Alva Review-Courier -

U.S. Representative Frank Lucas met a couple of young students before beginning his Town Hall meeting Friday afternoon. After posing for photos and learning they were in 4-H, he invited them to lead those assembled in the Pledge of Allegiance to open the meeting. "I started out as a 4-H member longer ago than you can possibly imagine," said Lucas. He added that the first time he was elected president of his 4-H club was in 1973.

Speaking on the campus of Northwestern Oklahoma State University in Alva, Lucas said these Town Halls are important to him. "Congress is in session nine months out of the year, and I want to give everybody the opportunity to look me in the eye. I can't make our 800,000 neighbors in the third Congressional District come to a town hall meeting, but I want to be available."

"I customarily spend a few minutes about things going on back east that affect us here at home," he began. Lucas said this Congressional session is a "different body than the previous session." In the previous four years, Republicans were in the minority in the House of Representatives. Now Republicans have the majority although it's only by five members. In the Senate, there's a 51-49 split with a small Democrat majority. He said absences due to illness or other things can have a big impact on voting.

Lucas also explained that in the House, it only takes a simple majority to make something happen. "The Senate is a body of unlimited debate, only 100 of them," he said. "But in order to cut off the unlimited debate, because when a senator stands up and is recognized he or she can speak until the end of the two year session or the end of the world, and sometimes you wonder which would be better to come quicker. But that's just an observation from a House member. Unless 60 of the 100 vote for something called cloture which cuts off debate ... and they move forward." While judges can be advanced by a simple majority, in all regular legislation 60 of the 100 have to agree.

"With a divided Congress, this is the two year period, where no one is going to slam anything through," Lucas said. "You're not going to force your will on anybody else." He said the downside of this situation is that it is difficult to get anything passed. The upside is that it's easy to prevent bad things from happening. "Sometimes keeping bad things from happening is a really important thing."

Lucas then spoke more specifically about the committees he serves on.

Agriculture

The farm bill lasts for five years, and now it is farm bill time. "I'm back on the (agriculture) committee," said Lucas. The last four years while the Democrats were in the lead in the House, he stepped back, but now at his request and in light of his seniority, Lucas is back on the committee.

G.T. Thompson of Pennsylvania is the committee chairman. "Pennsylvania, good farm country, deep soil, it rains when it's supposed to. What do they have in common with us?" he asked. "Well, we don't have enough rain ever. We rarely have enough soil. But, that said, G.T.'s farmers are smaller operations. Think of them as the folks that still plant with eight-row planters versus some of the 32-row stuff you see in the Midwest ... closer to our agriculture. That's important."

Lucas said the previous chairman, from the suburbs of Atlanta, was focused on a 2023 farm bill that would address environmental and social justice. He said that kind of farm bill would tell you what crops to plant and who should be farming. "That's bad policy. That's how you starve," said Lucas.

He said the farm bill is part of the budget negotiations going on right now between President Biden and House Speaker McCarthy involving the debt ceiling.

"The Secretary of the Treasury said the other day that any time after June 1, she might not be able to cover the checks," Lucas said. "Don't think of the debt ceiling so much as authorizing spending. Think of the debt ceiling limit as covering the hot checks, as my late father would say, that have already been written. You have to meet your obligations." He said the way out is to get an agreement to make spending more realistic.

"If we have some new money, the key to the farm bill will be to tighten up the safety net," said Lucas. "As all of you know who are involved in production agriculture, since 2018 ... Covid, the trade wars, the war in Europe ... all input costs have exploded. The price of fertilizer, seed, fuel, feed, equipment, parts, everything since 2018 is dramatically more expensive. Yes, maybe some prices will come down, but they'll never go back to 2018. How do you make the safety net on the production side stronger? We've also had some really tough weather in this country. So the safety net's got to be tightened.

"If we have new resources, I think we go in and look at the weather histories and we may cut off a year or two to keep up. There are reference prices that make price protection products work. They need to be adjusted to reflect the costs that are now out there. If we have a little bit of money, then taking the base bill from '18, making these adjustments, we'll be good to go, I think, until 2028."

But what if there isn't any new money? Lucas said if the leadership in both bodies will let the agriculture committee adjust what's in the farm bill, "we'll still be able to do what we can do."

"We've come through tough times, and nutrition bills which is the lion's share of farm bill spending ... not production side, nutrition side is the lion's share ... dramatically are up. If we provide stability to the economy, if we reassure people about the national finances, we will hopefully encourage more economic growth. More economic growth means more jobs and fewer people needing assistance from us. If we're allowed to have credit for that, then we'll still be ok."

What happens if you can't do that and don't have any money? "I can't be a part of a farm bill that takes the safety net that's not strong enough anymore and cut it and drag it out for five years. In that scenario, my advice to my colleagues in Congress is that we authorize the farm bill one year at a time until things get better," Lucas said. He said much of this comes down to President Biden and Speaker McCarthy's discussion over the next few days.

Financial Services

Turning to another committee, Lucas said, "I'm the longest serving Republican on financial services. I would have told you at the beginning of this session the big focus would be crypto currency. You know, the technology of using algorithms, encrypted codes to move value around. To some people, this really appeals to them to avoid the banks and the government.

"Crypto currency is not a regulated thing. It is kind of the Wild West. Think about the fellow in the Bahamas who misplaced $8 billion not long ago. We're tracking much of that down, but it was a sobering moment, I think, for a lot of people."

"I would suggest this to you," he continued. "Until there is regulation and structure, until there is order in this stuff, it is literally, as I said earlier, the Wild West. If you want to invest in it, power to you. But just only use the money you don't need."

Lucas said another issue overpowers the problem of crypto currency, the collapse of three different banks. "Those three failures cost the FDIC, the federal deposit insurance corporation, north of $50 billion to clean up," he said.

There will be a lot of discussions about how this came about in the banking committee, the financial services committee of the House. "Like everything else in life, it's a combination of things. The banks that got in trouble are not the too big to fail super banks," he said. "And they're not your community banks, the typical banking we have in Oklahoma and certainly in our (Congressional) district."

He explained, "I personally believe that what got them caught in this mess, what destroyed them was a combination of things. Part of it is when the property boom bubble busted in 2008, the Federal Reserve System drove interest rates down to, for all practical purposes, nothing until a year or so ago when the inflation rate exploded. Federal Reserve started raising interest rates to get things under control. A lot of financial institutions had higher than average rates to secure deposits so that they could then turn it over and make investments in higher tech, the crypto, the software, the AI stuff, all those kind of things, betting that interest rates would not change dramatically ... betting that by paying a bit more they could draw even more interest off of these high risk loans."

He said some of them put certain requirements on the loans that if someone borrowed a certain level of dollars, money they hadn't spent had to be kept in their bank. "Your corporate treasurer will tell you that you never keep all of your cash in one place. You spread it out," he said. "They also purchased, when they couldn't make loans, bonds and mortgages that were slightly above the going interest rate, riskier yes, in the spirit that they could generate just a little more income."

When the feds began raising interest rates, suddenly those assets were worth less, he said. "Suddenly they were upside down. There will be questions asked about not only where the managers were but where were the examiners when these policies were put in place."

Science, Space and Technology

Lucas is chair of the science, space and technology committee. He said it's the committee that oversees the National Science Foundation, the entity taxpayers put money into for basic research in fundamental physics and engineering, "the kind of research that creates opportunities for other science."

It's also the committee for the National Standards Board. They set the standards so that when industry manufactures things, it all works together. They determine how long a yard is, what a pound weighs.

It's also the committee with jurisdiction over the National Weather Service, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). "NOAA was never authorized by Congress. It was authorized by executive order by Richard Nixon when he was president in 1970. The committee goal is to take it out from under the Department of Commerce and make it a free-standing agency like NASA," he said.

Lucas believes that would remove them from political pressure so they can "do weather, research, gather the data, do forecasts, do predictions, give us facts."

"Along with that, if we can't do that, at the very least we will authorize next generation radar," he said. "The system we use now is 40 years old. Like all technology, things are changing dramatically. It will take five years to get the system up and running. Once in place, it will be a quantum leap forward."

The committee is also involved in NASA. "It's not just pushing the scientific edge forward," Lucas said of the space program. "Things that NASA does are real hard. When it involves humans, it's even harder. Like Apollo, it will drive our science and engineering farther down the road.

"We're also engaged in another international space race. It's different than what we went through in the '60s, '70s, 80s. Remember the struggle with the old Soviet Union? Who can plant a flag on the moon first? This is not about planting flags. This is a challenge from the Chinese government. It's who's going to control the resources from the moon, asteroids, Mars?" He said it's a scientific, economic and military issue.

Lucas then opened the floor for questions. The audience asked questions involving aid to the Ukraine, the debt ceiling, immigration, the need for more accountants, and marijuana regulation. To watch a video of the entire Town Hall, go to http://www.AlvaReviewCourier.com and click on the Video tab.