The Emperor in the People’s House
In a moment that stunned observers, Kyle Hilbert seized the presiding officer’s chair and rewrote the rule—on live vote. Here's how normal legislative order continues giving way to one-man control.
Hilbert took to the dais, personally assumed control of the presiding officer's chair, and lodged his own motion—something rarely, if ever, done from the chair—to "rescind" the failed reconsideration vote, a motion which, according to House Rules and precedent, was not valid. In doing so, he effectively devolved the House from an assembly of elected representatives into a one-man show—an emperor with no clothes—making a joke of the concept of equal, representative government, seizing control while most of the hapless members of the House just stood by, looking on and allowed it to happen.
It was April 22, 2010, and the expression on the face of Oklahoma House Speaker Pro Tempore Kris Steele said it all: "uh-oh, what did I just do?"
Steele had just made a mistake, and now he had a decision to make. Would he double down on the mistake—throwing the Oklahoma House into a state of lawlessness—or would he take responsibility for the error and do the right thing, preserving normal order and protecting the deliberative character of the House?
Let me tell you the story of how Steele passed the test—and then, why this is relevant to an incredibly dangerous decision made by Oklahoma House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, the youngest speaker in the nation, someone who failed the same test last Thursday.
It was April 22, 2010.
Three days earlier, on April 19, Senate Bill 2207 had been defeated by the House by a large margin. However, the author—a precocious legislative freshman who didn’t take no for an answer—had held the bill over for what is known as “reconsideration.”
Reconsideration is a legislative concept that allows a member to have one more, final chance to get a vote on their proposal. This re-do vote can only happen one time. According to both House rules and well-established legislative procedure, if a bill fails on reconsideration, then it's all out of lives. It cannot be heard again until the next Legislature is seated. Nor can the text be amended or attached to another bill.
SB 2207 had been initially defeated on the 19th with just 30 votes in favor and 67 against. For the author to succeed on reconsideration, many House members would have to change their vote.
That’s a tall order, but there had clearly been lobbying—perhaps even arm-twisting—because on April 22, as the bill got its one and only allowed re-do vote, as the vote board lit up, many members were now voting green.
They were flipping, and it was clear that the freshman was going to get his 51 votes and win the day.
Then something unexpected happened.
Speaker Pro Tempore Kris Steele, who was presiding that day, did the inexplicable.
As the "yes" vote count hit 50, Steele closed the vote and declared the bill approved.
But for those familiar with the legislative process, it was immediately clear: Steele had made a fatal error. While the bill had received a majority of votes cast—50 to 35 with 16 not voting—it did not receive the constitutionally required majority of the full House: 51 votes.
A simple majority of those voting is sufficient for many motions, but not for final passage of a bill. Steele had likely, if only momentarily, forgotten the difference.
This was rare for presiding officers of that era, an era marked by competence, supported by an expert parliamentarian, Joel Kintsel. Today’s presiding officers—sloppy in style and too numerous in number to gain real expertise (politics ruins everything)—stand in stark contrast. But that's a story for a future article.
Back to 2010, there’s little doubt that had Steele waited a few more seconds before closing the vote, one of the 16 not voting members would locked in and would have tipped the bill over the 51-vote threshold; but by closing the vote too soon, Steele had accidentally sealed its fate. As Steele declared that the bill "had passed," a hesitation crept into his voice. He likely realized, in that moment, what he had done, and I vividly remember looking on from my seat on the House floor as realization set in and his face betrayed the weight of the mistake.
A mistake though it was, the House rules were clear: the language in that bill could not be revived in any form until the next Legislature convened.
This concept—final action—is a cornerstone of legislative order. It draws a necessary line: a bill must eventually live or die. Without that limit, powerful interests would simply bring a proposal up repeatedly until they got their way: they could twist arms with unending torque, promise pork, and trade votes. There would be no end to the skulduggery enabled by the perpetual consideration of zombie legislation.
In the Oklahoma House, final action occurs when a bill has been reconsidered and still fails to pass.
Now, however, the precocious freshman author of the bill, being new to the House, probably didn't yet understand this concept. And he didn’t take the defeat lightly. Whether out of naivety or boldness, he tried to create a loophole in the law of final action. He entered a motion to rescind the vote by which his bill had been defeated.
This raised a concerning possibility—had this new freshman found a magic loophole in the final action rule? And, if so, could no bill ever truly be killed?
If Steele had allowed the motion, it would set a precedent: that every controversial bill could get extra votes—an outcome that would embolden special interests and gut the meaning of final action.
Steele consulted with Kintsel, who no doubt informed Steele of the gravity of the proposal and the fact that House rules prevented this type of additional consideration. Steele then informed the House that final action meant final action. There would be no magic loophole.
By doing so, Steele took the hit for his own error—but preserved the integrity of House procedure. And, even better, Kintsel then ensured the ruling was recorded in the official House precedents, a system he had championed as a way to bring consistency and transparency to the decisions of the presiding officer.
That decision, and the ethos behind it, reflected the culture of Oklahoma’s first generation of House Republicans—committed to deliberation, process, and reform. That effort peaked around 2014, after nearly a decade of Republican control that was marked by increasing transparency and professionalism with each successive session.
Unfortunately, that culture has been destroyed. Today’s House members operate in a culture of opacity so dark that most don't even see the darkness, or realize the need for or importance of deliberation and transparency.
And that descent reached a new low last Thursday when House Speaker Kyle Hilbert was tested in much the same way Steele had been tested.
Hilbert didn’t merely fail the test—he shattered it, delivering yet another blow to the House’s legitimacy and unleashing a Pandora’s box of consequences that may haunt the institution for years into the future.
The bill in question was Senate Bill 224.
This bill, costing taxpayers up to $5 million, will create yet another government entity—one designed to harvest student data from Oklahoma’s public schools. Grassroots organizations view it as a step toward a managed economy, where the managerial class alliance of government and corporate interests will collude to micromanage the lives of citizens from the youngest age on.
As one might imagine, while this bill is likely popular with powerful special interests and those who give the politicians money—perhaps those who fund the massive dark money campaigns, and fund the Oklahoma City nightlife that accompanies each session—it's not popular with those who believe in the values of small government, fiscal conservatism, and the populist concept that it is the individual who is best to determine their fate, not government and not corporate interests.
So, it was not a surprise when on April 29 of this year, Senate Bill 224 was defeated by a large margin, receiving just 35 votes in support.
However, the author of the bill held it over on reconsideration, meaning that, according to House rules, he would get exactly one more vote on that bill, and if that vote failed, according to the rules and the official precedent of the House, it would not be eligible for any additional consideration until the next Legislature commences in January of 2027.
House rules dictate that once a bill is held for reconsideration, the proponents of the bill have three legislative days to bring the bill back for its final vote. After that, the bill is dead.
This gave the special interests three days to do their work to twist arms and convince legislators to flip and to cast a very bad vote that was most assuredly not in the best interests of those legislators to cast—at least as it related to the values of their voters back in the district.
Apparently, they twisted enough arms and believed they had enough votes, because on May 1, last Thursday, they brought the bill back for its reconsideration vote.
And then, something very unexpected happened.
Manning the chair on that day was a presiding officer who had been newly appointed to presiding officer rotation.
As a rule of thumb, whenever the Speaker of the House authorizes a bill to be presented on the floor, the presiding officer knows that the bill is likely wanted by leadership. They want it to pass. So the presiding officer knows to hold the vote open for as long as it takes to get the needed votes. This makes for bad policy. There should be a cap on the amount of time a vote remains open, but there isn’t.
However, the newly appointed presiding officer apparently didn’t get that memo, and he called the vote after a reasonable amount of time had passed—but notably, before 51 House members had voted in support.
He then declared that the bill had failed. According to House rules and the precedent from 2010, this constituted final action, and the bill was no longer eligible for consideration in any form—either in the form of Senate Bill 224 or in the form of an amendment to another bill—until 2027.
That’s where this story should have ended.
But unlike Steele in 2010, Hilbert clearly wasn’t going to let that happen.
Hilbert took to the dais, personally assumed control of the presiding officer's chair, and lodged his own motion—something rarely, if ever, done from the chair—to "rescind" the failed reconsideration vote, a motion which, according to House Rules and precedent, was not valid. In doing so, he effectively devolved the House from an assembly of elected representatives into a one-man show—an emperor with no clothes—making a joke of the concept of equal, representative government, seizing control while most of the hapless members of the House just stood by, looking on and allowed it to happen.
There’s a reason the presiding officer should never enter his own motion—because if the validity of that motion is challenged, it’s the presiding officer who must rule on it. In this case, the motion was not valid and should never have been entertained—but it was, because it was being made by the presiding officer himself.
Presumably, no House member is going to make a point of order and ask the presiding officer to rule his own motion out of order—especially when that presiding officer is the House Speaker, to whom much of the House’s power has been delegated by weak members who live in fear that the very power they yielded might be turned against them.
But never fear—no matter how lawless and unprecedented this whole episode, there were exactly 51 members of the House who volunteered to pass the bill.
The vote of those 51 members, by ceding even the pretense of government through the rule of rule, has forever sullied the reputation of the House—a House that has descended into an abyss of parliamentary sloppiness and lawlessness.
This new action, though presumably not recorded in the official book of precedents, has created the possibility that from now going forward, no bill ever dies. Any member of the House, upon losing a bill on reconsideration, can at any future date, potentially for as many times as necessary, insist that their zombie bill be given its own bonus vote and resurrected back into existence—a specter that should horrify any rational-thinking taxpayer who now has to fear the newly found and never-ceasing ability of legislators and their special-interest financiers to move bad and dangerous zombie proposals.
You can find your legislator's vote on the proposal here. Each member was the deciding vote, meaning that, if your state representative voted for the bill, they were the reason it passed.
If your legislator voted in the affirmative, then know that this is a legislator who has wrought great destruction on the image of the House of the people and the state it's supposed to serve.
Forward this article to your personal network as together we work to get the word out about the great harm this generation of legislators is doing—and the need for the people to remedy the harm in the next election cycle.
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