Six months into his first term, 2nd District Congressman Josh Brecheen said he wants his fellow Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives to be more conservative.
“I want to be part of the group that is pulling the conference to the right on spending, that we’re going to do the bold things,” Brecheen said during a recent visit to the Tulsa World.
Lest anyone think the “on spending” qualifier suggests that Brecheen looks at non-spending issues differently, on Friday Brecheen announced the Patriotism Not Pride Act.
The legislation would prohibit the use of taxes for Pride Month or any similar event and would ban the display of the Pride flag or any other “representing gender identity or sexual orientation” by federal agencies on federal property.
“I’m someone who’s going to be very outspoken on biblical issues,” Brecheen told the Tulsa World Editorial Board.
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But debt and deficit — more specifically, spending — are Brecheen’s foremost concerns, which is why he was one of the Republican holdouts in the election of Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California as speaker of the House and why he voted against the debt limit and spending bill in late May.
Brecheen spits out debt projection statistics like a pre-microchip computer’s dot matrix printer, but reduced to their simplest form, the numbers mean federal financial obligations are rising faster than revenue. At some point, conservatives and lot of liberals say, the gap will become unmanageable.
The spending curbs in the final bill were much, much less than the $900 billion in a budget bill passed by the Republican-controlled House but which had no chance in the Senate.
“There are those who will say (the final bill) is the biggest cut in a long time, and they’re not lying,” said Brecheen. “But we have an opportunity, I would say in the next 10 years, to really get serious about changing the trajectory of our debt.
“Relative to the size of our problem, I want a solution to match,” he said. “I contend we can’t celebrate wins in terms of millimeters. We have to start measuring them in miles. … Let’s operate in bold colors.”
Those bold things involve spending cuts and strong economic growth. They do not include tax increases or doing more to collect all of the taxes owed under current law.
There is also the delicate matter of driving sustained growth without driving sustained inflation.
Brecheen, as a disciple of the late Sen. Tom Coburn, says the there is “plenty of money” if the federal government would stop doing things the U.S. Constitution doesn’t authorize it to do, but he acknowledges that won’t be easy.
For one thing, agreeing on what is authorized and what isn’t has never been easy. And then there is the argument of practical versus philosophical. The federal government got into things like flood control, old-age pensions and medical care, education and disaster relief because many states were doing such a poor job that the entire country was being pulled down.
Still, those revenue and debt projections, charted on a graph, are getting farther and farther apart. As things stand now, Medicare Part A will see mandatory cuts in about five years. Social Security faces them in about 10.
“My hope is, by speaking the truth in love to my colleagues, we can stiffen spines and say, ‘C’mon, let’s be the survival of our country ahead of our personal survival politically,’” Brecheen said.
Sooner or later, he added, “Interest is going to eat our lunch.”
Dr. Chris McNeil joins the podcast this week to explain that, in his opinion, because of a poor medical recruiting system, we are losing lives, talent and time. McNeil is the only Black male resident emergency physician in Tulsa, and starting July 1, he'll be the only one in the state. He has ideas on how and why that needs to change.
