Weekly Columns

This week, I hosted my annual agriculture tour of Arkansas’ Fourth District; traveling from Ozark to Hope, and many places in between. I always look forward to this week because I can spend considerable time speaking with farmers and ranchers about their challenges and about how I can highlight their needs to my colleagues in Congress.

Americans are struggling to pay the price for President Joe Biden’s energy policies. This winter, families are expected to pay the highest prices in over a decade to heat their homes. Natural gas prices continue to remain near a 14-year-high. As of Sunday, the national price for a gallon of gas was approximately $3.71 – over a dollar more than when President Biden took office. As Arkansans know, high energy costs effect every industry, especially food.

Since President Joe Biden’s first day in office, America has watched as he and Congressional Democrats hastened our economic instability and allowed shelves to go bare, communities to be ravaged by crime, and savings to evaporate. I’ve heard from many Arkansans who feel left behind. President Biden has sarcastically asked, “what are Republicans for?” Well, Mr.

I always look forward to August recess when I am able to spend time traveling across the Fourth District visiting with constituents and local officials to hear directly from them about the challenges their families, businesses, and communities are facing. When I hear the unvarnished truth from the people who are living with the choices made in Washington, D.C., I can do a better job of making government work with you and for you, not against you.

This week marks the 21^st anniversary of the horrific attacks on our nation that look nearly 3,000 innocent lives on September 11, 2001. 9/11 is known as one of the darkest days of American history. It changed the world forever and shaped a generation. In the days following the shocking attack, we turned as a country to process our grief and consider our next steps forward. The horrors of those days transformed into something the terrorists never intended. We came together to comfort and support each other in unprecedented unity.

President Joe Biden issued an Executive Order this week to transfer $500 billion of student loan debt onto the American taxpayers over the next ten years and extended the freeze on student debt repayments until January 2023, costing the taxpayers $5 billion per month.

This week, Congressional Democrats used a special procedural tool called “reconciliation” to pass a $745 billion bill through both chambers of Congress on a party line vote. The misleadingly named “Inflation Reduction Act,” (IRA) will raise taxes on every income bracket, hire 87,000 additional IRS agents to enforce those taxes, cut jobs, reduce medical innovation opportunities, and certainly worsen inflation. Moreover, this bill will result in approximately $130 billion in new debt that will be carried by our children and grandchildren.