U.S. Senator James Lankford on the Biden COVID Bill, Importance of Non-Profits and Daylight Savings 44:25

Welcome to another episode of Broken Potholes with your hosts Sam Stone and Chuck Warren. And on the line today here in just a moment, very special guest, U.S. Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma.

Chuck, a little disheartening that we have to go to Oklahoma to get a Republican U.S. senator on the line. Oh, don't get me started on that. That's a catastrophe in every sense of the word. Just awful. I mean, in these these elections, we had the governor win by, what, 17 points four years ago.

We had just about every state and local race we won this last cycle, but we didn't win that congressional election. Martha just did not, for some reason, turned off a small percentage of the suburban electorate, which kept her from being reelected. And it's really sad because everybody I've talked to, even Democrats, said she was an absolutely fine U.S. senator.

I think she was a really fine U.S. senator. And right now we could we could really use her in Washington. That one seat would make a big difference. Yeah. We always talk about Georgia, but we forget about this seat here, which we should have kept.

We'd have control of the Senate and the Biden agenda would go through Republicans right now. Moderated quite a bit. It's right now. It's just it's a runaway train. I mean, there's nothing to stop it. And I was laughing the other day. Someone was posting about Republicans spent too much time talking about Dr. Seuss and they should have been focusing on this COVID bill. There is literally nothing that Republican Senate could do.

to stop that COVID bill. None of them voted for it. They put up amendments. Democrats shut it down. Yeah, that's what happens when you have the majority. Yeah, and we are learning a very good lesson about not voting.

letting the last election affect the next one, which is what happened in Georgia. And, you know, one of the big scams in politics right now is that West Virginia senator is a moderate. Right. I don't think I'm still waiting for people to tell me what a moderate is. You know, I mean, it's like when they say Mitt Romney's a moderate. Mitt Romney does not vote like a moderate. He's maybe moderate in temperament, but that does not make you a moderate. But he the West Virginia senator is the same way.

He has a certain tone to him, but there is nothing moderate about that man. He doesn't go along with everything they want done. Yeah, no, absolutely. If you're a Democrat, you're a Democrat. If you're a Republican, you're a Republican. And the difference between a conservative and someone like Romney, who's called a moderate or any of these other folks, it's five, 10 percent of their votes at most. At most. And it's not even that most anymore. It's more fundamental. Like I didn't kneel to the

to the throne of Trumpism. Therefore, you're moderate. Well, speaking of this and speaking of some upcoming legislation, I believe we have Senator Lankford on the line. We're still trying to get him on the line right now. So just one more minute. Hopefully we'll have him on. The senator is actually here in Arizona today. And as anyone in Arizona can tell you, he is coming from Tucson, which means he is trapped on I-10.

They need to fix that mess down there. It is a giant disaster. I mean, I remember when I first moved here, that was a very easy, you know, 90 minute drive from Tucson to here. Now you're lucky if it's two and a half hours. And it is just a traffic nightmare. And you add in Arizona drivers and let's face it, we have more in common with Mad Max than we do driving Miss Daisy. Well, you know, I volunteered at the State Farm Testing Center last week.

And I was in the tent where we're checking people in. And, um, most of our folks who were there were seniors. Um,

There were some moments I thought I was going to get run over with them pulling in the tent. So imagine them going 75-85 on that highway between Tucson and Phoenix, which chills up someone's spine, right? I mean, it finally came to the point I had to stand on the white line when they're pulling in so they would stay between the lines. I still almost got clipped like six times. It was unbelievable. I don't know why you would expect Arizona drivers to stay between the lines. There's no evidence we're any good at that. They are so aggressive. It's amazing. Yeah.

We are the fastest driving state. The most accidents. Like we're in a hurry all the time. It's like it's a beautiful day. It's 70 degrees. Slow down. Roll down the window. Turn some music up. But we're just...

Well, you know, pull over and join the intersection takeover the street racers are doing. You know, speaking of that and infrastructure, that was the one thing that really surprised me about the Trump presidency is that he didn't immediately jump on an infrastructure bill. I think he could have got a bipartisan infrastructure bill early.

I may be optimistic, but that's something he could have done. Well, we do have Senator Lankford on the line right now, so we can talk about potentially an infrastructure bill there. But I want to hear, obviously, first about some of the crazy legislation we have coming up. Senator Lankford, thank you for joining us. You're on the air with Sam Stone, Chuck Warren on Broken Potholes.

Great to have you. That'd be great to be able to talk to you as well. I'm enjoying that drive. I'm driving between Tucson and Phoenix. And you'll probably be there for a little while. That's what we just talked about. So thanks for coming on. If you're not going more than 10 over, by the way, they don't pull you over. So you're safe.

You will be shocked to know that I am caught in a whole cluster of traffic that's about five below, actually. And so it's not the racetrack that you're advertising between Tucson and Phoenix. You had to get here on the day when we tie everything up for you. It rains and nobody in Arizona can drive for the rest of the week. Yeah, well, I was glad I got here for the annual rainstorm, actually. We'll be celebrating it for weeks.

Senator, you are really one of the great conservative voices in Congress, I think, and also one of the compassionate conservative voices. One of the things that obviously Democrats are really good at is making their bills sound like they are just fantastic.

But they are often poison pills. They are loaded with things that are not fantastic at all for the average American. And we've got a bunch of those things coming up potentially, you know, for votes in front of you in front of the Senate, including H.R. 1, some of the others. Can you tell us a little bit about what what you're seeing and what you expect to happen with some of that legislation? Sure.

Yeah, we've had several of those. Let me just back up a couple of days here. Even for the COVID bill that just passed that everyone says this is a great COVID bill. The target of the COVID bill was for President Biden to be able to say, I spent more than President Trump did. The reason so many Republicans backed up and said, hey, let's pause before we borrow two troops.

China and say we desperately need this. The first question is, how much do we need to borrow? Let's borrow what we need to, but not more than we need to. We really have $1 trillion unspent from last year's five COVID bills. There's a trillion dollars still unspent. And then this was another $2 trillion to be able to borrow on it.

some obvious questions there what is the money for what's it going towards even things like vaccines everybody's all for let's look at the vaccine now let's get this going as fast as possible the administration still has six billion dollars left over in the vaccine account from the bills from last year that unspent and the president just last week said

hey, we already made the purchase for every single adult in America to be able to have the vaccine by the end of May. So my question was, why do you need tens of billions more in vaccine when everything's already done? What is this? And we could never get an answer for it.

And there are some real structural changes in some of the conversation. Again, it sounds very compassionate to be able to say, hey, we're going to help with new assistance for folks that need assistance and get checks. But what actually happened was all that the Clinton administration did to do the welfare-to-work transition to say, you know what, when we just didn't care,

And welfare assistance, that actually makes people more dependent rather than actually engaged in our economy. So we were trying to have a conversation to say, well, why are we using our welfare programs to just be cash programs again? We got away from that in the 90s and said that's a bad idea. Literally, this COVID bill just took it back to that.

And so it wasn't just about COVID. It was not about a lot of things. There was like new taxes on South Korea and customs from South Korea, which I've yet to figure out where that fits in COVID. And for the first time in 40 plus years, we have a health bill that actually pays for abortions

with federal dollars and again there's lots of opinions about abortions. I'm very, very pro-life personally and I just see the value of every child. But we have had agreement as a nation to say we only use federal dollars to pay for abortions. This $2 trillion bill starts doing federal funding for abortions. So

that there's a real structural change where we disagree we just want to be able to debate it and when you get into things like h_r_ one before the people on voting it's like who wants that voter suppression will know what everyone wants a voter suppression but in the next question if you really want to have a lot of california

with ballot harvesting, and do you really want to have federal funding for elections that literally every person is given a voucher of tax dollars and say, you can go hand this out to whatever candidate you want to give it to, or for every dollar you give, federal tax dollars. I don't meet a lot of people that want to have federal funding for campaigns. I particularly don't want my tax dollars being used for candidates. I vehemently disagree.

But that's what this bill does and a whole lot of other things to dramatically change it. So you're right. Great names, great titles, and it runs well in the news. But when you get into the details, it really doesn't smell right at all. Well, Senator, this is Chuck Warren. What we've seen now, and you've been there a while, have you ever experienced such an ideological divide between the two parties? I mean, a perfect example is the HHS nominee.

And, I mean, that's an ideological pick. There's nothing there that merits him having that position or making that agency better. And he has no medical background, but he does love suing nuns and churches and things of that nature. So in your time in Washington, has it gotten worse or we're just seeing it because there's so much social media now?

Yeah, there's a lot of social media, a lot of noise on it. But some pics from the administration, they put out like Javier Becerra for health insurance services. We were all a little shocked when the right during the middle of a pandemic, the person that President Biden picks to be able to run the health agency is a lawyer. Bill Cassidy during the question time said he's a doctor, been a doctor all of his life.

He shouldn't be the attorney general as a doctor because that really should be a lawyer in that, just like it probably shouldn't be a lawyer. Did we lose the senator? And even more, that sued Health and Human Services. We're getting a little distortion on the line. I apologize, folks, if you're hearing that. We're a couple of minutes from our break right here. But, you know, Chuck, I think you brought up a really good point, and Senator, you did as well.

In terms of the money not being spent, here in Phoenix we have about $140 million, $130 million left over from the first $300 million we got. We're getting another $400 million left.

in this next round so what do you what are they going to do with it i mean i mean so okay let's say they have all this extra money is it go for new goodies or could they at least be smart enough to say we're going to put it towards pension pension deficits here and making sure to get those things whole i mean you and i have talked about this for a long time i paid for and funded an initiative on it you know everybody says everything's to be swell but we have hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars in pension debt and they had to put more money in this year i understand yep

So what are they going to do with this extra money? What are they going to do with this extra money of the federal government with these billions of dollars? Well, I can't tell you what the federal government is going to do. But here at the state level, the local level, the city of Phoenix is hiring hundreds of new employees and they're giving big bonuses to all the existing employees. We needed maybe 20 to 50 million dollars for COVID, actual COVID expenses. Everything else is just being used to pad our budget. And it's not going towards protecting the future by paying down our debt. It's going to increase that debt.

by hiring all those more people. Broken Potholes, we'll be right back. It's the new year and time for a new you. You've thought about running for political office, but don't know where to start.

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Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your hosts Sam Stone and Chuck Warren. On the line with us today, U.S. Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma. And right before we went to the break, we were talking about this next round of stimulus, the fact Phoenix has a huge amount of cash left over from the first round. There were some restrictions on that spending, but I understand that's actually different with this next batch of cash. Senator, what, if any, are the restrictions on that money this time around?

There is no restrictions on the money that was just sent out in this last bill. That's another big change from...

bills. We had five bipartisan bills last time. They were all focused on COVID. This one was not focused on COVID. Last year's money from the CARES Act, we had $150 billion sent to cities and states, and we told them, you can spend this on COVID, but you can't spend it on other things. It's got to be on COVID expenses. And this bill, $350 billion, can be spent literally on anything. They can spend it on flowers if they want to spend it on that. They can spend

on pension, retirement and debt. They could spend on hiring more employees, whatever they want to be able to do. If they want to go back and paint the highways yellow, they could do that with it, with this COVID money, because it doesn't have to actually be for COVID. It was kind of a wink and a nod to everyone. The only one restriction is for cities and states, once they take the COVID money, suppose that this money is $350 billion, they cannot lower taxes.

during the time period. That's the one restriction they put on it is you can't take money and then lower taxes. So there are quite a few jurisdictions that are saying, hey, we had already planned on decreasing some fees to people or trying to lower taxes to certain areas, and they're suddenly having to determine that Democrats in D.C. said, we don't want any jurisdiction in the country to lower taxes on anyone, and their enticement is have money, but don't lower taxes. Wow. I mean...

In Phoenix, we don't have to worry about lowering taxes because of the progressive council majority is moving ahead very fast, creating entire new departments full of social justice warriors to fund with this money. So I guess we don't have to worry about those tax cuts. But that is frankly, we got around the restrictions the first time we took about one hundred and seventy million dollars of that money and swapped it into our public safety budget and swapped out one hundred and seventy million for other spending.

Yep. What was actually interesting was one of the things that you could spend it for, it was assumed for law enforcement, for instance, that law enforcement had to change everything about how they were doing things. And so it was assumed that if you did use that CARES Act money for law enforcement, that was perfectly fine. That was considered a reasonable expense. But so many cities, as you know, were right in the middle of it.

A lot of them said, well, we don't want to actually give more money to law enforcement. So thanks for allowing us to do that, but we want to use it for other things besides law enforcement.

enforcement because we're going to defund the police. So that's a big issue. When we did that in the CARES Act, that was in March of last year. That was way before the defund the police movement was even discussed. A bunch of cities mad at us saying, hey, we can't spend all this money. We said, you don't need more money for law enforcement to be able to do that? Every city needs that. That's a major expense. They're like, yep, we'll use it for everything but that. Welcome to decision making in a lot of cities and states around the country.

I think in Phoenix we spent, if I remember correctly, it was about $9 million on direct COVID-related law enforcement expenses. Plus, that includes the expenses for all the protests and riots we had. That was at $9 million out of the $297 million we received. Wow.

Senator, let's talk a minute here about your bipartisan efforts on nonprofits. You know, there's 12 million people in the United States who are employed by nonprofits. You, in conjunction with some Democrats, created a new above-the-line federal tax deduction for $300 for charitable contributions. Tell us about what you're working on that now and what's going on in the future.

how important these nonprofits are, whether it's feeding, you know, homeless shelters, food banks, churches, and so forth. Can you tell us a little bit about why this is needed? Yeah, it's a big deal. Obviously, during a pandemic, we see the importance of nonprofits even more, because when you're hungry or homeless or hurting, the first place you go is not to the government. The first place you go is to your family, your neighbors, and then you go to churches and nonprofits.

If churches and nonprofits and families aren't strong, there's no way government can keep up with all of the needs around the country. So one of the things that I got into the CARES Act a year ago was an incentive for people to be able to financially give to nonprofits.

If they give $300 to a nonprofit, they can pick anyone they want to. Church, synagogue, mosque, any nonprofit, United Way, Red Cross, whatever it was. If they give to a nonprofit, they can take that off their taxes, even if they don't itemize. So a lot of folks that are doing their taxes this year right now are going to find out, hey, I don't normally itemize my taxes, but if I donate to a nonprofit, I can take that off. We added that again into the 2021 taxes.

in the December bill, and I was actually trying to get that into this bill that was just passed, but it was just no-go, no Republican, anything was going to get into it. We didn't try to make this partisan. Quite frankly, not-for-profit shouldn't be a partisan issue. Our safety net has got to be strong as a country. We do have hungry and hurting and homeless people around the country, and the best way to take care of them is not just to mail them a check from D.C.,

but it's actually have a real person that can do life on life with them. The best people to do that are churches and nonprofits. They do that the most efficiently, lots of volunteers, lots of engagement. I just want to make sure that we're, uh, making sure that people can write that off on their taxes, even if they don't itemize to incentivize more giving to that, uh, to be able to help more people. Well, and when a charity brings someone in, uh,

in their community who contributes to them or volunteers for them, that becomes a long-term relationship more often than not. Right. As opposed to just counting on a check from the federal government that may or may not eventuate based on what's happening politically in the country that year, right? Right. I mean, your plan really strengthens the foundation of nonprofits. Yep.

Yep. And the goal of this is, obviously, that people aren't on assistance. The goal is not to maintain assistance. As funny as it sounds, the federal government tracks the quality of its assistance programs by how many people are on it. Okay, so that's the reverse. You should be tracking by how many people get off of it, how many people graduate from the program. Churches and nonprofits are always focused on, hey, there's going to be more need.

I want to help this person not have a need, be a productive person, actually get a job, actually learn some life skills. So churches and nonprofits are actually trying to help people get out of it when the federal government's like, yeah, you're just another number. We helped a million people last year. We may help a million and one people next year. Well, again, that's not the goal. The goal is to help people get off of it rather than stay on it.

Well, it depends if it's the goal for the betterment of that person or for the betterment of this country. That's the goal, right? But if you're a Democrat and you're counting on people dependent. Question, Senators Chuck Warren. If we had had a Majority Leader Schumer instead of a Majority Leader McConnell in 2020, could you have gotten this passed?

You know what? I don't know. I honestly don't know on that. Things have been so different. It's amazing to me to be able to hear Joe Biden give a speech on unity on January the 20th. And then we literally are not having committee hearings. This giant $2 trillion bill, the largest stimulus ever been done. There was not a single Senate committee hearing on it at all. It just appeared.

and said this is what we're going on and uh... so it it's been pretty clear that uh... they're not interested in trying to work across the aisle get other ideas and that even the focus of chuck schumer right now is actually bought the filibuster uh... so that we can really do whatever we want uh... and pass as many bills as we want to not have to have both i have to tell you people get frustrated with the filibuster the senate in its design

It is the one place in government that both sides of the aisle are supposed to be heard. It's not in the White House. It's not in the House of Representatives. Not in the Supreme Court. Only in the Senate. Senator, I apologize. I have to cut you off. We have to go to break right now. But Broken Potholes will be right back. It's the new year and time for the new you. You've thought about running for political office but don't know where to start.

Before you start any planning, you need to secure your name online with a yourname.vote web domain. This means your constituents will know they are learning about the real you when they surf the web. Secure your domain from GoDaddy.com today.

The political field is all about reputation, so don't let someone squash yours online. Secure your name and political future with a yourname.vote web address from godaddy.com. Your political career depends on it. Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your hosts Sam Stone and Chuck Warren on the line with us today. And thank you very much, our special guest, U.S. Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma.

Been an interesting conversation so far. Maybe a little disconcerting for some Republicans looking at the future in the next couple of years here. Highlights aren't the importance of our next election and looking forward. Exactly. Let's first talk about Senator this daylight savings bill. Are we ever going to change this in the country? I don't know. And why do we need to change it? In Arizona, we're just fine with the way things are.

Yeah, you know what? The rest of the country is still in the oppression of having to be able to spring forward. So it's a different world for all of us in the rest of the country. This is something Marco Rubio actually floated a couple of years ago, and I jumped in to be able to help him to say, let's just...

We're calling it Lock the Clock. Let's just lock the clock. This is over 100 years old, a change from World War I to be able to save candles and oil and fluid during World War I. You look at my smartphone at night. And so if there's one thing that we can do, free parents with a young child would be excited about saving time. Hey, hey.

Because their kids do not get, hey, I changed the clock and so you got to sleep longer or stay up longer. And so there's no reason to have it. We got lighting power. We're energy in this country. We don't need that. Well, as an Arizona, Arizona and Senator, I got to tell you.

I'm all for your bill for the simple reason that I can stop explaining to people everywhere else in the country whether we are two or three hours different from the Pacific or mountain time. Right. That's how they do it. I don't know. I don't even know what time we're on. I say there are a bunch of other states that are thinking about modeling what Arizona is doing because there's a lot of states, including my own.

that have bills in their state legislature to say. Lots of people hate it. And so it's a fixable thing. I told somebody before, the sun is the sun. Regardless of what Congress votes on, it's still going to be sun up and sun down. So why don't we try to set our lives based on the sun, not based on Congress's vote? Hey, Senator Chuck Warren, I want to talk to you briefly. I was listening to a podcast you're on, Jake Taper,

And it was late. It was in late early January, I think. And they were talking about at that time, President-elect Biden not getting intelligence briefings. And you pointed out that, well, Bush didn't get them either when they were having a dispute in Florida. It was interesting because, frankly, if you ask 99.9 percent of the public about that, no one knew that Bush was not getting intelligence briefings. Right. Right.

Do you feel in your time in Congress that what's being reported is just so one-sided now they don't even try to be bipartisan or objective in just the facts? I mean, you can have your editorial opinion. That's fine. But they just seem – I mean, that was such an obvious one. And, you know, Sam and I read quite a bit. I had not read that, that Bush had not received these intelligence briefings. But all you knew is that only Biden never had this happen to him.

Has it gotten worse? Yeah, it's not gotten worse. It's gotten crazy because people not only are not getting information now, whereas a lot of news stories are doing human interest or they're doing really short stories or they're getting a really biased story, but a false story is also getting out online.

and people can pass it around. I'm a free speech guy as well. People can throw out things that are false if they choose to, but it's whether somebody believes it now. You know, I joke with my staff all the time that I always quote my favorite Abraham Lincoln quote, and that Abraham Lincoln once said, don't believe everything you read on the internet. So, but for whatever reason, people just say, a friend of mine shared this on social media, so it must be true. But

but no one's really tracking all the facts and information on this. When I brought up the issue about intelligence briefings, most people didn't know that once you're a candidate for president,

briefings. So Joe Biden was getting intelligence briefings as soon as the Democratic Convention ended in the summer. He started getting intel briefings every day to be able to go through this as you're preparing to be president. And then after the election, that got cut off. And I just raised the issue and said, hey, you know what? We're still in dispute. There's still lots of questions about the election and who won it. But

But in the meantime, let's just maintain status quo where both sides are still getting intel briefings. It was one of the issues of the 9-11 Commission back from the...

election between Al Gore and George Bush that the 9-11 commission said George Bush was behind because he got cut off from intel briefings all the way up until December and he couldn't get his team up to speed. So I was like, hey, let's learn the lesson. At that time, we were saying, we don't know who's going to be president, but I do know both sides should still be getting briefings until we do know. And then let's fix it.

30 seconds before we go back to break, but I actually think this goes back to something Ben Rhodes, the Obama official, said talking about reporters. They know nothing. These are young kids. The industry has changed. They don't have the background. Broken potholes. We'll be right back.

The 2020 political field was intense, so don't get left behind in 2021. If you're running for political office, the first thing on your to-do list needs to be securing your name on the web with a yourname.vote domain from GoDaddy. Get yours now. The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping.

Yes, folks. It's that time. Broken Potholes. The sunshine moment.

Today in studio, Mackenzie Semerad. She's got our first Sunshine Moment. We have a very special guest also for a second one today. Double the sunshine. Hello, hello. So I want to start out by talking vaccinations. Let's start with some numbers. So as of March 11th, over 10% of the entire U.S. population has been fully vaccinated for coronavirus. And that's according to the CDC.

More than 33 million people have received either both doses of the Pfizer and Moderna or the single dose of Johnson & Johnson. And the U.S. is actually averaging over 2 million shots per day, which I think is pretty outstanding. It's amazing. It's a miracle is what it is. And thank President Trump, because as much as Joe Biden has tried to take credit, this was all in the works and it's going really well.

Mackenzie, those are a lot of people who get to see their grandkids tomorrow, right? Exactly. And that's where the real sunshine moment comes into play right here. And I was scrolling Twitter the other day and the handle Jessica Shaw on March 9th, which Tuesday tweeted,

My mom's doctor wrote her a prescription to hug her granddaughter, and there was a picture of an actual prescription paper signed by the doctor that read, You are allowed to hug your granddaughter. And that tweet was followed up with a tweet that showed a video of her mom hugging her granddaughter while crying tears of joy. And the caption was,

First hug she's had in a year. Thank you to all the scientists and doctors who made this happen. And I thought that was just awesome. I know my parents are days away now from being able to hug their grandchild for the first time in

a year. So that's a pretty incredible thing. It's amazing. It's remarkable. Unbelievable. Well, we're not stopping at just one moment of sunshine today. We have two in the studio with us also, Chris Hopper from Oklahoma. She has been doing something she was telling me about earlier today. And folks, I thought you needed to hear about it as well because I thought it was pretty amazing. Chris. Thank you for letting me share today because this sunshine moment comes all the way from Oklahoma.

But I'll start with this thought: Did you know that a deaf baby can learn to listen and talk? I did not. Well, it's happening every day at Hearts for Hearing, which is located in Oklahoma. And we are a nonprofit, and we provide the first set of hearing aids for every single baby born deaf or hard of hearing in our state at no cost to the family.

And then by parent choice, if they choose listening and spoken language for their baby, that's what we provide. So you actually do the training with the parents and with the child? We have audiologists and speech language pathologists on staff working collaboratively. And that is the outcome that we expect for these children so that they can be mainstreamed.

streamed in their local schools all across our state. How many kids have gotten their hearing aids, their first set of hearing aids, through this program now? On average, we see around 150 babies per year. So we are into the thousands of children. And we save our state over $4 million per person over the course of a lifetime when we teach a deaf child to learn to listen and talk.

That's remarkable. That is just incredible. Chris, thank you so much for sharing that today. When you told me that earlier, I was just blown away. I think that's an incredible, incredible thing you're doing for those families. So thank you. Thank you. Senator, are you on? Yes, sir, I am. I'm just trying to not just pull back some tears here listening to those two great stories. Thinking about a prescription to be able to hug your grandchild.

That's a pretty great script on that. And I know what Hearts for Hearing is doing. And it's a really remarkable group of folks that are really life-changing for a lot of kids. Well, what's remarkable is I volunteered at a state farm vaccination site last week. And as people were getting ready and I checked them in for their second vaccine, I asked them what they were doing. And many said, I'm going to see my grandchild. And the very first one

I said, well, when's the last time you saw them? They said, February 12th. And I said, well, that's not that long ago. They go, no, no, this is 2020. And each person I asked, and there were a couple dozen grandparents simply saying they knew the exact date the last time they had saw their children or grandchildren. And I think one thing that's been missed on this because politics becomes so real because, you know, the sky is falling mentality we've seen is,

Operation Warp Speed is probably one of the greatest things the United States has done in quite a while. Is that a fair assessment? No, I would completely agree. The combination between government and private business and what was happening in development is a remarkable group of things coming together. Really amazing. I mean, you know, you're talking about a vaccine timeline in less than a year for a process that previously took an average of something like 10 years ago.

Which is just absolutely incredible. I mean, it really shows Americans what we can do. Am I wrong on that, Senator? I mean, what we can do. No, you were spot on on that. And the interesting thing is some of the backstory will come out in the days ahead. But for Moderna especially...

started researching this type of vaccine because this is the first time it's ever been done to be this specialized. They had started researching this seven years ago, and it started the process of investigating different types six years ago. And it started working through different vaccines, working to see if they could actually do it with this technology. And right as COVID-19 was first identified in China, they got the DNA sequence in...

if what we've worked on for years and years on the flu, to see if we could actually go to the flu virus and take it on. I wonder if that would work for this. So it wasn't just a, hey, we pulled this together in three months. They pulled this together in about seven years. They just didn't know they were preparing for COVID until it actually hit. They got the gene sequencing and determined, yes, we can do this. So it occurs in preparation. For those of us that are people like I am, I go, it almost looks like God was laying the groundwork

But we never knew we needed the vaccine. We started making that preparation in order to be able to come. Otherwise, it really would have been as it is.

Yeah. I mean, Operation Warp Speed, I think, is one of those stories that Republicans need to focus on telling. And as we head into 2022 and 24, I think one of our biggest challenges telling those success stories of the things we've done, but also talking about the things we're going to do, not just the things we're going to be against. And and.

What do we need to do as a party to gear up now? I know a lot of people are still looking back at the last election, but Senator, what do you see that we need to do to gear up now?

to focus on those next elections? Because I think we're learning right now how important every one of these votes we cast is. Quite frankly, we are the party of Lincoln, and we're still the party of Lincoln. That is for equal opportunity for everyone. We're trying to find ways to get more options for schools. One of our main focuses, we want the education of every child and for every parent to have an opportunity. That goes on.

We're having you break up again a little bit, Senator. So I'm sorry we missed that last bit. But Senator, as we close our time here, tell our audience, why should someone run for public office? Because it seems like more of a pain than it's worth. Why? Why do it?

I have to tell you, giving time to be able to serve in a public way and to be able to make a difference is exactly the right thing to do. And it is a real pain. You have to go far to be able to look at any of our social media and to see how people just relentlessly attack anyone who steps their toes.

into public life for anyone that's in public life. But if we don't have good people running for city council, for school boards, for county offices, for

for local and national state offices, then just no one's there. I mean, it's still the oldest phrase out there on this. All that has to happen for people to thrive is for good people to do nothing. And there are a lot of people that are good just throw up their hands and said, it's too hard. It's too difficult. It's too painful. I just won't do it. But we've got to have good people in the serve in the most local races or in national races, or we just give it away.

I think that's a great point. We've been talking a lot here about those school board races, frankly, and the fact that we have abandoned, I think Republicans as a party abandoned the public education system. I think school choice is important, but I think we're seeing right now that the effect of us walking away from public schools and from public school boards and those things also.

It is. And if you walk away from that and not engage, then those ideas are not out there. Then you stare at it and think, I don't see that's being taught in school, being done in school. And the reason is because no one has another voice to say this is a bad idea. And in states like my state in Oklahoma, our state legislature just opened up for transfer with the legislature.

So it's not just a school choice issue being private and chartered and other things, but there are ways to be able to give parents the option to say, hey, I live right next to a district that's being successful, and ours is not. It's competition even within the public schools to be able to say there are ways to be able to address this. So there's good competition, but also great support for our teachers, folks that are out there that are working really hard for our kids that we want to be able to stand behind, but also encourage their success.

Absolutely. And I think that's a great point to finish on. Senator, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. Just a fantastic conversation. I look forward to hopefully speaking with you again here in the future. I very much appreciate you being with us. Look forward to it. Thanks for what you're doing, giving the message out and just having good dialogue. Thank you. Thank you, Senator. Well, let's go back to the sunshine moment for a minute. Mac, what else did you find when you're looking at how many grandparents are going out and

being able to go travel and see their kids now. When I was looking up stories, I wanted a specific one, and I ended up landing with the one I found on Twitter. But there were, I mean, numerous stories of the same exact thing, of grandparents just the anticipation of seeing their grandkids and kids after, you know, a long wait. And it's just really heartwarming to see how many people waited so long just to simply get that hug or touch from a loved one.

Well, you want to be extra cautious with your grandparents, right? Yeah. As Dr. Victory, who we had on the show, said, you know, people like us who are our age and younger, under 70 and in good health, you're really not at much risk from COVID. But if you're over 70, grandparents in general, you're at real risk. I mean, there is a very significant risk. This is not a joke. And so these folks have had to endure a long period without human contact.

Well, as I told you, I remember calling you the day after I did the volunteering. And how startling it was that these grandparents knew the exact date. And I'm pretty sure a lot of them could have told you the exact time. And just this glee and joy that just encompassed their face, this aura they gave, like, you know, this long national nightmare is over. And it's just remarkable. And, you know, you and I have talked about this before. Could you imagine...

if COVID had hit on 9/11 instead of what hit on 9/11, you would have had 50% unemployment. You would not have had a vaccine this fast. I mean, in a lot of ways, there have been countless miracles and innovation that have shortened this timeline by three, four, five years. The AI revolution has a lot to do with why we were able to develop these mRNA vaccines.

And that wasn't available even two, three years ago that you would have had that same computing power available to do a lot of these things. And so but I want to bring up one thing a little bit off topic from the rest of the show here because we're talking about getting rid of daylight savings time. And thank you, Senator Lankford. We all agree. But can we get rid of the penny? No.

No, I like the penny. Oh, no. No, no, no. This is just a... Come on. Come on. What are you going to do about piggy banks then? You're talking countless jobs lost making piggy banks. What are you talking about here? I'm talking about a coin that costs more to mint than it's worth.

And that just clutters up your, you know, look, I've got pennies falling out of every corner in my pocket. They're under the seat in my car. It's the domino effect, Sam. Next thing you know, the nickel's gone, then the dime, then the quarter. It's a horrible, horrible domino. You know, I'm okay with that right until you get to the quarter. You can just do some rounding. Make this nice and easy. Yeah. Regarding daylight savings time, I know the Utah legislature as well, I think they actually passed it. I mean, this has been...

I don't know why this became an issue, but Rubio's made it an issue. And supposedly it helps with tourism of Florida. That is my primary understanding with it, because there's longer daylight hours during the winter. So more people travel and can experience daylight in Florida. I don't think Rubio said that, but that's what he is being accused of by Florida papers. But it's not a bad idea. Well, look, I'm for it just so I don't have to try to figure out what time it is in New York right now.

Oh, exactly. You know, I mean, I'll take making life easier for all of us. You know, I think the senator touched on some really important stuff this afternoon about what's going on in Washington. And I don't think most people get a fair or honest view, left or right. And I hope we bring a little bit of that to you each week here on Broken Potholes. I agree. And folks, thank you for tuning in. Once again, fantastic show.

I'm Sam Stone with my co-host Chuck Warren. We have a very full studio today. Mackenzie Semerat, Chris Hopper. We have Kylie Kipper and even Jamie Kleszek. Kylie, the mute's here. This is wonderful today. We have two mutes. Broken potholes. Back next week.