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Rep. James Lankford

Mr. Speaker, today is day 1,001 since the Senate has passed a budget. In addition to that, Mr. Speaker, the President has notified this body that his budget will also be late this year. Now, that may be a couple days, it may be a week--we don't know exactly how late that's going to be at this point. And last night, at the State of the Union Address, he spent exactly 3 percent of the speech talking about debt and deficits. We have $15.3 trillion worth of debt right now in our Nation. It is a major issue for us. It slows down our economy.

I was very pleased to hear him talk about an all-of-the-above energy strategy though, and I'm very focused on that exact same thing. But I did have a couple things that need to be cleared up. He mentioned basically that hydraulic fracking and the process of recovering shale gas was a Federal project and a Federal invention. Well, I'd like to inform everyone that since 1949, we have done that in Oklahoma. And the chemicals that he mentioned, we need to get out there and stop concealing them. If you go to fracfocus.org, Mr. Speaker, you will already find all those hydraulic chemicals out there. So we need to clear those things up.