When “Shall” Becomes “May”: Why the People of Oklahoma Face a Dangerous Four Days Ahead

The People of Oklahoma Are in Grave Danger: How Charles McCall’s One-Word Power Grab Will Hit Hard This Week

Can you imagine any city council, county commission, corporate board, or even the board of a local charity, where a member of the board wasn't allowed to make a motion?

Of course, you can't. That’s because if a member of the board is prevented from lodging a motion, there’s probably not much point in being on the board in the first place.

The right of a member of the board to lodge a motion and to ask the other board members to take action is at the heart of parliamentary protocol. 

Mason’s Manual of Legislative Procedure—the authoritative guide on these matters and the publication designated as a guiding authority by the rules of the Oklahoma House of Representatives—declares that, "One of the fundamental rights of a member is the right to present any proper proposal for the consideration of the body."

As obvious and commonsensical as it may seem, regular readers of these articles probably just felt that familiar drop in the pit of their stomach—that creeping sense that something is deeply wrong.

"Wait… could it really be that my state representative isn’t even allowed to make a motion?"

Yes. Believe it or not, that’s exactly where we are.

Under the rules of this House of Representatives, your elected representative does not have the authority to lodge a main motion before the House of Representatives until and unless he receives the permission of the powerful House Speaker's designee.

The Speaker represents just one district—no more, no less. So why does he get to decide whether representatives from the other 100 districts are "allowed" to speak, act, or introduce motions on behalf of their voters?

This assault on parliamentary principles—and on the republican form of government itself—is a betrayal of everything we first-generation majority Republicans once stood for when we set out to reform the Oklahoma Legislature.

This particular offense was delivered to us by the imperial speakership of Charles McCall.

Regular readers will know that in this writer's opinion, McCall—through his eight long years of imperial power—gutted the institution that is the House of Representatives of its deliberative nature, and simultaneously destroyed the culture of the House Republican Caucus, a group that in its earlier iterations (both in minority and majority status) had advocated for the principles of openness, transparency, and deliberation in the House of Representatives.

In 2019, as McCall was coronated for his second of four long two-year sessions in charge, he took a major step toward consolidating power—one of the most notable moves in the slow, steady dismantling of transparency that’s been underway since the height of our reform era in 2013. That was our apex. And ever since, the Legislature has been in retreat.

In his once-every-two years rules resolution, buried deep inside of Rule 9.1, was the following declaration: "The Majority Floor Leader may schedule said motions at his or her discretion."

In previous years, that text had read as follows: "The Majority Floor Leader shall schedule said motions upon the same legislative day, the timing of which shall be left to the discretion of the Majority Floor Leader."

Can you spot the difference?

With this one small change, McCall had just taken away the right of a state representative to, on their own authority, lodge a motion—instead requiring that representative to first get permission from McCall’s designee, the Majority Floor Leader, who at that time was Jon Echols. Previously, Echols was required to allow the motion to be lodged, only empowered with scheduling the time of day in which the motion would be entered—but in no way, shape, or form could Echols deny that right of the member to make that motion.

As he presented McCall’s plan to the House, McCall’s close ally Terry O’Donnell led House members to believe that the change in the language was merely about “timing.” In other words, O’Donnell gave the impression that it wasn’t a question of if the Speaker’s designee would allow a member to lodge a motion—it was simply a question of when the motion would be lodged. The implication was that motions could still be made, but perhaps not on the same legislative day—they might just have to wait until the next day, as a matter of scheduling.

But, as we now know, by changing "shall" to "may", this was a deeply consequential power grab by McCall—one that, to this day, remains among the most powerful mechanisms by which his imperial successor, Kyle Hilbert, continues to wield, in this writer’s view, an undemocratic and authoritarian control over the House. Most members, it seems, are content to sit on the floor, dutifully pressing their green buttons—like the dazed, compliant figures in Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial.

But last Thursday, one brave House member broke from the ranks, sprinted through the fog of compliance, and hurled a challenge straight at the heart of the system. With that single act, he signaled something important: not every house member is willing to remain a zombie.

Here’s what went down.

On that day, John Pfeiffer—in the view of this writer, one of Hilbert’s foremost foot soldiers and a mindless drone who faithfully carries out and executes the tyranny of the House Speaker—took to the House floor to suspend important transparency rules.

If this seems familiar, it’s because just days earlier, Pfeiffer had done the same, asking to suspend a vital transparency rule—a suspension that another of Hilbert’s henchmen, Dale Kerbs, almost took advantage of to shuck a bill with a proposal to pack Education Superintendent Ryan Walters’ board with political appointees from the House Speaker and the Senate Pro Tempore.

That assault on Walters had been staved off after Walters and the grassroots engaged, and The Oklahoma State Capital wrote about those events noting that many lawmakers who would have voted against Kerbs’ proposal to put political appointees on Walters’ board had actually enabled the sneaky assault in the first place by voting for Pfeiffer’s motion to suspend the rules.

So on Thursday, when Pfeiffer took to the House floor to once again suspend various rules, House members had to scramble to figure out what it was that Pfeiffer was suspending—but they hardly had time to do so before the vote was declared and the motion was approved.

In all, the suspension of the transparency rules took less than 90 seconds to go from proposed to approved, and the impact of the suspension certainly had little time to be understood.

Pfeiffer never explained the specifics of the rules he wanted to suspend. He simply cited their number, and the presiding officer never restated the motion—as is proper parliamentary procedure—meaning that unless House members had memorized not only House rules but also House and Senate joint rules, they probably had little idea of what specific rules were even being suspended.

Pfeiffer merely told members that he, Pfeiffer, wanted to be a good steward of the Legislature’s time and led them to believe that his suspension would allow them to enjoy their Memorial Day weekend. The implication was clear: if Pfeiffer’s suspension didn’t pass, legislators might have to return Friday to cast votes. But if the rules were suspended, they’d be free to leave on Thursday and enjoy a four day weekend.

But the attentive, eagle-eared House member might have caught the deception: Pfeiffer’s motion not only failed to explain the specific nature of the suspended rules—it technically suspended those rules for the remainder of the legislative session, a session which extends through the end of the month.

So, under the guise of “let’s get out for Memorial Day,” Pfeiffer and the House struck down a key transparency rule—not just for last weekend, but for the entire final stretch of the session.

And now, as we head into the last week—the week already most vulnerable to sneaky attacks on the people of Oklahoma due to minimal public scrutiny—even the bare minimum transparency that had protected us has been suspended.

We are in grave danger.

So, what rules did Pfeiffer get suspended?

He struck the requirement that a proposal must be available for reading the day before it is voted on by the full House. This minimal transparency measure had already been watered down by Hilbert’s newest rules. As recently as last year, House members had to wait a full 24 hours before they could consider a proposal. Under the current rule, they can file a proposal late one day and vote on it early the next.

But with Pfeiffer’s suspension, even that small safeguard is gone. Now, they can file and vote on a proposal almost immediately—within hours or even minutes.

We are running with absolutely no meaningful protection of the process.

And in sad fact, the number of representatives who even realize what they’ve done with that vote—and who are aware that the transparency rule remains suspended—is probably only slightly larger than the number who care that they’ve done it. In other words, you could probably count them on two hands.

In fact, you, the reader, are now likely far more informed about all of this—and probably certainly more concerned—than the vast majority of your elected representatives.

So, no doubt with a strong sense of déjà vu from a few days earlier and not wanting to give Pfeiffer the benefit of the doubt, later that day, Tom Gann asked Anthony Moore, who was the presiding officer at the time, to allow the House to vote on the suspension of the rules one more time.

Moore denied Gann that right because Gann hadn’t obtained permission to make that motion from Josh West, who is Hilbert’s designated floor leader.

That Gann—an equal in every way to Hilbert, Moore, and West—was prevented from entering that motion is an offense to everything that is our republican system of government.

Gann’s district, through their election of Gann to the position, has a right to their voice being heard in the form of a main motion lodged by Gann on behalf of restoring transparency that's subsequently voted on by every House member.

Then, the voters of Oklahoma, through their right to vote, can hold their representatives accountable based on the subsequent vote.

But when Hilbert, Moore, and West have the authority to deny Gann’s right to lodge a motion, they haven’t just silenced the people of Gann’s district—they’ve denied all Oklahomans their right to hold their representatives accountable.

It’s a sick, sick system—one unworthy of a first-world democratic republic. It more closely resembles a second-world totalitarian regime, cloaked in the deceptive pretense of democratic process.

However, there is good news. Gann’s courage in attempting a parliamentary action—even in an environment dominated by the Speaker’s control—evokes the image of the lone figure in Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial: charging through the ranks, hurling a hammer at the screen, shattering the illusion of control—and maybe, just maybe, beginning to awaken the zombies in the audience.

Courage is contagious. And there’s reason to believe that more and more members of the House are beginning to wake up—to recognize the sick reality that they’ve become lemmings, zombies, mere instruments in a powerful system they themselves have allowed to self-perpetuate since 2014. That was the year House Republicans began their long descent from the principles of transparency, deliberation, and openness—into the abyss where they now find themselves wallowing.

That great awakening is manifesting itself in small ways, and after next year’s election, we are right to hope for elements of reform—the first green shoots of promise—to be reflected in the next Legislature’s rules. One of those green shoots should be the reversal of this particular aspect of McCall’s tyranny and a new set of rules that allows every member of the House—by virtue of their responsibility to represent their constituency—to once again have the right to lodge a main motion on the House floor.

But to accomplish this goal, it’s vital that the approximately 75% of the House Republican caucus—known as the “lemmings”—receive an electoral challenge in the 2026 election.

Soon after the legislative session, The Oklahoma State Capital will publish two reports:

The Capitol Conformity Tracker – an easy rule of thumb that allows the people to quickly determine how often their representative is mindlessly hitting the green button and voting with Hilbert and his sidekicks, and are thus enabling and perpetrating this sick system; and,

The People’s Audit – a breakdown of the most offensive votes—votes which the constituents of those offending representatives will be shocked and dismayed to realize that their representative has supported.

While the Capitol Conformity Tracker will allow for the identification of the lemmings, it's the People’s Audit that will provide the subject matter by which a brave challenger to the lemmings will be able to educate his local electorate.

However, of note, this education process isn’t something that can be accomplished by waiting until next year, until election season. Those who want to reclaim their district, and reclaim their representation, must start soon.

To accomplish true change—and to return our state government to a government that’s truly of the people—it’s incumbent on you, the reader, to adopt your House district, and to either help recruit a brave challenger who will spend the next months educating the electorate in the form of an election challenge, or maybe, to actually step up, make the sacrifice, and run for the position yourself.

Are you ready for this challenge?

If so, please don’t hesitate to reach out at jason@oklahomastatecapital.com. I look forward to hearing from you. We need someone in every lemming-controlled legislative district. And share this article with your personal network. The next reform-minded state legislator could be the recipient.

If you have found this article to be helpful, and wish to receive many more like it, subscribe at oklahomastatecapital.com/substack.

And if you’re in a position to do so, consider supporting this work—and receive early access to the Capitol Conformity Tracker and the People’s Audit—by becoming a paying subscriber.