Good morning, good morning, good morning, Welcome, welcome, welcome TOIME now for our early burned version of the Community Connection on K one, the one you Trust. It is now eight twenty three. Julie Daniels is in with us. By the way, congratulations on your election. It's final.
Thank you very much, Tom, and thank you to the voters and Senate District twenty nine for allowing me to serve a final four year term as your senator.
Oh well, congratulations. We got a lot to do today because other things are still up in the air and up for consideration on the ballot, and some people are getting two pages, are getting three today, but you're here to talk about one that's on the.
Main ballot, right and before we get to that, if you do want to know about your sample ballot, where your precinct is all that, you can go to Oklahoma State Election Board. You can go elections dot ok dot gov and click on the voter portal. You put in your name and your date of birth, and you pop up and it will tell you where you vote, and
it will tell you exactly what you're voting on. For instance, I'm in Jim Kurd City Council Board and he didn't have an opponent, so I won't be voting for city council. Other people will, so you'll know before you go to the polls. These are the things I'm voting on. And remember that the ballots are front and back, so remember to fill out the backside. Oh and there's the county
question about alcohol sales. Somebody asked me about this. So since the eighties in Washington County, we have not allowed alcohol to be only to be sold from noon until midnight I think it is. And when New Year's hits on a Sunday, it really cut back on the revenue from different and other counties have it as early as eight until two in the morning. So this is what we're asking people to consider. Do you want to expand
the hours of alcohol sales? And that's why the county put that on, But it's just to put us in line with other counties if you think that that would be a good idea. So I want to come here and talk about voting for the judges. There's a whole slew of them. There are a Court of Criminal Appeals, Court of Civil Appeals, and then we have three Supreme Court justices on the ballot. Now sixty years ago, the
people voted on two state questions. One was, we want to continue to elect our justice's non partisan, we'll take the party affiliation, we want to continue to elect them. And the other one was we're going to let a non elected group of people make a list of three names and give it to a governor, and the governor, who's elected by all the people, will choose from that list. Both of these state questions got a majority of the vote, and the one to continue to elect justices got the
most votes. But the folks who wanted to put in the system where the bar Association would have undue control over the process because of the composition of this unelected committee, they put in language that said, even if the other one gets more votes, we still win. So for sixty years we've had a scheme in place that really didn't reflect the will of the people at that time. But
they threw a bone to the people. They said, but we're going to have a retention ballot, so every six years you can decide whether or not to keep the justices that we put in place, without your governor getting to choose from anybody in the state, just getting to choose from this list. But they never thought anybody would ever actually act on that, because we've never unretained a justice.
But when we finally did shift the politics of this state after one hundred years and Republicans did take control of the government, which you know back and forth, that's good for the republic. The last vestige of being able to hold on to some of the Democrat control was through the courts, and that is what we face today
since I was elected. Sixteen of the twenty cases that have been assessed on oklajudges dot com ok l a j u DGEs dot com have been decided since I took office in twenty sixteen, and they are all rolling back what the majority party passed. We're the legislatures. The governor signs the stuff that we or doesn't signs the stuff that we pass. But in the constitution we do the policy. That's the role of the legislature. And when they haven't been comfortable with what we've done, they've gone
to the courts. And we have Supreme Court justices who are willing to say, well, we'll just be legislators with black robes. We'll find a way to get the result we want because we don't like the policy, and that is what has happened over and over again, and that is why I'm recommending that we vote no on these three justices and show for the first time in sixty
years that the voters are paying attention. If you vote for a certain party in hopes that they can put their policies in place, then you should also want a judicial, a judiciary that also stays in their lane. So you can vote for a particular person for Senate or House or governor.
But if what they do is then undone.
By justices who are, in my view, abusing their power, then you don't make any progress. So one of the examples I'll give, we passed lawsuit reform in two thousand and nine. It was a huge fight and it was a giant bill. We really rewrote the civil code for lawsuits. And the Supreme Court it was in place for about
four years. They picked around at it, picked out around, and finally the Supreme Court throughout the whole thing, saying it was law, ruling that we had put too many measures together in one package, and therefore because it violated the single subject rule of our Constitution, they threw the whole thing out. Not it been in place for four years, but they wanted it to go away because it did
make us more competitive with other states. Texas had done this years before, and so my point is that was not their role because in previous legislatures when the Democrats were in charge, they completely rewrote the criminal Code, completely rewrote it. They didn't throw that out as violating the single subject law. It had many more sections than the lawsuit reform had, but they didn't like the lawsuit reform, and so.
They found a way to throw it out.
That's what I'm appealing to people to think about today is to put them on notice that the voters are paying attention and that they truly should operate and determine what the law is and not what they wanted to be. They shouldn't be finding ambiguity where none exists. For instance, they took a law that had been on the books for decades that says you only get treble damages in a car accident when there's no injury, where just the car is damaged and you left the scene, we'll charge
you three times. Let's say you did one thousand dollars worth of damage to somebody's car and you left the scene, not knowing whether or not somebody had been injured or not, you're going to pay three thousand dollars they could do that. Well, trial lawyer came along and said, we think that ought to apply when there are injuries too, But that's not the way the law was written and had been on
the books for years. So they tied themselves in knots and they actually looked at the way the law was on the page and say, well, back in the eighties they had this section on page two, and now they've moved it to page three, and they've redone the sections. We don't think they really intended only to be only. They literally re wrote the law to get the result they wanted. So this is what we're urging the people
to consider when they go to vote. It's happened over and over again, and I would like us to show that in the future the appellate justices do need to be aware that the folks are paying attention. And so that's why I'm well, I've already voted, because I voted on Thursday. It's a big issue. It's a little bit difficult to understand. We've asked for years for information on judges and now the Oklahoma Council for Public Affairs, which is our conservative thing tank in Oklahoma.
They've done this assessment.
I actually worked on picking some of the cases that they should look at. And when you go to Oakland Judges dot com this morning, before you go to the polls, call it up. Look at the three justices on the ballot. There's campaign material that says they're liberal.
Well, yeah they are.
And the anti people say they're protecting the state from the extremists they mean conservatives because they don't want to say the word conservative because a lot of us are conservatives, so they say the word extremists. We stopped the extremists, and the no side is calling them liberal and they're liberal and their decisions because they're jumping outside of their lane. But you can go to Oakland Judges dot com and read about it make.
Up your own mind.
I think it would truly send a signal to the justices that you should look very carefully before you simply undo what the elected representatives of the people put in place. Do we have one more minute? Okay, here's another one. We changed the dui loss and we changed them so that there weren't as many roles for the trial lawyers. There weren't as many ways for them to sue. They got all upset about this because this is the way some of them make their money. They sued. None of
them had been charged with dui. They weren't the defendants. They sued, saying it was unconstitutional because it would affect their pocketbook. They wouldn't have as many d UI clients in court. And our Supreme Court said, that's enough standing, that's enough, that's enough injury to.
You to throw this dui lag. Yeah, exactly.
So, I mean we get creative when we want a certain result, we get creative, and that, sadly is what they have done over the years. Because nobody is holding them to account today, I hope that we hold them to account.
All right, Senator Daniels, thanks for being here with IS today in the Congratulations on your victory.
Thank you for great