Senator Inhofe stops by Ponca City

U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe, who is a pilot on the side flew himself into Ponca City this morning. He took a minute to sit down at the airport, and chat with me about re-election and the Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby ruling.

Inhofe said his thoughts on the Green Family, who own Hobby Lobby is different from anyone else. They are different because he knew the family before they were a large franchise and were just a small operation out of their garage.

“He cares enough for the Lord and what it stands for to risk losing it all,” Inhofe said. “How many people have that much courage? I can’t believe it wasn’t a unanimous decision, that it was five to four. I’ll buy that in a heartbeat, but I can’t imagine what was going through the minds of the four United States Supreme Court justices who would vote against this issue. I am very excited about it. I was worried about it because you never know what the courts are going to do and as I said the Greens were risking everything.”

Since a majority of the justices voted in favor of Hobby Lobby they aren’t required to pay for contraception coverage for their female workers. Inhofe would like to see more things go in his favor like that Hobby Lobby case, so he is running for re-election.

“There are three things that nobody else does in the United State Senate and this is the main reason,” Inhofe said. “First of all, we have a president named Obama, who is destroying our military. He has his War on Fossil Fuels so we can be totally independent today but, he won’t let us do that. His over regulation is killing people, not just in Oklahoma but throughout the country. I take them one at a time. And again I considered not doing it but knowing we’re going to have him for four more years I thought nobody else is there to handle these three issues.”

Inhofe said Obama has been disarming our military since he first took office.

“Rather than take my word for it, because a lot people out there just aren’t aware what he’s doing to the military,” Inhofe said. “General Dempsey is the number one military guy in America, he is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he says that ‘our force is so degraded and so unready that it would be unmoral to use force and that’s the problem we have right now.’”

The second issue under Inhofe’s belt is the War on Fossil Fuels. Fossil fuels are coal, oil and gas, and Inhofe said we have enough of these resources in our country to serve our people.

“If he would allow us to go into federal land we would not have to be relying upon any other country to generate the energy necessary, the electricity necessary to run America,” Inhofe said. “And while the shale revolution that we’ve had increased our production in the last five years by 61 percent, but it’s all in-state and private land. On federal land, we’ve actually had a reduction in development so all we need to do is get him to agree to allow us, like every other country in the world does we would be totally self sufficient.”

Inhofe’s third project is one he said no other U.S. Senator is talking about.

“If you talk to Tom Buchanan, the head of the Oklahoma Farm Bureau he’ll tell you the biggest problems that our farmers are facing are not anything that would be found in the Farm Bill,” Inhofe said “It’s the over regulation of the EPA on endangered species, where they can’t plow their fields for fear of running into some kind of a varying beetle or what they’re trying to do with the water runoffs on these farms in Oklahoma.”

These are the three issues Inhofe plans to keep on top of if he gets re-elected. Inhofe won his primary election by a strong majority, with 87 percent of votes. He will face-off against democratic candidate, Matt Silverstein on the November ballot.