As this year’s Senate session came to a close, Sen. Dusty Deevers took to the Senate floor for what we now know was likely his final day in legislative session—at least for now. There, Deevers, the Senate’s leading advocate for opening up the rules and allowing senators to actually do their job, forever sealed the legacy of his first term on the side of transparency.
Deevers simply sought a vote on key legislation that no Republican senator would dare return home and tell their constituents they opposed.
It was a key part of the Trump agenda: a proposal to check for and expose medical welfare fraud by illegal aliens, which many senators had already voted to advance out of committee and place on the Senate floor for a final vote.
Deevers called the bluff of Senate leaders and exposed the smoke-and-mirrors game they were playing.
The courage of Deevers and his allies, and the dastardliness of the senators playing this smoke-and-mirrors game, have been widely analyzed within grassroots circles.
There is, however, a fascinating component of the now-infamous episode that has not received the analysis it deserves.
The Senate’s ability to bottle up the bill depended upon the Senate floor leader’s refusal to bring it to a vote, even though the Senate had voted to make the bill eligible for the vote, in what in retrospect was almost certainly a faux vote, purely for show so that those senators could claim to have supported the Trump plan, without having enacted it, thus keeping the monied special interests happy: i.e., eating their cake, and having it too.
As Deevers took to the floor, under the Senate leadership’s interpretation of the rules that day, in the most technical sense, one person—not the members of the Senate—held all the cards: Majority Floor Leader Julie Daniels.
This allowed just about every other member to play the smoke-and-mirrors game of helplessness: passing the buck, hiding behind Daniels’s skirt tails, and suggesting that it was her sole decision to refuse a vote on the bill.
Now, ask just about any voter in Daniels’ Senate District 29 if they support analyzing, exposing, and ending the healthcare welfare spending for illegal alien fraud, and time and again, they will say, “Yes!”
But Daniels—well, she’s a lame duck, not at all likely worried about the sentiments of those voters. So she won’t likely mind being the fall guy, the sole reason for it’s failure.
Allow me to suggest that those voters are the victims of the big grift, the same big grift that any number of other Oklahomans just fell victim to in recent days, as they re-elected members of the Swamp Seven on a platform of hardline opposition to all things illegal alien invasion, time and again sending out consultant-crafted messaging with Trump clip art, or shaking the hand of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, the official in charge of the matter at the federal level.
But it’s Daniels who most clearly illustrates the grift. She could have easily said, “OK, we will hear that bill now,” albeit perhaps at great risk to her standing with Senate Pro Tem Paxton and the dark-moneyed special interests who ensure the survival of the Swamp Seven and Paxton’s position of power. And just two short years ago, she campaigned to her very conservative electorate, as did more recently the Swamp Seven, as an immigration hardliner.
Certainly, she did not campaign on a platform of single-handedly and in the most tyrannical of fashions refusing to give the Senate even the chance to cast a vote on key immigration reforms.
But it’s not as if the voters of Senate District 29 hadn’t been warned. They, unlike so many other districts, had their own Paul Revere—an individual of great courage and conviction. At great personal sacrifice, she spent substantial time traveling throughout the district, informing voters that Daniels had already betrayed them by supporting an official Oklahoma government identity for illegal alien invaders. This was the now-infamous driver’s license proposal brought before the Senate by a liberal Oklahoma City Democrat immigration attorney.
This modern-day Paul Revere has served her neighbors time and again, standing in the gap that no one else will fill, to take on the unthinkable: challenging an establishment incumbent with tens of thousands of dollars at their command and the ability to obfuscate any issue, any past transgression, and convince the voters that they are in fact the “conservative” choice.
Wendi Stearman knew she faced long odds, but she knew that voters needed the option of doing the right thing, even if they didn’t choose to exercise it.
As she sought to stave off Stearman’s strong challenge, and courageous truth telling, Daniels’ 2024 re-election followed the usual consultant-crafted formula: time and again, flood the mailboxes declaring herself to be a hardliner, make a very personal commitment to defending those values, and then attack the opposition for “misleading,” but of course never substantively answer the specifics of any of the opposition’s charges, because of course, they weren’t misleading—they were spot on.
It’s a flawed system, as shown by a glossy mailer claiming Daniels was protecting “state resources” on illegal immigration—an ironic claim given she just blocked the Senate’s ability to do exactly that, even after many senators voted to consider the bill.
The reader will also note how skillfully Daniel’s consultant sought to obscure her vote for the illegal alien driver’s license by a little-known amendment vote, that’s rather difficult to even confirm. This, in tandem with Daniel’s mailer declaring her opponent to be “mudslinging,” would no doubt create enough confusion among voters to give them the fig leaf they needed to keep Daniels in office, perhaps leading them to believe that Stearman was mistaken or, worse, intentionally misleading—which, of course, she was not.
Daniel’s content writer followed a familiar establishment playbook: obscure the issue, then attack and discredit. T
The Warning Senate District 29 Ignored: How Senate Majority Floor Leader Julie Daniels Proved Wendi Stearman Right
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog
July 9, 2026 at 08:31AM - J Murphey
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