'That's not how you get to a balanced budget,' Lucas says of government shutdown threat

He is also the only one who was in office the last time the federal budget was balanced, almost a quarter-century ago in 2000.

As such, Lucas has some observations about the apparent stalemate rocketing the federal government toward another shutdown Saturday night.

“There are too many stubborn folks who, if they can’t have their way, (are determined) to take us off the edge of the shutdown cliff,” Lucas said by telephone Thursday afternoon when asked if a shutdown can be averted.

“I’m as fiscally conservative as anyone else, but that’s not how you get to a balanced budget as we did in the late 1990s,” Lucas said. “You restrain the growth of government. You leave money in people’s pockets. You don’t drown them in regulations. You let them succeed to their potential, and you grow your way into balance.”

Lucas joined the U.S. House of Representatives in early 1994 after winning a special election for a vacancy in what was then Oklahoma’s 6th Congressional District. There had been a few short-term stoppages before then, beginning in 1981, but in 1995 and 1996 battles between President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich caused the federal government to close a total of 30 days over a 55-day span.

This would be Lucas’ sixth shutdown.

“In my experience, nothing really positive comes from (shutdowns),” Lucas said. “You disrupt people’s lives. You disrupt the services the federal government provides to people. … You create real financial stress for folks out there. You do.”

One noticeable difference between this budget standoff and previous ones is that until now they’ve involved disputes between Republicans and Democrats. This one is mostly among Republicans, whose narrow majority some hardliners are leveraging for what Lucas says are unrealistic concessions.

Those conditions, Lucas said, “are really difficult to make happen legislatively … and even more difficult to implement policywise.”

One proposal is to cut almost all Title I education funding, which goes to help school districts with disproportionate need. The Farm Bill, which is near and dear to Lucas, would take a 15% hit.

“The Senate is not going to take up these bills,” Lucas said, referring to the proposed reductions. “My very idealistic friends — and I don’t fault people for having strong principles — are working in a way (that) cannot succeed. But they’re going to inflict a huge amount of punishment on people in the real world, and who knows what kind of legislative result we come up with? Or the political impacts next year?”

The situation is such that Lucas returned to Washington this week even though he’s still recuperating from an early August encounter with a bull.

In trying to load the bull into a trailer, Lucas wound up with a shattered hip and broken pelvis. He could not put weight on his right side for seven weeks and is still limited mostly to a wheelchair.

But with Republicans holding only a five-vote majority, and more than that in open rebellion, leadership needed Lucas back in Washington.

He said his frustration is not only with the budget but that the “oxygen” taken up by the intra-party fight prevents other legislation from advancing.

That includes his bill to put the secretary of agriculture on the committee that oversees foreign business transactions, including farm land and food-processing facilities.

“Congress and some of my zealot friends on both sides of the room are kind of like — let’s just say they’ve gotten to where the focus is on what’s going to happen in the next 15 minutes, the next hour or the next day,” Lucas said. “No one seems to be willing to think about next month, next year, the next decade. You can’t fund or implement policies on that kind of time frame.”

Many think the deadlock can only be broken with Democrat votes. Lucas wouldn’t say that, but experience tells him that “ultimately, when the differences are worked out, … we’re going to come up with something a majority of Congress can support, and it’ll be signed into law.”

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