Third District Congressman Frank Lucas thinks of himself as old-fashioned.
He stays off cable news as much as possible and describes himself as boring. Criticisms are generally muted. He tries to get along with Democrats enough to at least get some work done.
After 28 years in Congress, Lucas still travels a district that covers more than a third of the state. Unlike many colleagues who now limit their public interaction mostly to conference calls and controlled meetings with friendly audiences, Lucas tries to have at least one live town hall every year in each of the 32 counties he represents.
Constituents, he suggests, ought to have the chance to chew him out in person.
Lucas is old-fashioned in at least one other way: He longs for the days when candidates and parties ran political campaigns, corporations weren’t people, and dark money wasn’t legal.
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“Call me old school if you want, but I would tell you if (Congress) would pass some kind of bill to overturn McCain-Feingold and the Citizens United court case, blow up the Super PACs, … tune down the political action committees and move this back to the parties, I’m not so sure we wouldn’t be better off,” Lucas said at one of those town halls Monday in Mannford.
“At least (with parties) you’ve got a broad group of people, and — unlike a PAC or a Super PAC, which say things beyond imagination, nasty, ugly and rude, and disappear — the parties don’t go away. They have to answer for what they’ve done,” he said.
Lucas was responding to questions about how Congress functions in the bitterly divided political environment and why he thinks that environment has evolved.
“The shift of the last 10 or 20 years is really driven by a combination of the electronic media — think Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow on late at night — and a shift in campaign financing,” he said.
Lucas traces those changes in campaign financing all the way back to the period just after the Watergate scandal, when individual contributions to campaigns were capped. The 2002 McCain-Feingold Act referenced by Lucas was supposed to limit campaign spending, particularly by corporations and parties.
Subsequent actions and inactions by the Federal Election Commission and U.S. Supreme Court rulings turned McCain-Feingold into just the opposite of what was intended.
Corporations were declared “persons” with full First Amendments rights, and spending by political action committees and other entities cannot by regulated without violating those rights.
Lucas thinks all of that was a mistake.
For all of their flaws, Lucas said Monday, the two major parties constituted a center around which “large groups of people” had to unite in order to win elections.
Now, he said, candidates are more beholden to Super PACs and narrow special interests than to broad constituencies and are more interested in spreading their names and raising money than in writing good legislation.
“I have people I serve with in Congress who have no particular allegiance to a political party … (or) much of an allegiance to their district, and if they’re loud enough and shrill enough, they can keep this system going,” he said.
“And by the way, (they) don’t do town halls. (They) do polling. Because then you don’t have to look people in the eye and speak your mind.”
Winning and holding office, he said, has become more about decibel level than governing.
“It seems like everybody is going to the corner and screaming,” Lucas said. “It’s marketing. You don’t get anything done screaming.”
But screaming does raise money. Members of Congress, Lucas said, “have figured out if they can be loud enough and shrill enough they can get elected. And if they come to Congress, if they’re loud enough and shrill enough, they can be on either Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow.”
That, he said, “primes the pump” for contributions and completes the circuit that connects campaign financing, electronic media and the internet.
“Watch some of the nastiest TV commercials. Who’s paying for those? ‘The Committee for whatever wherever it came from.’ Well, these are the super PACs,” Lucas said.
“The system now is that an individual can drop huge amounts of money into one of these things, blow everybody up, and then the PAC that was created goes ‘Poof!’ into the night. It’s horrifying.”
July 2021 video: Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Oklahoma, encourages COVID-19 vaccine
Tulsa Health Department video from June 2021
