James Lankford, who is pictured above, represents the State of Oklahoma in the United States Senate. He is a Republican. His campaign website tells voters that, "James Lankford is a strong conservative leader committed to God, Family, and the Constitution." While I don't know anything, really, about his spiritual or family life, it does look to me - if The New York Times is telling the truth - that Lankford's claim about his commitment to the Constitution has been borne out in practice.
On Sunday, August 18, 2024, Lankford was profiled in a New York Times' "Interview" conducted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Lankford is described in the Times' headline as "The Man Who Tried to Solve Immigration for the G.O.P."
If you have been keeping up with presidential politics, you will remember that Democrats in Congress (joined by both President Biden and Vice President Harris) agreed to support revisions to current federal law, in an effort to address the claims, made most notably by former president Donald Trump, that massive and illegal immigration is posing a huge threat to the United States. The proposed immigration legislation was negotiated by "a bipartisan trio of senators, and the Republican in that group was Senator James Lankford."
Lankford, who arrived in the House as part of the Tea Party movement in 2011 and became a senator in 2015, clearly has big political ambitions; he’s currently running for Senate leadership. And for months, he worked on that immigration bill with Senators Kyrsten Sinema, an independent from Arizona, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut. Their negotiation was a rare show of bipartisanship in Congress, and after getting sign-off from both party leaders in the Senate and an endorsement from the White House, the bill looked as if it was going to become law. It would have been the first major piece of bipartisan legislation on immigration in decades.
But then Donald Trump came out against it — he didn’t want to give President Biden a political win on such a sensitive issue during an election year. And even though the bill contained most of the hard-line policies that the right wanted, it became toxic among Republicans. In the end, only four Republican senators voted for the bill, it tanked and Lankford was left holding the bag (emphasis added).
Trump, in other words - and again, this is not news if you have been following recent presidential politics - killed a bill that would have addressed what Trump has claimed is a massive national crisis and a threat to both the economy and public safety. Trump was more interested in maintaining his political "talking point" than in actually solving the problem he portrays as such a threat.
Here is a statement by Lankford that highlights something that we all need to understand (emphasis in the original):
How much independence does your body of legislators have from what Trump does or doesn’t want for the party? I mean, you are a separate branch of government. Yeah, we are. I have folks that will tell me when President Trump was president, “OK, he’s the boss.” And I would say: “No, he’s not. He’s a coequal branch.” I don’t work for the president. I work for the people of Oklahoma. That’s who I work for. I think we do have to protect that constitutional integrity of government and how things are set up.
The President is not "the boss." LOTS of people are a bit unclear about that - not just Republicans in Congress.
Our Constitution establishes a system based on the supremacy of the legislature, not the president. Congress makes the laws. The President's main job is to "see that the laws are faithfully executed."
Lankford gets some credit, in my book, for understanding this basic principle. I wish all the rest of the Republicans understood this, too!
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