Congressman Kevin Hern made a stop in Sapulpa and gave a town hall-style talk to a small group that had gathered in the upstairs meeting room of First United Bank (318 E Dewey). He began with a topic relevant to all Americans: the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
“Nobody will get a better tax deal than you have right now”
“Really, the reason for this is that throughout our entire working lives, every tax policy has had an expiration date on it, though we don’t think about it until we start seeing these brouhahas happen, whenever things are going to expire at the end of the year,” he began. “So this tax policy will be different because we’re making everything permanent.”
In addition to reducing non-military spending and enacting stricter eligibility requirements for SNAP and Medicaid, the bill seeks to resolve the impending lapse in the tax cuts that President Trump implemented in 2017. Hern said that if the cuts were allowed to lapse, “every single person in America will have a 22% tax increase. Every single person. We can’t have that happen.”
“Nobody will get a better tax deal than you have right now,” he said. “What you have right now is what you get to keep, which means that—assuming everything passes over the next couple of weeks, December 31st this year will just come and go.”
On May 22nd, the bill passed the House 215-214-1. Republicans Thomas Massie (Kentucky) and Warren Davidson (Ohio) broke from their party to vote against the bill, while Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris of Maryland voted present.
The bill is currently in negotiations in the Senate, with a goal to have it pass and be signed into law by President Trump on July 4th of this year.
“Nobody wants to go to war with Iran”
Someone in the crowd asked Hern about the conflict in the Middle East brewing between Israel and Iran, and whether or not America would get involved.
“This has been brewing for a while, and there is nobody, with the exception of one or two people in congress, that wants to go to war with Iran,” he said. “Because honestly, you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
In the same statement, Hern clarified that “everybody wants Iran not to have a nuclear weapon. We would be having a different conversation if they had an active nuclear weapon.”
Hern maintains that he doesn’t see the needed congressional approval to go to war with Iran, unless they fired upon a US Military Base, which Hern said “is very possible. But it would really be to their own demise to do that.”
Why are we not hearing much about the border anymore?
Mayor Craig Henderson brought up border security. “We hear a lot about the ICE raids and rounding up the illegal immigrants. We don’t hear a lot right now about border security. Do you know what’s currently going on at the border now?
Hern answered by revealing that the mayor was the first person to ask about the border in all the meetings he’d been to that week. “Everybody’s just taking it for granted that there’s nobody coming in anymore,” he said. “And here’s the headline: there’s been no law changes. We’ve not voted a single thing to change, it’s just enforcement.”
“Do you know that last month was the first time in years that there’s not been a single person released into the United States illegally? Compare that to May of last year—there were 62,000.”
Hern went into some sordid detail about what happens when families attempt to send their relatives to the US as he recounted a trip he took to the Reynosa International Bridge, which sits over the Rio Grande and connects Mexico to the United States.
“It was 107 degrees that day, and there were all these people walking up. They were carrying children that weren’t theirs from different parts of, you know, Central America and South America, because they got paid to do it, to be couriers for children.”
Hern said he visited the facility where these children were being held, and noticed a little girl waiting to see a doctor, who had writing in permanent marker on her feet. He asked one of the border patrol agents about it.
“They’ve learned that when the parents and the the aunts and the uncles send their kids and grandkids from South America or Central America or Mexico—to write Mexican on their feet, because most of the time, these girls are raped about six or seven times at 12, 13 years-old, and most of them, many times, don’t live, and so they need to know where to send the body to. So that’s the kind of crap that was going on in real life, and that’s all stopped now.”
Hern concluded his talk by discussing the other ways that the government was looking to to put a stop to the illegal activity, including a remittance bill he introduced in 2023 with J.D. Vance, who was a senator at the time. The bill is based on a similar policy in Oklahoma.
“Oklahoma is the only state in the nation currently that if you wire any money outside the state of Oklahoma, there’s a 1% charge on it,” he said. “You get it back if you file a legal Oklahoma tax return at the end of the year, it’s like a credit back to you. If you don’t file, the money stays in the Oklahoma treasury. And Oklahoma’s received about $60 million in forfeited monies.”
The federal bill passed and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will generate between $2 to $3 billion a year in forfeited monies.
