U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) recently joined the Senate Republican Conference Podcast, “The Elephant in the Room,” to discuss his experience with starting a business, his unexpected journey to Congress, and the importance of American energy independence.

Click here to listen to the full episode.

Speaking about his journey to Congress, Mullin describes the first moment he considered running for office:

“They [the Obama Administration] put me out of business in just a few days…Some faceless bureaucrat made the decision to change the regulation, not legislation, the regulation, and it literally put me out of business…We have a saying in the family, ‘You’ll never change anything you are willing to tolerate.’ I came home and complained about it and my wife said, ‘are you running for office?’ I said heck no…I made my trip up to Washington, D.C. Didn’t own a suit. Didn’t own a tie. Didn’t know how to tie a tie. Within two weeks, I was in the race.”

Mullin continues, laying out why American energy independence is a top priority:

“You cannot have a reliable and affordable economy if you do not have reliable and affordable energy. If you show me a country without reliable and affordable energy, I will show you a third world country. Energy is the backbone of every economy. It is where inflation lives and inflation dies…The Democrat party has decided energy is bad. Yet, every single one of them are wearing something with a petroleum-based product in it today.”

“Let’s take the policy out of the hands of Washington, D.C. and put it back in the states. Where it belongs to begin with… Fracking is the renaissance to our energy independence…Now, we have bigger reserves than Saudi Arabia. We had the largest reserves in the world. Who was permitting that? It was the states. The states figured out how to do it – not federal government… Let the people of that state make the decision for themselves…I’m saying [to the federal government] get out of our way.”