Jason Murphy Divulges The ‘Scam’ That Runs The Oklahoma Legislature

Former member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, Jason Murphy, joined Michael and I on the podcast Wednesday, 2.12.25 for a discussion on legislative procedure. You can find the full live video on YouTube and on Rumble.

This year, the House has instituted a new way of doing things. Instead of going to ONE Committee for a hearing, there are now TWO Committees a bill must pass through before moving to the floor for a vote of all Representatives.

It used to work something like this for both Senate and House – I’m going to use an education bill since that’s what I’ve worked on forever:

A bill was introduced – that bill was assigned to the Common Education Committee – the members of the Committee voted yes or no – a bill voted out of the Committee with a majority went to the Floor Leader who scheduled it on the Floor (for all legislators to hear) calendar – the bill was brought to the Floor where it was voted on – the bill then moved to the other house to start virtually the same procedure over again.

This is not the way the procedure in the House works this year. Since the election of the youngest Speaker in House history, Kyle Hilbert, things have been different.

Now, if the members of the Common Education Committee pass the bill, the bill goes to an OVERSIGHT Committee who hears the bill. Then, if the bill passes out of Committee, it can go to the Floor Leader who can determine to hear the bill on the floor.

Now, let’s look at this. Below are the members of the Common Ed Committee.

These are the members of the Education Oversight Committee.

Are you going to remember those names? Well, you’d better, because if you want to call the members of a Committee to make sure they vote a certain way on a bill, now you’ll have to call members of TWO Committees.

This was all instituted as a way to make the process of a bill becoming a law in the House more transparent, but so far, I’ve had a terrible time trying to make heads or tails of it and I’ve been watching legislation nearly 15 years.

I argue (and so does Jason), that it makes the process LESS transparent than before.

Stop and think. How many times does leadership have the opportunity to kill a good bill and pass a bad one? LOTS.

• The leadership chooses the Chairs of the committees
• The leadership assigns the bill to a committee – to what committee the bill is assigned makes a difference
• The Chair decides what bills are heard in his/her committee – and that happens TWICE. A Chair doesn’t have to hear a bill in the first committee and the Chair of the second committee doesn’t have to hear a bill even if it’s passed out of the first committee
• The leadership picks the Floor Leader and the Floor Leader can determine whether OR NOT a bill is heard on the Floor of the House (or Senate)
• Even if the bill is voted in the affirmative by the Representatives in the House, it might not be assigned to a committee on the senate
• and then the whole process starts over

Where do The People fit in here? Jason tells us…

…we’re the ones getting ‘scammed’.

Nope, I don’t like it any more than you do, but this has been the way of the legislature for as long as I can remember. It’s a scam. It’s meant to make us think we have some control, but it’s not ‘by the people, of the people, for the people’, it’s ‘by the lobbyists and big business, of the lobbyists and big business ‘for the lobbyists and big business’. We have only to look at those who sponsored this year’s Speaker’s Ball to get a good idea of who rules the roost.

So how do we fix this? We band together and GET GOOD PEOPLE ELECTED WHO WON’T FALL FOR THE SCAM. There is no other way. There just isn’t. But then, once we get them elected, we need to stay on them like white on rice to make sure they’re not falling for the SCAM!

True, it’s work, but Benjamin Franklin once famously said to a woman on the street in Philadelphia who asked him what form of government the Continental Congress had created for the country, “A Republic, ma’am. If you can keep it.”