That would be an important development, nationally and for the state of Oklahoma, because the Environment and Public Works Committee oversees the Department of Transportation and the Army Corps of Engineers, which operates and maintains the McClellan-Kerr system.

The Environmental Protection Agency is also under the purview of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

The Port Authority, and many of the businesses at the port, have been concerned for some time about the navigation channel's maintenance. The corps has identified $100 million in critical repairs and says almost all of the locks need overhauling.

Current legislation addresses some of that, but Inhofe had little to say about its prospects except that the situation is similar with land transportation but that the Obama administration is more concerned with "global-warming stuff" than infrastructure and the military.

Inhofe said he "wistfully" looks back on the Cold War, when "we knew what they had and they knew what we had. ... Mutually assured destruction, remember that? That was what people held up as our salvation.

"Mutually assured destruction means nothing" to Iran, Inhofe said. "They want to die."