It was born in a corporate board room in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1992 and became organized and active in 1993. Since that time, it has endorsed every effort to shrink Oklahoma’s ability to educate her children, provide health care, protect the environment or preserve the civil rights of its citizens. It has promoted every effort to inject religion into schools, cripple or eliminate labor unions, limit or block access to voting and inject fear over social issues into the political world.
Its name is Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, and its website is ocpathink.org. It should be ocpastink.org.
The first clue is that OCPA will not reveal its sources of funding. Who is financing the work gives a very real indication of what the biases or prejudices might be. Charity Navigator says, “If this organization aligns with your passions and values, you can give with confidence.” But Charity Navigator also gave it a zero for “Financial Statements.” There are none. No documents reveal where its money is coming from.
Grover Norquist has been quoted as saying, “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
What Norquist is hoping for at the federal level, OCPA promotes at the state level.
Consistently since its inception, OCPA has supported every piece of legislation that would lower or eliminate state taxes and has opposed every measure that would increase revenue. For example, on its website endorses Senate Bill 1 which would eliminate the personal income tax in Oklahoma.
One problem with OCPA taking extreme positions on legislation is they then measure the votes of members of the House and Senate and label the legislators as “pro-business” or “anti-business” based on those votes. They support a measure prohibiting rank choice voting (SB 1610) and oppose a measure requiring that legislation to use gender neutral language (SB 1612). They are for a law against contracts with Communist China (HB 3067) but they oppose charter schools being subject to the same regulations as public schools (HB 1341). That is all well and good, but it is difficult to tell how the measures chosen by OCPA have much to do with being pro- or anti-business.
As might be suspected, thousands of bills are introduced annually. Many, if not most, should be voted against because they are unnecessary, unconstitutional or just plain stupid. There were a number of bills on OCPA’s list requiring that you be a U.S. Citizen to vote with an amendment to the Constitution to that effect. Article III, section 1 of the Oklahoma Constitution now states pretty clearly “…all citizens of the United States over the age of eighteen (18) years who are bona fide residents of this state, are qualified electors…” Being a US Citizen is already a Constitutional requirement. OCPA has endorsed all of these bills, stupid and unnecessary as they are, and if a legislator votes against them, they risk being branded as anti-business.
They support censorship measures in our public schools, even though schools are supposed to be subject to local control and regulation. They support SB872 and SB 1202, which establish criteria for “inappropriate materials” and ban them (unlikely to survive lawsuit in a state or federal court). But they oppose HB 3461, which would fund free breakfast and lunch in public schools.
“Researchers Find Oklahoma Supreme Court is Liberal” blared the headline of an article on the OCPA website. The article makes the same tired argument they consistently make to do away with the Judicial Nominating Commission (JNC), established in the 1960’s as a result of a judicial scandal that saw three Supreme Court justices removed from the bench with subsequent prosecutions and one impeachment. TIME magazine labeled it the worst judicial scandal in the country.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court was very political prior to the reforms. There were elections, and justices were forced to fundraise to avoid being beaten at the polls. Justices Welch, Corn and Johnson were either convicted of or confessed to taking bribes on cases for decades. Leaders of the reform effort included a young legislator named G. T. Blankenship, the governor at the time, Henry Bellmon, and his successor, Dewey Bartlett. All Republicans. Bellmon went on to the U.S. Senate, and Blankenship became our Attorney General.
These were not “liberal” reforms; they were necessary reforms. The Judicial Nominating Commission was and is made up of 15 members, only six of whom can be attorneys chosen by members of the Oklahoma Bar Association. Eight members are chosen by the Governor, Speaker of the House and President of the Senate. They must be a mix of Democrats and Republicans, but none can be attorneys or have attorneys in their immediate families.
The JNC utilizes the OSBI to conduct background investigations on applicants for judicial positions. People who know the applicants are interviewed, and the accumulated information is provided to the JNC. The top three candidates are forwarded to the Governor, who then chooses the judge or justice.
Also created in the reforms were a Court on the Judiciary and a Council on Judicial Complaints. The Council investigates complaints against judges and the Court, if merit to the complaint is found, conducts a trial. Even Justices of the Supreme Court are subject to the Council and Court if there is a complaint lodged against them. And, the decision of the Court on the Judiciary is not appealable to the Supreme Court.
In over a half century, nearer to 60 years, since these reforms were enacted, there has been no scandal at our Supreme Court.
So without a scandal to support their efforts, the Oklahoma Council of Political Affairs has resorted to name-calling.
Citing “Researchers,” they claim the Oklahoma Supreme Court is “liberal.”
The OCPA article on our “liberal” court quotes from the December 2023 State Politics and Policy Quarterly, apparently a publication of the American Political Science Association. Sounds as American as apple pie. However, the research was done at Cambridge University, which, by the way, is not in America. It is in England.
The study uses a mechanism called PAJID, which means “party-adjusted surrogate judge ideology.” They did not interview justices, asking their opinions on issues. More importantly, they did not look at their votes on individual cases. Also more important (in my opinion), they did not look at the constitutional documents and case law the justices had all sworn oaths to follow, particularly when ruling on the legality of statutes passed by the legislatures of their respective states.
So, what did they look at? According to the article, three things only: “1) a justice’s political partisanship (his or her party registration), 2) the method by which justices are selected and 3) the ideology of those tasked with choosing state supreme court justices.”
Also, maybe it is in there but this writer could not find how they define “liberal” in England or what Cambridge students think “liberal” means. It is a fatally flawed study that would no survive close examination, but it is all OCPA can cite.
There are flyers on your windshields and ads on your television saying to “Vote No” on retention of the three Supreme Court justices on the ballot this year, saying they are “liberal.” There are no cases cited in the ads; nothing you can look up to check for accuracy. There are no examples where these justices did not follow the Constitutions of the United States or the State of Oklahoma, or did not follow established case law. All that is presented is the unsupported allegation of “liberal.”
Just like the funding of OCPA, the source of the money for these ads is not reported; just the names of organizations which, under the law, are not required to report their donors.
There are legitimate organizations that do research and report findings that are important in making public policy decisions. You may not agree with them, but if the research is legitimate, it cannot be dismissed out of hand. OCPA is not such an organization. It is funded by big money with a particular bias in favor of low to zero taxation. They seek to be unrestrained by government regulation with freedom to pollute the air and water. They hold the firm belief that everyone should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even if they have no boots.
OCPA is not a “think tank”, it is a stink tank and should not be afforded any weight in public or private decision making.
Drew Edmondson
Attorney General, 1995-2011
Brother of Supreme Court Justice
James Edmondson
Opinions expressed on the commentary page, in letters to the editor and elsewhere in this newspaper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of ownership or management.
This article appears in Bigger than basketball.