Why You Should Vote to Not Retain Oklahoma's Three Supreme Court Justices on November 5th
Destroying the integrity of Oklahoma's elections: in the context of the state's November 5th judicial retention ballot, it's the most important issue that no one is talking about.
With the legislative leaders unwilling to uphold the Constitution by holding the dishonorable justices accountable, the people now have the opportunity to do justice using the very mechanisms those justices attempted to undermine: the sanctity of the vote. A right that so many have sacrificed so much to preserve for our current generation, and a sacred responsibility we must also meet, which we can and must do, on November 5th, by forever unseating the leftist judicial anarchists, Edmondson, Gurich, and Kauger.
Antonin Scalia creatively referred to them as "elephants hidden in mouse holes." It’s the theory that legislators, when writing a new law, set some parameters for that law deep within it. Then, somehow, activist judges come along and magically extract these parameters, amplifying and applying them to every other law in the law books.
By yanking these imaginary elephants from mouse holes, unelected, radical jurists who wish to legislate are, in essence, writing their own new laws—laws not approved by the people but instead emanating from the tyranny of the unelected, black-robed. They are also creating a judicial absurdity, a set of insanities that when applied to the real world, break the real world.
To perhaps best illustrate this point, consider the now well-known case of Jack Smith. He’s the partisan political hack, with a long record of sketchy partisan prosecutions, who has perhaps done more to destroy trust in the rule of law than any other person in the history of our nation.
After the Enron collapse, Congress passed a law to address the issue of Enron’s accountants allegedly shredding important documents before they could be disclosed to regulators. Congress sought to prevent this type of future abuse. They created a special obstruction offense, described in a single clause buried deep within the Enron-inspired reform.
Somehow, Jack Smith concluded that Congress had stuck an elephant in a mouse hole and that he should pull that elephant out and shoehorn this clause into a wider application: This would somehow enable him to charge President Trump with obstruction because Trump had publicly advocated for Congress to provide oversight regarding the conduct of the 2020 election. With this oversight, Congress could have restored faith in the election system for a significant portion of the population who were—and now, still are—losing confidence in its integrity.
By the time Smith’s contorted logic reached the U.S. Supreme Court, it fell apart.
Nevertheless, this is the exact tactic used by Oklahoma’s Supreme Court judicial anarchists in 2020, as leftist-aligned groups across the nation sought to dismantle the common-sense controls and mechanisms that had until then protected the integrity of states' election systems.
In "deep red" Oklahoma, those leftists found great success, at the state’s Supreme Court, despite the fact that Oklahoma's people and values are conservative. The Supreme Court is dominated by radical leftists, an imbalance that cannot long endure.
The court wrongly concluded that, back in 2002, with the passage of House Bill 1939, the Oklahoma Legislature had stuffed an elephant into a mouse hole.
House Bill 1939 was a non-controversial, bipartisan update to Oklahoma's Title 12, the section of law governing civil process. Within that 70-page bill was a section allowing a person, who, when filing a civil court document, to submit an oath stating the filing was factual, rather than needing a notary to verify it. The clear intent was to cut costs and/or save time for citizens who were trying to file documents in court.
In no way, shape, or form would legislators have given a near-unanimous vote in favor of this bill if they thought it did anything beyond this.
In fact, just one day before the House passed House Bill 1939, it also passed Senate Bill 1350, which proposed that notarizations of absentee, mail-in ballots be offered to voters at no cost. Both bills were signed by Governor Frank Keating.
In the wacky world of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, on May 23rd, 2002, the Legislature was prescribing free notarizations of absentee mail-in ballots, and on May 24th, 2002, it was allegedly attempting to remove any notarization requirement for many documents, including mail-in ballots. How insane is that?
The state's election board secretary succinctly described their ruling as effectively leaving Oklahoma "without a means to verify that the person who signs an absentee ballot affidavit is the same person to whom the ballot was issued."
I believe this was a deliberate attempt by the left to enable ballot harvesting and fraud, potentially canceling out the votes of those who are complying with the law, including Oklahoma’s in-person voting where the voter must produce voter ID to vote. It makes no sense that an in-person voter has to identify themselves, whereas a mail-in absentee voter should remain unidentified.
We have been granted the right to vote by the great sacrifice of so many who believed in the American concept and that right is nullified when fraud is allowed to occur.
A thoughtful observer of history and human nature will know that there are terrible consequences when a citizen's voice is taken away.
One of the fundamental principles of the American Revolution was that colonists didn’t have a voice in Parliament. "No taxation without representation." Had they been part of a republican system of government where their voice was heard, they wouldn’t have revolted.
When a person feels he has no voice, he will either revolt; or, he will just give up and check out, which means we no longer have a government of, by or for the people.
A republic relies on widespread, nearly universal trust in the processes that give every man an equal standing. When powerful, moneyed interests use fraud to gain an outsized say in the election process, that trust is destroyed, and eventually, so is the republic.
And then, as a former legislator, I was especially suprised by the court’s interpretation. That's because, long after the 2002 Civil Process reform bill had been approved, I had become familiar with the notary requirement because I was voting to protect its integrity. At no point during my twelve years in the House, did anyone in the Legislature believe this requirement had been invalidated back in 2002. To the contrary we were debating it and updating it.
Due to the state’s unfortunate policy of allowing no-excuse absentee balloting—make no mistake, this is the weakest component of the state’s election system, a credit to the Dark Prince of Corruption, former Senator Gene Stipe, and no credit to subsequent "Republican" legislatures too tepid to restore the system’s integrity—corrupt campaigners allegedly bought absentee ballots from voters with the complicity of a select notary public who was also involved in the fraud. The price for these ballots? An investigation revealed voters were being offered $20 or methamphetamines, depending on the voter's preference.
In the 2012 session, we passed a bill capping the number of absentee ballots a single notary could sign. A notary wasn’t supposed to notarize more than 20 ballots in an election cycle unless they received permission from the county election board secretary, thus, limiting the potential for corruption.
Then, during the 2015 session, some Midwest City legislators sponsored Senate Bill 173, which lifted the 20-ballot cap on notaries as long as the signing was done during office hours at the notary’s office.
I didn’t like this new bill.
I think it opens the door to a type of high-pressure, outside-the-polls ballot harvesting that’s not good for our secret vote process; and, I believe it likely enabled the one-sided mail-in voting that occurred in recent Edmond municipal and school district elections—but that’s another story. Edmond has issues! We will get to them later.
I was one of 25 conservatives (we had a pretty strong group of them back then, before the 2018 purge of conservatives from the House) who voted "no" on lifting the cap.
I say all this to make a point: long after 2002, the Legislature was still updating and refining the notary requirement for no-excuse absentee ballots.
Clearly, none of us who were in the Legislature, including those from the 2002 session, believed the whole system of election integrity checks and balances had been destroyed by an elephant in the mouse hole from back in 2002.
Post 2002, legislation refining the notary requirement had occurred as soon as 2003, when House Bill 1412 stated that notaries who were candidates, campaign chairs, or campaign treasurers couldn’t notarize absentee ballots. Senate Bill 358, also passed in 2003; it declared that relatives couldn’t sign the ballot.
Then, the coup de grâce: House Bill 2725, passed in 2004, reconciled the two bills from 2003.
Why was House Bill 2725 so significant?
It was sponsored by the same State Representative who had sponsored the Civil Process reform, House Bill 1939, in 2002. And it was signed by then-Governor Brad Henry, who had been the Senate author of House Bill 1939 in 2002.
The insanity of the court would have us believe that the same two legislators who had "removed" the notary requirement in 2002 had then apparently forgot what they had done and amended it two years later.
The Consequences
Imagine the consequences of this ruling if applied to its logical extent.
In my view, the leftist court intended to destroy the laws that protect our elections' integrity. But by doing it this way, they essentially shot a fly with a shotgun. Maybe they hit their intended target but they probably invalidated many state laws requiring a notary public.
One can only imagine the opportunity for legal mischief this has opened up. How many legal processes depend on a notary public? Isn't the integrity of many of those processes, and the many millions of associated business transactions now open to litigation?
Of course, it's an absurd outcome, but it shows the lengths to which the state Supreme Court will go to enact their leftist agenda. In my view, they will put at risk the legitimacy and legal standing of an entire occupation (notary) and throw a monkey wrench into millions of dollars of free market business transactions in pursuit of temporary partisan goals, in this case, the destruction of election protocols for the 2020 election—an election that is now long past.
I believe their arrogance stems from the fact that the Oklahoma electorate has never voted to not retain a Supreme Court justice. These judicial tyrants simply don’t fear accountability—not from the electorate, and not from the Legislature.
To the Legislature’s minor credit, they did tepidly respond to the court by restoring the mail-in absentee ballot notarization requirement prior to the 2020 elections. But to the great detriment of the timid legislative leadership, they didn’t immediately move to impeach the anarchist judges, an action which would have probably quickly restored normal order and the rule of law.
With the legislative leadership unwilling to uphold the Constitution by holding the dishonorable justices accountable, the people now have the opportunity to do justice using the very mechanisms those justices attempted to undermine: the sanctity of the vote.
It’s a right that so many have sacrificed so much to preserve for our current generation, and a sacred responsibility we must also meet, which we can and must do, on November 5th, by forever unseating the leftist judicial anarchists, Edmondson, Gurich, and Kauger.
This has been a 2024 Election Special of The Oklahoma State Capital project. It's designed to educate the public and inform them of facts they otherwise wouldn’t be aware of before casting their vote on November 5th, 2024.
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