Nsa might be knowing what phone calls or numbers go in and out of my phone and intercepting some of my emails and that sort of thing, it is hard for us to see how it impacts our lives. It is different from the economy and jobs and obamacare. It may be more of an intellectual exercise that does not really rise to the top of the political debates. We will watch to see how all of the issues unfold. Charles babington, karen tumulty, thank you. I appreciate it. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2013] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] on monday1, a conversation with former Vice President dick cheney and his daughter, who announced her run as republican senate. 7 30 p. M. Eastern. , tuesday morning, outgoing Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano will get remarks at the National Press club. Shecertain cease served since 2009. Republican senator tom coburn held a town hall friday. This is an hour and 10 minutes. On monday you good . Good afternoon. We are on time. Welcome. It is good to visit with you. I will be a little slow this evening. This is the fifth one i have done today. Bear with me. It drag you down more than you think. I will not spend a lot of time talking, but i do want to hear from you. There are a lot of concerns in our country, not any of them on solvable unsolvable, but theyre big and problematic. If i were to assess where we are today, and its a Constitutional Republic we have is at risk for the very reasons our forefathers talked about. The abandonment of constitutional principles, especially the enumerated powers. It has treated situations where we find ourselves leaving a legacy to our children i certainly cannot be proud of and i know most of you will not be proud of. Our unfunded liabilities right now are 126 trillion when you add them all up. That includes the 17 trillion plus the rest of the unfunded. That includes the 17 trillion that we owed plus the rest of the unfunded liabilities. Essentially, the game is up. The problem is we do not have any Visionary Leadership in our country in either party that will stand up and talk about what the real principles and problems are. We have undermined Self Reliance in the name of being charitable. We have abdicated personal responsibility in the name of being fair. We are following in the footsteps of whatever historian has noticed about every Constitutional Republic they do not last. The reason they do not laos is because we concentrate power in the Central Government and give away freedom and create fiscal policies that undermine the economy that supports the growth and vibrancy of our country. I think theyre all solvable. The questions i asked publicly and privately is all of these big problems, why are we not addressing them in the congress . I hear from oklahomans about the fact that we need to work together. I have an observation on that. Were going to have an 800 billion deficit this year. Congress approved that. I would say were working together to well. [laughter] we have agencies rife with fraud that congress has agreed not to do anything about. I think were working too well together. Our biggest problem, in my estimation, is not our country and not our people. It is the elitism that comes from career politics that dominates our congress and our country. [applause] a was asked today and asked the law i was asked today and asked a lot about what we can do about it. Throw them out does not work unless you replace them with andple that are different. You a as i is 70 of the senate essentially has never had a job out of career politics. They are wonderful people. I get along great with dick durbin. I like him as an individual. Our philosophies are entirely different. He means well, as well as many of the of the people that promote what i would consider policies that will undermine our future liberties. The thing is they lack a frame of reference from experience in the world like our farmers sitting over here that nose, like our insurance agents, our policemen that are here to have done something with their lives outside of elective politics. It does not do any good to throw them all out. I have been convinced, in the last week or so i have read a book called the liberty of amendments. I used to have a great fear of a constitutional convention. I have a great fear now of not having one. 3 4 of the states would have to approve anything approved through that. I do not think there is a lot of danger from our republic in us taking back control from washington and honoring the 10th amendment, enhancing federalism, and recreating a sense of personal responsibility and accountability at the individual, city, and state level. I had a fire chief get upset with me today because i do not see any role in the federal government for us to be buying fire engines for states and cities. The danger with that is you become addicted to the largess of the federal government who says theyre giving you something but are actually stealing it from your children and grandchildren. I do not think we have problems we cannot solve. We lack leaders thinking long term and understand what makes our country great or has made our country great is the very fact we enhance personal responsibility, hard work. We do not condition dependency more so than what is needed, rather than to create an environment where you do not have to help yourself. I am thankful each of you are here today. We have had a big turnout at town hall meetings. Were talking to the choir. He would not be here. He would not be here unless you were concerned and had an interest in it. Were going to do questions. I will try to answer to the best of my ability. We have one rule. We do not let go of the microphone. I learned a long time ago if i let go of the microphone, it may be 20 minutes before i get it back. I will go as long as you want to be here. Almost as long as you want to be here, until my blood sugar get so low that i will go eat some ribs. That is not a commercial. That is just my favorite place to eat in town. Who wants to ask the first question . We have a microphone right here. I appreciate your being here. If not for you, we would not have any senator at a town hall meeting. You touched on the topic of wanted to hear about, personal responsibility. There is no accountability in the government, ok . You, with all of these Great Research papers on fraud and waste. Nothing happens. The constitution does not seem to matter anymore. Obama, i cannot work with him so i will do it this way. Nobody seems to object. The only people punished where the i am going to make you get to a question. My point is lets not talk three years to the next president. What are we going to do in the next 12 months to correct the course . Are you going to go on his show and talk about his book . Right now, i am out of favor with the lavigne show because i do not think it is a smart strategy to shut down the government to defend obamacare. Our economy is so precarious right now. Shutting down the government will not stop obamacare. It will continue to roll out. We are limited. A couple of points i would make. Republicans control the house of representatives. That is 1 6 of the total government. We do not control the presidency, we do not control the senate. The second point i would make is when they do those things, as a u. S. Senator, i do not have standing in a court of law i have letters out right now chastising a Justice Department asking why they have not cooperated with the Government Accountability office. By law, they have to cooperate. Except this administration is refusing to do so on multiple events across multiple agencies. I think a lot of ways, they are loyalists in terms of their behavior to congress. The leadership in the congress, especially the senate, is designed for shortterm political gain, not designed to solve the problems of our country. The reason i can say that is the numbers i just gave you in terms of our unfunded liabilities, you would think we would be addressing those issues. 100 billion a year in fraud in medicare. I have three bills that i cannot get considered. I know something about health care and insurance and medicare. The point is my desire is great. My ability to continue to push boulders up is limited because there are not the votes there to help me. We have great people. I love mike lee. We differ on the shut down strategy. He is a great patriot. We have 20 or 30 guys like him. But that is not enough. Until you change to is there, you are not going to change. I do not have a great answer for you. I will keep fighting and oversighting, keep putting out reports. I have offered more amendments on the floor than anyone else combined. I held more bills and appointments than almost anybody else there. My first rule book is the u. S. Constitution. It is not the republican party. It is the u. S. Constitution. We will keep fighting. But remember, the press is not balanced in this country. There is a bias, a hard left bias in the press. You put it out there and makes common sense, but they will not cover. Next one. Thank you for being here today. Last week, it was the first time i have been to one of these. This is the first time i have been to hear you. I am proud of what you do for our state and how you represent us. I just wish there were 100 like you. I have been around a few years. I am reminded of when Strom Thurmond said 100 here and there and soon were talking about real money. I wish we were still talking about 1 million here and there. Now were talking about billions. Were getting desensitized about money, where it goes and what not. We have a debt limit coming up next month, actually in october. I am reminded that we pay our bills. Im reminded that we pay our bills. This is not money to spend. Is to pay what we already spent. That is the whole point. When are you going to quit spending so we do not have to keep raising the debt limit to pay our bills . That is the problem as i see it. That is just a basic. So your question is . Why do we keep letting them spend our money . I thought congress was the one that allocated money. How did they get this billions of dollars to give away . We have got Serious Problems in this country that this money could go to. The answer, first of all the federal budget under the Johnson Administration was unified. Social security access monies started in our deficit five years ago. There is mandatory spending that congress then appropriates. It is the vast majority of spending. That is why shutting down the government over obamacare will not top obamacare. 85 of it is mandatory spending. There is some good news on that front. Over the last two years, we have spent about 160 billion less on discretionary programs than we did the two years before. That is the first time that happened to since the korean war. We did it once in 1996 when we did a package when i went into congress, which ultimately resulted in us balancing the budget. The extrapolation of that 64 billion came out to be 130 billion a year. It was a big deal. This is a bad way of doing it, a sequester, but it is a whole lot better than not doing it at all. It is like when your wife asks you to pick the weeds. You take the lawnmower and mow everything. That is what we are doing. If you go on our website, we put out a whole lot of sequester letters to the administration. What we were hearing from the president , how bad sequester is going to be, how all this, what was going to be 17 days of furloughs is now down to four on only 50 of agencies. Necessity is the mother of invention. There is still, after the sequester, 250 billion appear fraught of pure fraud, waste, and deprecation in the federal government every year. And we have nothing done nothing about that. The question is, wheres is the leadership to do that . What im telling you, it is not there. I do not see it. It is not in my party and not in the other party. Certainly not the president he thinks we need to spend more money, not less. A big portion of that social security, medicare, medicaid, veterans benefits, all mandatory spending, unless we reform those programs they are going to continue to grow, and massively. But i will show the 30year projections of spending. And the 30year projections of revenue. It is totally unsustainable. We are at 17 trillion of debt. In 10 years, we will be at 30 trillion. That is a great sidebar, whether we will get there. Whether the International Community will continue to loan us money. Whether the Federal Reserve will continue to print money at Interest Rates. If we were at historical Interest Rates today for what we borrowed in the last 2030 years, we would have another 1 trillion of deficit in interest costs. Historic is 5. 89 , and we are paying 1. 35 now. Instead of 233 billion in interest cost a year, we would have 1 trillion in interest costs. That is a 1 trillion you are not going to pay. Your kids are going to pay. How they are going to pay it is through a markedly decreased standard of living. The inability to purchase a home, inability to send kids to college. That is what is going to happen. And we need to change it. That is why i said that i am afraid not to have a constitutional convention. I do not think we have time to waste. I think mark 11 has done a terrific levin has done a terrific job. He is pretty harsh sometimes, but we have real problems and they need real solutions. Nobody else is offering anything that comes close to it. Welcome home, senator coburn. Thank you. Are you aware the bureau of Land Management office in salsa is reposing to consolidate it with Oklahoma City at a cost to taxpayers of 2. 5 million, and it will take 20 years to reach recoup those moving cost us . No, i am not. I would love to have the details on it. If you will either give that to connie or one of my staff, the details. Do you recognize we spend 5 billion a year maintaining buildings the federal government owns that are empty . And that rather than moving into buildings and buying them, now the agencies lease them. Why is that . Because of the stupid accounting rule that says if you buy a building you have to expense it in the year you bought it. Anyone here who has ever bought a building knows that you do not write off the whole building the first year you buy it. The government will not let you write off the building in the first year you buy it. There is no way that the federal government cannot save tremendous amounts of money not owning their own buildings and getting rid of the excess property. I have been trying to do that for five years. I got a bill that taxed attached Real Property reform to the postal reform bill. I have an agreement with tom carper. We are not taking it out. We will reform Real Property, the way it is handled by the federal government, and save a ton of money. I believe john locke said that the purpose of government is to protect private property. When i look at what is going on now, the irs is collecting our financial data, ready soon you will be collecting all our healthcare data. They are collecting our email, all our web access. They will be using our kids to collect family data that is very personal. Plus, we do not get a salary until the government takes their percentage. Freddie and fannie hold liens on all our homes and 401 k or ira. A 10 penalty or wait forever. So my question is 65 is not forever. [laughter] do not put me in that group yet. Ok, almost forever. Anyway, what kind of republican party, and you as a senator or group of senators, can do to restore our privacy and stop the progressive tax code to steal the rest of our property . [applause] let me have a philosophical point first. We had an election in 2012. The republicans did not do so well, did they . My observation is everyone in the world knows what we are against, but nobody knows what we are for. When all they hear about is what we are against, they quit listening. The first thing we need to be is talking about a positive vision of how we restore our country, and what it means to you. What does it actually mean if we restore . What does it mean to your kids . What does it mean as far as personal liberty and private property . You forgot to mention that all these enrollers for obama care will look at every bit of your tax staff and every bit of your medical stuff. These are people who have not had the background screen, have not been looked at. You are just going to trust the average person on the street with some of the most personal information you have. If, in fact, you want to enroll. If you do not enroll, we will find you. We will fine you with a, quote, tax, our Supreme Court justice manipulated the words on. I think the first thing we have to do is talk about success. That means Something Different to each of us. Whether it means im a great poet or i have built a business or i am a physician or a great carpenter or policeman. We need to reenhance what it means to be successful. In contrast with what it means to be dependent. I have been working on this for six months. My staff, you have a great staff in washington. They are not careerists. Most of them are young, but they are very smart. The average age is probably 35 or 40. We have been researching all the government benefits, and right now if you are a family and you take advantage of every Government Program available you can receive almost 50,000 without taxes per year on the backs of us. On the backs of us. Now, my faith says to help those that need help. That is not helping. Ultimately, that is hurting. It is hurting everybody. So i would recommend, and i may have done this at a town hall meeting before here. There is a book, i believe, every concerned citizen ought to read. It is called the tragedy of american compassion. It is written by a guy by the name of marvin olasky. He outlines the history of how americans use to help people who need help. It was highly effective. In terms of turning peoples lives around. If, in fact, they wanted help to continue. Kind of like you would discipline your child, how you would change behavior. So i think we have a long ways to go in terms of doing that. All these programs are multiply wellintentioned, but administered in such a way and run in such a way that they totally undermine selfreliance. We need