Good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome, welcome. It's time now for our community connection on K one, the one you Trust. We have Senator Julie Daniels in studio and Senator first of all, welcome.
Well, thanks Tom, it's been a while. Yeah, we'd be back with you this morning.
It is always a pleasure to have you in our studio. We've got an election coming up. Your election has already said and done, correct, So we're not talking about your situation. But we're talking about something that affects everybody, and that would be a state question and the retention of judges that appear on our ballot. And people get a little they said, well, I'm going what's this exactly? Now, we're going to tell them what this is.
Yes, first of all, on the two state questions, Yes, one is very straightforward. We're amending one word in our constitution. Our constitution already says that all citizens of the United States may vote in Oklahoma if they meet our registration
requirements residency requirements. But there was a move this year among states that have that language to improve on it and say only so you're going to say all US citizens can vote you're going to change that to only US citizens can vote, and I supported that joint resolution of the House and the Senate, so.
That is on the ballot.
The other one that I supported would allow us to create public infrastructure districts in our state. It's a peculiarity of our constitution that there are many things that businesses can do in other states that we have to amend our constitution to allow. And this is one of the reasons that we are less competitive at times with other states, is because we have a structure that discourages some sort
of entrepreneurism and growth. So this one says, if a developer wants to build houses and has brought a plot of land to build houses, but the municipality either cannot afford to extend the infrastructure or they're going to delay doing that can get one hundred percent of the property owners to sign and say we will be responsible for the property taxes to build the infrastructure, not our neighbors across the street in another neighborhood, but those of us
in this contained area, we will do it. And that allows the development to go forward and not be delayed. But you have to have permission from the government to do it. You have to have a petition a board of trustees. And this is where it gets a bit confusing because people see government in there and think, oh, this is going to be on my property taxes. No, it absolutely is not, and it's confusing to read. You file a petition in the municipality, you have signatures of
one hundred percent of all the surface property owners. Then the district is governed by a board of trustees. They can issue bonds to pay for infrastructure and can charge the property owners up to ten mills to pay for that infrastructure. This is something that there are people in Tulsa who want to build some developments and they are not allowed to do so. And I would encourage people to just google Public Infrastructure district and look at Fort Worth. Again,
Texas has been doing this for a while. You can click on pid fort Worth and it will show you all the neighborhoods in Fort Worth that are governed by public infrastructure districts. And I think if people look and see how they actually operate, they will understand that unless you're one of these property owners, and unless you have agreed, then you would not be liable for any increased property taxes.
To pay for infrastructure.
That's a lot of words to make it easy.
Well, and that's why it's a lot of words on the ballot. I'm looking here and I would be happy to share more details on that with folks who want to be in touch with me. But I have no problem with either one of these state questions. So now let's move to the retention ballot.
Let's do that. Yes, that's where it gets.
We have a number of Court of Civil Appeals and Court of Criminal Appeal justices up for retention in Oklahoma. Once appointed, a justice serves six years and then the public decides whether.
Or not they should be allowed to remain on the bench.
We've been doing it that way for forty plus years and we have never ever voted a justice off the bench. Okay, well, there have been some problems in recent years with our Supreme Court, especially since after one hundred plus years of one party rule, we sort of evolved over into the
majority party changing in our state. And since that time, we have found that our Supreme Court has gone out of its way to change the policies of the legislature when it doesn't agree with them, not to decide what the law is, which is what we've been doing in this country for hundreds of years since Marbury versus Madison is the case where it was originally said it's the job of a justice to decide what the law is,
not what they want to be. And we have an instance here in Oklahoma of numerous cases where the judges have tied themselves in knots to figure out a way to say that what the legislature did is unconstitutional, which it isn't. In fact, the power of the legislature in Oklahoma is much more expansive than the power of Congress. Our constitution gives the legislature much more expansive power to
decide public policy than the US Constitution does. So, if anything, our justices should be more deferential to our elected legislature than they are.
Are you saying that they don't stay in their lane.
I am saying that they don't stay in their line, And quite often they act as a super legislature wearing black robes, and they use some devices in our constitution that make it easier for them to do that. So, for the first time ever, we have a judicial scorecard of our Supreme Court justices. Everybody to remember this, go to OKLA Judges oaklajudges dot com and you can call up the scorecard for all nine of our Supreme Court justices and you can look at.
How conservative or liberal they have been.
And you can click on the twenty cases that have been analyzed and been used to judge their conservatism or liberalism, and you can look at what the nature of those policies were that they overturned. Interestingly enough, I began serving in the session of twenty seventeen. Of the twenty cases that are assessed in this scorecard, sixteen of them were decided since I've been in the legislature, so we have had an increase in activism to overturn what the legislature
has done. So oaklajudges dot com and we are looking this year at having voters consider whether or not Justice Edmundson, Rich and Caugar should be retained. Justice Edmondson has a twenty one percent rating. Gurrich has an eighteen percent rating, and so does Justice Caugar. Our largest rating right now is Justice Kune, who came on in twenty twenty one with an eighty five percent rating. Justice Edmondson's been there
since two thousand and three. He was appointed by Brad Henry, Justice Gurrich since twenty eleven, appointed by Brad Henry, and von Kauger since nineteen eighty four, appointed by then Governor George nine nineteen eighty four nineteen eighty four.
That's a long time.
So all I'm asking people to do is go and look at the scorecard and look at the cases and make your own decision as to whether or not you believe it's time for a change, and for the first time to say no, these justices are outside their lane and have been so concentsistently enough that we think there should be a change. Now, how do you decide how to judge a justice. It's not the same as the
scorecards for legislators. Those are much more political. This is based on particular cases where they've overturned the elected representatives of the people, where they have disrespected the separation of powers, and they have determined that because they don't like the legislator legislative policy, they will change it. Conservative principles mean they respect their role as an interpreter, not a maker of the law. And so that's what this scorecard was
based on. And I'm just going to go we've got a couple of minutes. I'm just going to hit on two cases that I think are very timely because they have to do with election integrity. In twenty twenty COVID, the legislature was out of session for six weeks.
Fortunately we had not adjourned.
We came back in right after the League of Women Voters went to our Supreme Court and asked them to throw out our absentee ballot notarization requirement. We're within weeks of the primary election. Ballots to military are going out. Think of the chaos and the undermining of the integrity of the election would have been had that decision stood. It is definitely in the purview of a legislature determine election law. It's one of our basic responsibilities. We don't
do it at a federal level. Every single state has their own way of doing it, so we scrambled. It was an odd decision. They didn't really explain their methodology. They found something about affidavits in a section of law that had nothing to do with elections, and they hung their hat on that as a reason that they ordered we could not send out any absentee ballot information about note.
We couldn't send it out they forbid us to do it.
So we came back in and we quickly fixed things because we hadn't adjourned yet, and we got through our primary election. We got through our primary runoff. Now all three of these justices voted to throw out our election laws.
Why not? They did it in Chicago.
So then the Democrat Party went to federal court and sued us, wanting to get rid of the voter ID laws and other things. And an Obama appointed federal judge decided with the legislature on every argument. Let that sink in your own. Oklahoma Supreme Court justices five to four said, we don't like the voter ID laws, even though we upheld them a few years ago. We don't like the way the legislature's doing this. They wanted ballot harvesting. We had passed a statute saying you couldn't do that. They
wanted ballot harvesting. They wanted us to pay for the postage. They accused the state of putting a poll tax on people because they had to buy their own stamp. And what if they didn't have a printer at home to print out their ID to attach it to their ballot, which we were allowing during COVID. So the point is that our own Supreme Court disrespected the role of the
legislature and the federal court. An Obama judge actually wrote, the state has put in place alternatives that do not necessarily acquire voters to have direct contact with others in order to cast an absentee ballot. The evidence and the law substantiate that the state's interest in preventing voter fraud and promoting certainty and confidence are sufficiently weighty to overcome any minor burden placed on Oklahoma's voting during a pandemic.
That was the Obama appointed judge. That's the decision we needed out of our own Supreme Court three months before. So that, I think is the clearest example. A lot of the other cases have to do with workers compensation and lawsuit reform, all of which helped Oklahoma improve its economic standing, its business climate standing, and as they undermined us.
In twenty nineteen, we went into the judicial hellhole of the American Tort Reform Association with one of their decisions, and we are moving back down the scale in workers' compensation costs in our state because they're chipping away at that reform that took several years to pass, so I don't know where we are on timetime. You tend to talk to me and I just go like this, So why don't you ask me another question?
First of all, when we go into the voting boat and we see the sample ballads, you can get that at the voter portal. You can do that. And the question is on the judge, shall this justice be retained? Yes, sir no, And it's a yes or no. That's all you got to do. Just want to make sure that people are clear on that.
If you would prefer these justices to stay, vote yes.
If you think it's time for them to go, vote no.
Very good. In the same way with the state question, is it plain yes or no? There's no maybe or how about this yes?
And obviously I've made no secret of my own feelings about these different issues in these state questions, but I mainly am here today to say to folks you've asked for years, how do we know about these justices? Well, here's an organization that has taken up on themselves to score them.
And where do we find that score Cardigan.
Judges dot com, ud Judges dot com. You can click on each judge and learn more, and you can find out where how they were on each of these decisions, these twenty decisions. Obviously there are multitude of decisions that could have been scored, but they were looking for the ones where they outright overrode the legislative policy.
Very good, Senator Danis, thank you for being with you well, Thank you very much.
And I encourage people to get in touch with me, I to have questions.
I've had several people with absentee ballots already reaching out to me saying, Oh, I didn't know about all these judges.
What do I do? So I'm steering them to this website already.
Thank you again for being here. Thank