And, while they are at it, voters might as well ask their House member: Who did you support in the speaker’s race, Kyle Hilbert or Tom Gann? And even more importantly, who will you support in November?
That look of terror in their eyes as they instantly recognize the implications of their answer?
It will tell you everything you need to know.
There is an old lesson that every wise observer of human nature eventually learns.
Those who live capriciously — guided by impulse, emotion, personal loyalty, social pressure, and the crisis of the moment — tend to drift from bad decision to bad decision. They move from project to project, relationship to relationship, cause to cause, never pausing long enough to develop the system of judgment necessary to learn from their past mistakes.
It’s a problem that’s only gotten worse in the era of social media as society now has a collective case of ADD.
The result is predictable. They do not live so much as they react. They spend their lives managing the fallout from their last bad decision while preparing, usually unknowingly, to make the next one.
The secret to avoiding this fate? It is a system. You must have a system.
A person who intends to live wisely must develop a set of criteria, refined over time, tested by experience, and applied consistently. The criteria do not make every decision easy. They do not remove every uncertainty. But they do give the decision-maker something more reliable than feelings, instinct, fear, or social pressure.
This same principle applies to elected officials.
A constitutionalist legislator who hopes to survive the Oklahoma Capitol without being swallowed by its corruption must have a system. He must have a checklist. He must have a standard that exists before the vote, not an excuse invented after the vote.
Did the bill grow government?
Did it create a new bureaucracy?
Did it increase regulation?
Did it raise fees?
Did it carve out another exemption from transparency laws?
Did it exempt an agency from shared-service protocols?
Did it spend money that should not have been spent?
Is it, in effect, a special law? Did it transfer wealth from taxpayers to a favored political interest?
If so, the answer should usually be simple: no.
A consistent decision-making process keeps a legislator grounded. It gives him something to point back to when lobbyists rage, bureaucrats whine, leadership threatens, and the Capitol’s professional excuse-makers begin their work.
Without that system, the legislator becomes easy prey.
He starts rationalizing. He starts explaining away. He starts convincing himself that the big-government vote was actually conservative, that the transparency exemption was harmless, that the corporate welfare giveaway was economic development, that the lobbyist-funded dinner was appropriate, and that the betrayal of principle was really just the hard work of governing.
At that point, the brain is broken.
And once the brain is broken, the Capitol has him. The assimilation is complete.
Most regular readers of this publication will understand this problem instantly. Many will ask the obvious question: Why can’t my legislator do this? Why can’t they govern according to clear criteria, published for all to see?
But there is another question that must be asked first.
Why can’t the voter?
The voter is the higher authority. The legislator works for the voter. The legislator is hired by the voter. The legislator is retained by the voter. The legislator is promoted, excused, rewarded, or replaced by the voter.
If legislators must apply clear standards to their votes, then voters must apply clear standards to their candidates.
Otherwise, the voter becomes the political equivalent of the aimless legislator: guided by feelings, personal relationships, name recognition, last-minute mail pieces, church friendships, chamber-of-commerce applause, and the intoxicating flattery of politicians who know exactly how to tell grassroots conservatives what they want to hear.
So the question is simple.
What are your criteria?
What will govern your vote?
And when the 2026 Republican primary arrives on June 16, will you source your candidates with the seriousness the moment requires, according to clear, defensible criteria? Or will you be guided by those other co-opting factors?
Regular readers do not need to be told that the foremost criterion should be the abstinence pledge: the raising of the standard, the refusal to take the lobbyist and special-interest money that has so thoroughly corrupted state government.
A first-time candidate may find it easy to say he will not take lobbyist money before it is offered. The real test comes after election, when the money arrives in force.
It comes in campaign contributions. It comes in independent support. It comes in fundraisers. It comes in invitations. It comes in relationships. It comes in food, drink, entertainment, access, and the Capitol-city lifestyle that slowly transforms a citizen-legislator into a creature of the system.
The candidate who signs the pledge and means it is making a sacrifice. He is giving up thousands of dollars for his campaign account. He is giving up the social circuit. He is giving up the easiest path to political survival.
That does not make him perfect.
But it does mean he understands the disease.
If a candidate is willing to refuse that money, he is at least attempting to be part of the solution. If he is unwilling to make that commitment, then he is asking voters to send him into a corrupt system while refusing to take the most basic precaution against being corrupted by it.
And voters do such candidates no favors by sending them into Oklahoma City unprotected.
But, for the first time, there are a double-digit number of candidates who are making this commitment. And all across Oklahoma, Republican primary voters will have opportunities to support candidates who are attempting to raise the standard. They should take those opportunities seriously.
If the candidate has already held legislative office, the voter has another advantage: a record.
The Oklahoma Constitution’s Conservative Index has long served as one of the state’s traditional measurements of legislative conservatism. OKGrassroots.com has developed another important scorecard, built through detailed review of legislation and judged through the lens of Republican platform principles. The Oklahoma State Capital’s People’s Audit provides another layer of scrutiny, reviewing 93 of the worst votes of the 2025 session and explaining why those votes mattered.
If an incumbent legislator scores poorly across these indices, the voter must take that seriously. If a statewide candidate previously served in the Legislature and compiled a poor record, as almost all of them have, the voter must take that seriously as well.
The great danger in politics is not ignorance. It is rationalization. The voter sees the record, knows the record, understands the record — and then excuses it because the candidate is friendly, familiar, well-connected, personally likable, or skilled at performing conservatism before grassroots audiences.
This is how bad politicians survive. The most dangerous politicians are the best at getting you to convince yourself to betray your own values, the very motivation for why you are sacrificing to become involved in the first place, even when you don’t know that’s what you are doing.
Those sleazy politicians do not survive because voters lack information. They survive because voters explain the information away. There are simply too many resources now available to let the politicians get away with the scam.
And when voters excuse the same betrayals they once condemned, they become part of the problem they claim to oppose.
For State House candidates, one other question should always be proffered:
Do you support the Gann plan?
The Gann plan would change everything.
It would transform the Oklahoma House of Representatives from a centralized power structure — where the real decisions are made behind closed doors, dominated by the politics of special interests and protected by the pretense of deliberation — into a more open institution where ideas must be heard, debated, voted on, and judged by the people.
Under the current model, too many members live in fear of the speaker’s power. They function less like representatives and more like utilitarian lemmings: show up, press the green button, avoid angering leadership, attend the lobbyist dinners, and leave the hard decisions to the few people operating behind closed doors.
That is not representative government.
That is managed government.
The Gann Plan would give members real responsibility again. It would return the budget process to the open. It would force legislators to own their votes. It would make the House more accountable to the people who created it and less obedient to the leadership structure that captured it.
The day the Gann Plan wins adoption will be the day the House begins its return to the people.
Until then, every House candidate should be asked where he stands.
If a candidate refuses to support meaningful reform, refuses to challenge centralized power, and refuses to restore transparency to the House, then voters should understand what that refusal means.
He may talk like a reformer; but, until he says that he supports the Gann Plan, he is protecting the system. And it’s a very corrupt system.
And, while they are at it, voters might as well ask their House member: Who did you support in the speaker’s race, Kyle Hilbert or Tom Gann? And even more importantly, who will you support in November?
That look of terror in their eyes as they instantly recognize the implications of their answer?
It will tell you everything you need to know.
Candidates should also be asked whether they support Jim Shaw’s Save Oklahoma plan.
The strength of that plan is its simplicity. It gives candidates a clear policy structure through which they can show whether they are actually willing to confront the green energy, international-corporation, corporate welfare machine, the bureaucratic class, the taxpayer-funded-lobbyist industry, and the other monied special interests that dominate state government.
The question is not whether a candidate can say “limited government.”
The question is whether the candidate will apply limited-government principles when the Chamber wants money for its green energy members who are destroying rural Oklahoma, when agencies want more power by means of taxpayer-funded lobbyists, when the turnpike authority decides to raise toll rates yet again, when foreign interests want to buy up farmland for the latest cyanide-treated black-market marijuana farm that destroys the lives of so many, or when statists want to force the identities of Oklahoma citizens into the REAL ID sharing system but refuse to require illegal aliens to have their identities verified, allowing the modern-day labor exploitation market to continue to thrive.
A candidate who cannot oppose corporate welfare in plain English now will certainly not oppose it in office after Election Day.
Every candidate should be asked another question:
Have you ever signed a nondisclosure agreement related to public policy, public spending, economic development, or government negotiations?
And will you pledge never to do so?
The NDA has become one of the most disturbing tools in modern Oklahoma government. It allows politicians to sign away transparency and then claim they cannot tell the people what is being done in the people’s name.
It is government secrecy by contract.
When a legislator does this, he surrenders. He has betrayed his constitutional oath to the people, and he is acknowledging a higher power than his constituency.
This abuse became especially visible during the era of corporate welfare on steroids, when state leaders negotiated massive incentive packages in secret, withheld the identity of potential recipients, and then rushed the public process once the deal was already functionally complete.
The pattern is now familiar.
The deal is developed behind closed doors.
The public is told almost nothing.
The Legislature is brought in late.
The pressure campaign begins.
The vote is rushed.
And by the time citizens understand what is happening, the decision has already been engineered.
A key example is the massive incentive package connected to the UAE-backed aluminum smelter project. As more Oklahomans began to understand the proposal and its implications, opposition began to grow. But by then, the process had already been largely shaped. The machinery was already moving, and introduced over the weekend, and up for a final vote in the House by a Tuesday, the public-facing vote was a mere show.
That is not transparency; it is not deliberation, and it is certainly not constitutional self-government befitting our republican system of governance.
It is rule by secrecy, wrapped in the language of economic development.
And any candidate who cannot say, clearly and without hesitation, that he will not participate in that system is not ready to represent the people.
All of this returns to you: the voter.
It is easy to blame the politicians. And much of the blame belongs there.
But politicians do not promote themselves. Voters hire them, and as the employer, you are the highest authority.
If voters keep rewarding the very people who built this corrupt system, the system will not change. It will become worse. The secrecy will deepen. The spending will grow. The corporate welfare deals will multiply. The lobbyists will become more powerful. The speaker’s office will become even more imperial.
You can never allow your vote to be denigrated into a mere social gesture.
It is not a favor.
It is not a reward for friendliness.
It is not an expression of who shook your hand, remembered your name, attended your event, or spoke convincingly at your Republican grassroots group’s meeting.
It is so much more than that.
It is an act of self-government.
It is the tool given to the citizen by the design of the American system and our founders, and preserved by the sacrifice of so many who came before us. To truly honor this sacrifice, your vote must be governed by reason, principle, evidence, and a clear standard.
So build your checklist.
Ask whether the candidate has signed the abstinence pledge.
Ask whether the candidate takes lobbyist or special-interest money.
Ask how the incumbent scored on the big three indices: The Conservative Index, the gold standard of Oklahoma conservatism since 1979; the incredible OKGrassroots.com Republican Platform index, so thorough and complete and the work product of many hours of dedicated volunteer labor; and The Oklahoma State Capital’s People’s Audit, nicely capturing the worst votes that lawmakers never expected to be held accountable for.
Ask whether the House candidate
Your Vote on June 16th Is Not a Favor. It Is an Act of Government. Are You Doing it Right?
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog
April 28, 2026 at 05:24PM - J Murphey
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