The Oklahoma State Capital

Over the past few days, gubernatorial candidate Jake Merrick has gone viral throughout grassroots social media, as he has repeatedly gone live with real-time, on-the-ground livestreams from outside Children’s Hospital in Oklahoma City. With the energy and heartfelt passion that have defined Merrick—a dark horse candidate for governor who, most notably, refuses to take lobbyist money—he has shocked viewers with reports of a yet another social services effort to strip an Oklahoma parent of her parental rights.

On the surface, and based on Merrick’s initial recounting of events, it appears to be yet another stunning overreach by the state. Acting on what appears to be the aggressiveness of a medical professional who lacks respect for parental rights and the patient’s right to self-determination, the incident has further damaged public trust in Oklahoma’s social services and medical communities. It adds to the growing list of potential abuses that have fueled a grassroots desire to once again pursue omnibus reform of the state’s human service agency.

As grassroots interest and outrage build—and as citizen-led organizations begin to activate—a handful of people-minded legislators are already engaging. These legislators, though still far too few in number, remain essential to keeping the government in check. Without them, the bureaucracies would run rampant, unchecked by the biased corporate media, who are unlikely to inform the public about abuses of power within government institutions, especially those involving parental control and medical overreach. These concepts are now almost universally alien to the corporate media’s leftist worldview, a worldview held by so many who dominate that space, even in conservative Oklahoma.

It’s now incumbent upon the independent media—using the power of social engagement—and the conscientious legislators to stand as the thin wall between government overreach and the people.

Here’s the problem.

In 1997, then–House Speaker Loyd Benson secured approval for a reform that became vital to holding DHS accountable: a Title 10 law allowing a conscientious legislator, with the Speaker’s consent, to personally review internal Department of Human Services case files.

During my twelve years as a state representative, I found that law absolutely essential to fulfilling my duty as a representative of the people. When confronted with accusations of DHS overreach, as invariably happens even in more routine cases, I could request the confidential file, read every page, and determine for myself whether the complaint was legitimate and deserving of attention—or whether there was more to the story than the public could see. At times, information that couldn’t be made public—rightly so—may have proved to justify the actions of DHS employees, enabling me to respond with good judgment instead of pure impulse.

My willingness to take that role seriously—to read the many, many pages of documentation—helped keep my local DHS accountable. They knew I could access those materials and that my honest, fair assessment could expose any misconduct. And if they did act improperly, I always had the constitutional right to make their actions public through legislative speech—a vital safeguard that, in my view, allows a lawmaker to take to the House floor and expose wrongdoing, even when the evidence lies within “confidential” documents that the public cannot see and not activist judge could put a gag order on my speech.

Over time, Oklahoma’s leaders—from the constitutional framers to Benson’s 1997 reform—built this robust system of checks and balances. When placed in the hands of wise and thoughtful legislators who understand the weight and purpose of this authority, it provides a powerful means of holding even a massive bureaucracy like DHS, or local, corrupt judges, to account.

Today’s leaders? Not so wise. And that’s the problem.

As Oklahoma lawmakers prepare to examine this latest case of alleged DHS misconduct, they face a new obstacle. Unlike the leadership of my time, today’s legislative leadership appears, in my view, to be working hand in hand with the DHS bureaucracy—to restrict the ability of conscientious legislators to review those case files directly.

That’s because Oklahoma DHS Director Jeff Cartmell appears to be, unconstitutionally enforcing a “DHS policy” that restricts the Title 10 statute. Instead of doing as his predecessors did—simply providing the file to the requesting legislator so it could be reviewed thoroughly, carefully, and on the legislator’s own time without DHS supervision—Cartmell is reportedly requiring lawmakers to travel to the DHS building, where they must first sign what are, in my view, unconstitutional confidentiality agreements before being allowed to review documents that are then likely pieced out under the watchful eyes of DHS bureaucrats.

This shocking “policy” likely prevents legislators from knowing whether they’ve even seen the entire file. It likely enables DHS to bury lawmakers—who are taken away from their offices and legislative duties—with an initial dump of mundane paperwork, knowing that an inexperienced legislator may not know what documents to request. Instead of receiving the complete file, the naive legislator potentially ends up with only a piecemeal, partial view—spending valuable hours away from their work before ever reaching the most relevant information, thus greatly discouraging them from even trying to do real oversight, in the first place.

These control mechanisms give the DHS bureaucracy powerful leverage over the Legislature and the ability to intimidate and channel legislative oversight in ways that are, in my view, chilling and far-reaching.

Now, at this point, one might reasonably ask: Why would legislative leadership allow such a humiliating usurpation of its authority—and its constitutional duty to provide oversight on behalf of the people of Oklahoma?

My take is as follows.

During the Hickman, McCall, and Hilbert years, a consolidation of power has taken hold—dating back to 2014. This consolidation, which places all meaningful authority in the hands of the Speaker of the House, has destroyed the original ethos of the first-generation Republican majority, which sought to disperse concentrated power among the members of the House of Representatives.

When all power rests in the Speaker’s hands, oversight becomes a privilege, not a duty. Only the Speaker—and those in his circle—can use it. And if they refuse, there’s no danger that some rogue, truth-driven legislator will “embarrass” them by trying to do the job their conscience and the people require of them.

And so, in those years, time and again, across so many different areas, oversight and meaningful responsibility have been stripped away from the average legislator. They are now virtually incapable of performing their constitutional duties—especially when it comes to holding a large agency like DHS to account.

Frankly, DHS has little to fear from the average legislator, so long as the agency enjoys the favor of the Speaker. In today’s House of Representatives, a member cannot even enter a motion onto the floor without the Speaker’s permission—a horrendous policy abuse instituted by Charles McCall in 2019. If that member tries to file a reform bill, there is no guarantee it will even receive a first vote in committee. And when state representatives like Tom Gann propose measures such as the Gann Plan—to guarantee a fair hearing for all bills—the Speaker and his many green-voting lemmings simply table it without taking the time to so much as record the vote for the people to see.

Thus, the conscientious legislator is reduced to little more than a press release. Or was—until even that right was curtailed. During the McCall/Echols administration, lawmakers’ press releases were censored by House employees, who serve “at will” under the Speaker himself. It is a policy that continues under the Hilbert administration, where the legislator is still censored, their ability to communicate with the public suppressed. In my view, leadership fears even the discussion of certain issues in the public square.

This is tyranny. And it is not befitting of a representative republic of the first world—certainly not of a Western-style government that claims to value transparency and self-governance.

So the question now is simple: Is your representative a “green-voting lemming”—someone who has enabled this abuse?

You can find out for yourself in this year’s edition of the Capitol Conformity Report exclusively from The Capital, made possible by the many generous donors who have signed up for paying subscriptions to this publication.

If your representative votes “green” 90 percent of the time or more, it’s safe to assume he has yielded his power to the Speaker and enabled the atrocious system designed to make accountability all but impossible. It’s a system in which bureaucrats like Jeff Cartmell likely know that, so long as the Speaker is in their corner, they can intimidate and—at least in my view—unconstitutionally restrain your representative’s ability to do his job, if he’s even inclined to try in the first place.

Of the 80 Republican members in the Oklahoma House, 54 fall into this category—a majority of the chamber. Voters would be wise to replace every one of these 54 members in the upcoming 2026 election. To reelect them is to continue the present trend: a trend that ensures the bureaucracies will persist in their tyranny, unchecked and unaccountable to the people of Oklahoma.

Replacing these lazy legislators with those new candidates who refuse lobbyist money—and who will support the Gann Plan to return power to the rank-and-file member, and by extension to the people of Oklahoma—is the surest way to restore the tools we need to rein in a state government now grown to unimaginable size, unchecked and unconstrained in its power.