SEN. JULIE DANIELS

the United States Supreme Court. And I want to say, in terms of the election, you're voting on whether or not to retain these justices, and there's a whole slew of names on there, and I want to remind people to turn your ballot over. I'm hearing that some people are voting on the front page and not realizing there are other things on the back page in some places, So make sure you thoroughly peruse the ballot before you

stick it in the machine. I'm here to talk about my opinion that we should vote to not retain the three Supreme Court justices. That would mean a no vote. That is time for them to retire. And I have very specific reasons for that, and it has to do with them methodically and working to undermine many of the reforms that have been passed in our state in the

past fifteen or so years. And I think this is very telling about the attitude of people in the judiciary and those who put them there by telling the governor, these are the three names you may choose from, because we have a system that I think is not very reflective of the voting public. But these justices go, and

none of them have ever been unretained. We've never voted no on any of them, and yet by and large, they do not reflect the political reality of our state since we changed over from being a one party state, which we were for one hundred plus years. I just want to read a quote that was in the Tulsa World not long ago defending these justices. This is former Justice Joseph Watt, who wants them return to the court,

saying they have years of appellate experience. True, they are entitled to be retained.

the last minute. They didn't want any notorization of ballots, and they didn't like that we were going to let people photocopy their ID, put it in their absentee ballot envelope and signed the affidavit this is me. This is my ID that I'm putting in this ballot. That way they wouldn't have to go get it notarized. They said, nope, that's not good enough, and the notorization. We don't want that either, so none of that can be done. We fixed it, The legislature fixed it right before we adjourned

the end of May. That was a legal women voters case. Then the Democrat Party suit us in federal court trying to do the same thing as we approached the general election, and a federal district judge appointed by Barack Obama throughout all their arguments. A federal district judge appointed by Obama said, unlike our own Supreme Court, election law is the purview of the legislature. I'm not a le legislature of one. If you want to try to change election law, you

go to your legislature. So that was one example of where I believe there was real judicial overreach. People have asked me, well, how do you judge whether or not you should retain a justice, and the methodology that has been used on this new website oklajudges dot com okla judges dot Com says that a judge needs to say what the law is, not what they want it to be. The election law very clearly said here's what we're going

to do to accommodate people during COVID. They didn't like it, so they threw it out and made the law what they wanted to be. But they are not an elected branch of government. Yes, it's a third equal branch, but the founders were very clever. They didn't want to elect the judiciary, so they had them appointed by those who are elected. And that's really the methodology that I believe

would be the best for our state. But anyway, you're not supposed to put your own individual preferences into your decisions. You're supposed to look at what the legislature did and decide what the legislature said, and not take their words and twist them into what you want. So that is where we are with some of these justices. And I just wanted to talk about an issue today, and that

is workers compensation reform and lawsuit reform. These have been very active issues for the Republican legislature since they first took the majority back in about two thousand and four. So how do you compete with other states? We all talk and sometimes argue about big incentives for companies to come into our state, but you've got to get the back office functions right or you start out at a negative with people looking at your state, and one of

these is through lawsuit reform and workers' comp reform. How friendly are you to business is in terms of making sure your regulations are reliable, don't change too much, and they can count on certain costs associated with doing business. If you don't have lawsuit reform, if it's up and down depending on the venue and the judge and the attorneys, then insurance goes up, particularly medical malpractice insurance. And you have people looking at the states saying, Ah, that's too

risky to go to Oklahoma. I'm going to go to Florida where they have comprehensive lawsuit reform, or better yet, let's go to Texas where they accomplished this in two thousand and three. In two thousand and three, they passed

comprehensive lawsuit reform that included capping non economic damages. Those are the pain and suffering damages, not the medical rehabilitation, loss of income damages, but the ones where a jury or a judge that says, we're mad that this happened, we're mad that this happened in the workplace, and we're going to punish the employer. So they capped non economic damages. They outlawed forum shopping, going and finding the judge who would be most likely to decide for your client, and

they limited damages in medical malpractice cases. In response to Texas doing that, a sitting senator, Senator Stratton Taylor from Claremore, who had been pro tim of the stenate, wrote to his American Trial Lawyer Association associates in Texas and said, with the recent events that have occurred in Texas, you

may be looking to file cases in Oklahoma. I want to take the opportunity to introduce you to our law firm, and the end of the letter says we would be pleased to assist you in any cases you may want to file in Oklahoma. The response from the legislature was overwhelmingly negative, and then the Wall Street Journal weighed in and they said that the letter is an invitation for the entire national tort bar to forum shop in Oklahoma, a state that just can't say no to jackpot justice.

Keating tried for two terms to get a demo crat legislature to at least start reigning in the abuses in this area and was only successful with a few things on punitive damages. But as the Wall Street Journal said in two thousand and three, you're going to continue to see higher insurance costs, fewer doctors, and all the other troubles that come with an out of control to court system. So we finally passed it in two thousand and four, and five years later our Supreme Court threw it out

the whole thing. Then we worked on non economic damages and we passed a cap on those in twenty eleven, a cap of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Eight years later, Supreme Court threw it out. We worked to

change our workers' comp system. Instead of a broken arm at this workplace and a broken arm at that workplace being treated differently because you have different lawyers in different courts advocating for as much money as they can get, go to a commission system where you standardize how you're going to treat different injuries, and you have a commission to hear the complaints about those decisions. You can't appeal

then to the court. We worked very hard to get this done, and it was a comprehensive rewrite of workers been done in many states. And the first thing our Supreme Court did, including these three justices, was to say you put an entire change of the law into one bill. Yes, it's all one law, comprehensive, comprehensive, but we believe that's lag rolling, and so we're going to throw it out.

We had to go into special session. Taxpayers paid for the legislature to go into special session in twenty fourteen and pass thirty six separate bills to accomplish the reform. But again, these judges, including these three justices, said, oh, but anybody in the old system, the re litigious system, they can't enter the new system, which perpetuated two different ways of doing workers' comp right up until today, keeping the court going for a while and then the commission

system over here. And we have injured workers languishing years later in this other system when they could easily have been transferred, injuries treated, damages, be returned to work. And so it's really undermined our ability to get people healthy and back to work. So here's the deal. It's up to us. If we don't vote, we are voting to keep these same kinds of decisions coming down from the

bench with these three justices in those majority opinions. Just one other quick example, most recent, we have a multiple injury trust fund that says, if you have worked for multiple employers and you've had several injuries, we don't know exactly how to assign responsibility, so you may go to this fund where everyone contributes and taxpayers contribute to making sure we have money to address the needs of people

who have had multiple injuries with multiple employers. Trial lawyer challenged this year and said, you say it has to be a subsequent employer before they can tap into this trust fund, But we think you really mean subsequent injury. That you can be with the same employer, work for the same employer your entire career, and they're paying for workplace injuries, but then you have a subsequent injury after that employer. But you know what, we think the existing

employer can be the subsequent employer. Subsequent to me means after, And the Supreme Court managed to say that subsequent employer actually does mean subsequent injury. So you can work for the same employer twenty thirty years and you can still go to this multiple injury trust fund. Completely undoes what the reform said. And they said very cleverly, somewhere in the statutes, you use subsequent injury. So when you use

subsequent injury. You must always mean subsequent injury, and the fact that you put employer after the word doesn't make any sense. You actually meant to say subsequent injury. So it doesn't matter if you work for the same employer your entire career. You could also tap into that trust fund, which was only intended for employees who worked for multiple employers. I know it's very in the weeds, but this affects your insurance rates, This effects the cost of during doing business.

It all comes down to the consumer in the end. And these are reforms we put in place to make Oklahoma more attractive. And so as we erode these reforms, we go back to where we were finishing up in twenty nineteen when they threw out our cap on non economic damages. We went from being in the top ten

with the American Tort Reform Association. We had been working our way up to the judicial health with one decision, and we are still there because we continue to retain justices that are absolutely opposed to the reforms the elected representatives and senators and governors are putting in place in our states. So I would urge everybody to carefully consider

voting no on retention of these three justices. And remember to look at your whole ballot because you've got various things to vote on, so you need to look at both sides.