James Lankford: “I do appreciate the leadership on the Intelligence Committee and for the leadership that has been there. I would concur.…”

“I do appreciate the leadership on the Intelligence Committee and for the leadership that has been there. I would concur. You have a spot to be able to lead and a task to be able to be done. You have studied this, so that must mean you know it. We look forward to your leadership in the days ahead. I appreciate that very much. National Debt Mr. President, I do want to speak on a very different subject as well, and it is a subject that we are all going to face in the days ahead. It is this wonderful issue of a government shutdown. We seem to forget, at times in this body, the issues that press around us, but the one that seems to get slipped under the rug most of the time is that of national debt: where we are and how we are going to try to address this in the days ahead. The conversation comes up--it seems to be on a regular basis now--about are we going to have a government shutdown; and the conversation of a government shutdown ends up being a very small portion of the very large debt that we face. The challenge is, how do we actually address that based on its size? Well, let me just give you a little bit of context as to what I am talking about. We are, right now, preparing, within days, to cross into $33 trillion in total Federal debt--$33 trillion. To give some context of that acceleration of Federal debt and what is happening during this time period, from the time of Andrew Jackson--who was the last President who was President when we had no debt at all.…”