observers. When he talks, Republicans should listen.
During a meeting with The Oklahoman's editorial board last week, Cole persuasively argued that Republicans are poised to win elections in 2014, potentially seizing full control of Congress. The ongoing debacle of Obamacare is a major factor.
Yet GOP infighting could derail the party's electoral success.
Tulsa World - Wayne Greene
The American people are headed into a presidential election evenly divided between two sharply differentiated parties.
Big-time political donors are paying millions so their messages can drown out the opposition.
Washington at times seems unable to do anything regardless of who is in office.
And yet, U.S. Rep. Tom Cole remains an optimist.
The Journal Record - Journal Record Staff
Ripples from the federal government shutdown continued to spread across Oklahoma this week, with effects ranging from canceled airplane sales to home loan approval delays to court stays.
The Oklahoman - Chris Casteel
Congress missed its deadline early Tuesday to resolve partisan disputes over Obamacare and struggled into the early morning hours for a way out of a morass that forced the first government shutdown since 1996.
House Republicans were set to vote after midnight on a proposal calling for a small group of House and Senate negotiators to tackle the problem. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Senate Democrats would not agree to negotiate “with a gun to our head.”
Associated Press - Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar
Republicans pulling on the budget thread can't neatly unravel President Barack Obama's health care law.
A partial government shutdown next week would leave the major parts of the law in place and rolling along, according to former Democratic and Republican budget officials, as well as the Obama administration itself. Health care markets for the uninsured would open as scheduled on Tuesday.
The Oklahoman Editorial
As expected, the U.S. House of Representatives voted last week for a bill to defund the Affordable Care Act. The vote was mostly symbolic, as it stands zero chance of passage in the Democratic-controlled Senate and the president would never agree to such a plan anyway.
All five members of Oklahoma's House delegation voted for the bill, which would deny money to implement Obamacare but would keep government funded through mid-December. They all noted afterward that the intent of the bill was to keep government operating.