The Oklahoma State Capital

"Nothing good happens after midnight!"

It wasn't just an unspoken rule; it is actually in the rule book of the Oklahoma House of Representatives. And to suspend that rule is to cross the Rubicon.

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As first-generation majority Republicans, we set about reforming the Oklahoma Legislature — and Oklahoma government — from what we believed were decades of Democrat corruption, corruption built into the Legislature by years of a one-party majority that didn’t fear accountability.

Their actions had invariably resulted in an array of tricks and twists, one of which was late-night sessions, and another was the end-of-session trick of "covering the clock," a tradition that held up until the late 1970s and that nicely highlighted that majority’s contempt for the intelligence of the people of Oklahoma.

In the first decade of majority Republican leadership in the Oklahoma House, many of the members — even those who weren’t so dedicated to reform and instead preferred to surf on the bad system put in place by Democrats — still likely understood the need for there to at least be a perception that Republicans understood the culture of corruption and wanted to change it.

As such, I can't recall a single time, at least not in my memory, when legislators sought to suspend the House rule that requires the House to end daily business before midnight.

Working past midnight would, at the very least, in a symbolic sense, send a dangerous message to the people of Oklahoma: we are so arrogant that we can legislate upon the taxpayer while the taxpayer sleeps and can’t have their voice heard.

Now, there was no doubt plenty of temptation to suspend this rule. In that era, the newly-minted "minority" Democrats still had spirit. They weren’t the placid betas of this era — a tepid group, small in number, whose modus operandi seems to be more aligned with enabling the corrupt status quo in a uniparty-type approach more accustomed to coalition leadership than to holding the majority accountable through debate and exposure of corruption.

No, those were the Democrats of Morrissette, Toure, Proctor, Inman, Lamons, and Dorman: feisty fighters who sought to understand the rules and would drag out a legislative session to force the majority to bend to their will.

And there were Republicans too, such as John Wright and Mike Reynolds, who also insisted on accountability and the role of process.

And the rules of that time actually enabled and respected debate. In that era, a member had a right to make a motion on the floor and could force an issue. In this era, a member has no right to make a motion, and debate isn’t even allowed on certain types of bills.

So, all of that to say: this generation of legislative leaders has much less of an excuse for working past business hours than their Republican majority predecessors, as the culture of the institution that is the House of Representatives has become tepid and cowed, unable to resist — even if a minority of them were so inclined to do so — and thus, there’s little to slow down the rapid approval of countless bad proposals that define this legislative group.

And, in fact, through much of the session, when legislative leadership wanted to present themselves as deliberative-minded in defense of their latest rules implementation, House leaders would point to the fact that there had not been late-night sessions, as justifying their rules proposal — a sleight-of-hand argument, given the above-described circumstances, that at the very least seemed to show that legislative leaders at least understood the perception that working into the night is a bad practice.

All of that faux logic dissipated on Thursday, May 29, the next-to-last day of session.

With various transparency rules suspended, word reportedly spread around the Capitol: something big is afoot. It's going to be a real surprise.

By five o’clock, as the average working Oklahoman closed his business day and went home to take care of his family, that surprise still hadn’t materialized.

What was going to happen?

It wasn’t until well into the evening that legislators showed their hand: they planned to decapitate a state agency of its leadership, sans any meaningful due process.

Now, House rules require the House to give the public at least a day to see and realize what is going on before legislators can take action on a concurrent resolution that gives rise to debate.

But that wasn’t going to stop the House from their plan: a midnight execution.

First step: suspend the important House rule that requires the House to cease its business by midnight. A uniparty coalition just barely met the 68-vote threshold to get this done.

Only four courageous House members opposed this atrocity: Gann, Jenkins, Shaw, and Rick West. If those names seem familiar, it’s because time and again, they are the last defenders of deliberative process and seekers of accountability to the people. They are a thin last line of sanity. The remainder either missed the vote or, for whatever shocking reason, believed it acceptable for the House to do business after midnight — when the taxpayers paying their salaries are asleep and unable to have their voice heard. This is most certainly a vote that should and must be used in the upcoming campaign cycle, as it was truly precedent-setting. A crossing-the-Rubicon vote. And each and every one of the uniparty lemmings who voted on that suspension was the deciding vote.

Once the House suspends the midnight rule once, the Rubicon has been crossed, and a shocking new precedent has been set — an all-time low — and this Pandora’s box is unlikely to be re-capped.

Now freed from worrying about the clock, House leaders set about implementing their decapitation: the removal of the director of the state’s mental health department.

The narrative of the legislators: the governor’s appointee to head that department has been incompetent and unable to manage the agency.

The narrative of the governor: his appointee hasn’t yet had the time to restore the good standing of a department that appears riddled with either incompetency or corruption — or both. And worse, that corruption may very well have attachments to the Legislature itself.

That said, even if one is inclined to believe the first — or some similarity thereof — the shocking lack of due process, in no way, shape, or form befitting a parliamentary body of a first-world government, should have guided the legislators' vote.

But a betting man, if forced to choose between these two narratives, would be well advised to bet on the second narrative.

And the Legislature’s decision to work past midnight, conducting an execution without due process, certainly bolsters the credibility of this narrative.

Can one imagine any other process in which a charging document is filed for public consumption well into the evening, and then a verdict rendered and an execution carried out at the stroke of midnight?

Of course — that type of action is the hallmark of a third-world tyranny. And those who mindlessly supported the midnight execution showed that their legislative institutions are more characteristic of the third world — French-Revolution-style mobs guillotining their perceived enemies, with no meaningful due process — not even a show trial.

Had legislators had a sense of the importance of at least the appearance of due process, they could have conducted a show trial more characteristic of a second-world government body, where the accused can appear and try to answer the charges with at least a modicum of time to defend themselves in the court of public opinion before the verdict is rendered and the execution carried out. An example of this type of second-world processes, are the examples set by congressional democrats in their two impeachments of Donald Trump.

However, in this case, there was no opportunity for even a defense. Only an immediate execution.

This manner of doing business should send a chill to anyone who would do business with the state of Oklahoma. Were I to be a competitor from another state, I would present this as Exhibit A of how corrupt the state government has become, and I would ask: would you want this corrupt Legislature sitting in charge of your business's ability to succeed or fail? Just look at how they treat their own executive agency heads.

And this will send a powerful message to anyone foolish enough to attempt to reform a corrupt state agency: your ability to do so is, more likely than not, correlated to your ability to navigate a corrupt group of politicians.

Giving even more rise to this concern is the fact that the wife of the Senate author of this resolution reportedly works for the agency in question.

Can you imagine being the supervisor of that particular individual? Every decision would have to be put through the filter of, will this please the powerful legislator who has the ability to, with no due process, decapitate the head of my agency?

Talk about pressure.

That legislator didn’t have to be the one to sponsor the decapitation. Any member of the Senate could have done this. Are the people supposed to believe that his decision to do so was simply one of bad judgment so extreme that it's almost impossible to come to terms with — or was it meant to send a message?

At the end of the day, quite literally, there were only six legislators with the awareness and the courage to stand against the mob and the midnight execution.

The House mob of cowardly hangmen wouldn’t conclude their rampage until 1:46 a.m. the next morning — only hours before hardworking Oklahomans, mostly unbeknownst to what had occurred, would awake to go back to work, to earn the income that will be taxed to fund this third-world insanity.

For more reading on the activities of this day, one should see articles by the V1SUT Substack and Janelle Stecklein of Oklahoma Voice.

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