Whenever statehouse leadership introduces what it depicts as a routine, nothing-to-see-here measure, workaday Sooners should immediately go on high alert.
Especially when said proposal gets dumped into the public policy stew halfway through a session, amidst a frenzied deadline week.
Such is the case with House Speaker Kyle Hilbert’s HJR 1089 seeking voter approval for a constitutional convention that could rewrite Oklahoma’s 119-year-old founding principles.
Hilbert unveiled his plan with the equivalent of yawn: The Constitution requires the Legislature to give voters the opportunity every 20 years to create just such a conclave. But – tsk, tsk – lawmakers haven’t done so since 1970.
“Really, all I’m asking us to do,” the speaker shrugged, “is follow the oath that we took when we got into office and put a vote on people for a constitutional convention.”
It’s hardly that innocuous, of course. A primary reason past legislatures avoided a constitutional convention is because it’s a political third rail best avoided.
You see, the sudden push for a constitutional convention comes amidst intensifying efforts by statehouse leaders to neuter the unique check-and-balance powers the state’s Founders gave the unelected masses.
Principally, the initiative and referendum tool that empowers rank-and-file Sooners to act when their elected officials won’t – often because deep-pocketed special interests like things the way they are, crafted to their benefit.
In recent years, The People have taken matters into their own hands more frequently, mounting initiative petition drives that won voter approval for Medicaid expansion, medical marijuana and criminal justice reform.
More recently, citizen-petitioners secured a spot on June 16’s statewide primary ballot for a proposal to systematically increase the minimum wage – stuck at $7.25 an hour for nearly two decades.
Such drives aren’t easy or always successful. A proposal aimed at ending closed primaries failed despite gathering 200,000-plus signatures – more than enough had lawmakers not recently added new restrictions making it easier to reject signatures.
All the citizen-activism created consternation among the Capitol’s Republican supermajority – ironic, given the GOP for years billed itself as the party that “trusted the voters.”
The truth is, the legislative Powers-That-Be don’t like citizen meddling. They want absolute control over the state’s public policy agenda. They only want the citizenry voting on matters they send to them, like Hilbert’s HJR 1089.
Or maybe his HB 4440 that would put on Aug. 25’s runoff ballot a proposal to repeal Medicaid expansion, which has helped guarantee health care for thousands of the state’s working poor.
Why Aug. 25? In the heat of summer? Amidst the annual back-to-school frenzy? Because the turnout for runoff elections is typically scant. Mostly dominated by ideologues who know the cost of everything and value of nothing – and don’t like the idea “others” might be getting something they don’t deserve.
If Hilbert’s constitutional convention proposal clears the Senate – likely, given President Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton’s support – and is approved by voters, it would launch a nearly two-year process that could end up with another statewide vote on proposed changes.
Who’ll make the changes? Or rewrite entirely the Constitution? The Legislature. Period. No tribal representation. No members of Oklahoma’s congressional delegation.
In other words, no one to stop the Powers-That-Be from cementing their power – the antithesis of our Founders’ imperfect, but egalitarian notion that too much power in too few hands was dangerous.
The potential for a radical rewrite of the state Constitution ought to scare the you-know-what out of clear-eyed Oklahomans.
