Working with House Speaker Chris Benge

Last week the House of Representatives’ Republican caucus met for the first time since the recent election to elect new officers and prepare for the upcoming legislative session. The 70 person caucus contains members from every part of Oklahoma, including districts which have never before elected Republican representatives.

Since the next Legislature will take office next week, a number of the colleagues with whom I have worked in the past few years will be leaving the Legislature, including House Speaker Chris Benge who is term limited.

I have enjoyed the opportunity to work with Speaker Benge. I have found him to be one of the most honorable legislators. He was not one of the legislators who would play the political games which all too many politicians play. He treated legislators with respect. If he told us that he would support our idea then that is what he would do. If he opposed your idea then he was strong enough to accept responsibility for opposing it. I observed that he was not one of the politicians who would pass the buck by making it appear as if he were for your issue while secretly having it killed.

Benge placed a high priority on fiscal responsibility issues. His desire to guard the taxpayer dollar meant that he was extremely supportive of ideas for cutting government spending. He maintained that support even when our ideas came under heavy attack from those seeking to maintain the status-quo.

Benge’s support was extremely vital at the end of the 2009 legislative session when members of the opposition party launched a very aggressive attack against our effort to save millions of taxpayer dollars through streamlining the State’s IT infrastructure. Under Benge’s leadership the House passed the measure. The savings from this proposal are now set to come online at a time when state policy leaders will be required to cut millions of dollars of state spending.

I enjoy the opportunity to watch governance systems and learn from the mistakes and successes of policy leaders. I very much benefited from observing the system Benge used to develop and implement policy. Using the infrastructure put in place by previous House Speaker Lance Cargill, Benge utilized the talents of a team of energetic and intelligent policy professionals to maintain a communication pipeline with legislators, issue stakeholders, state officials and the office of the Speaker. This provided an efficient method for the dissemination of the enormous amounts of information that must be processed for the development and advancement of policy. It would have been easy for Benge to tear down his predecessor's infrastructure but instead he took advantage of it and used it in what I believe to be an effective manner.

One of Benge’s best long-term legacies will result from his courageous decision to allow the video broadcast of House proceedings. Because these feeds are archived, indexed and linkable they will greatly enable the citizens of Oklahoma to examine legislative actions for many years to come.

I developed the most respect for Speaker Benge in those times that I opposed his policies. It can be considered a risky event for a representative to vote against his own party’s Speaker’s legislation. However, I did this several times and was on more than one occasion one of just a very few representatives to do so. However, I never experienced retaliation for these votes and was never pressured to change my vote.

I am honored to have been able to work under the leadership of Speaker Benge and appreciate being able to learn from his example.

Preparing For The Expansion Of Government

Last Friday, I attended a meeting of House Republicans in order to elect new officers for the next session of the legislature.

There were more representatives in the room than ever before as the people voted to elect sixty-one Republicans up from fifty-seven and chose not to remove a single GOP incumbent.

The group unanimously re-elected Tulsa Representative Chris Benge as speaker. I believe Benge had earned the confidence of the Representatives with his friendly down to earth demeanor that makes it easy for them to express their opinions and engage in honest dialog about the issues they feel strongly about.

I also believe that Benge and many in the legislature are committed to using the stronger than ever conservative leadership in Oklahoma's legislature to do what we can in order to keep the obvious upcoming expansion of the federal government in as much check as possible.

You are probably aware of the recent massive expansion of the federal government which will now be firmly in control of liberal politicians who will no doubt use that power to aggressively advance an agenda that is in direct opposition to the values of many Oklahomans.

It is important to note that in creating the Constitution our nation's founding fathers designed the federal government to be small and limited in comparison to state governments. They knew that the people have a much stronger voice at the local level whereas the ability of the people to affect change is greatly limited at the federal level of government.

However, over time under both Republican and Democrat administrations both parties have used the federal government as a tool to accomplish their various agendas.

As a result the federal government has become very powerful. Now, a group of aggressive liberals can use that power not only to move America to the left but to build upon itself and increase in size, making the federal government more expansive and powerful than ever before.

As a result a bigger federal government will likely be the most responsive to those only with enough money and influence to use that power to benefit themselves. This will leave the responsibility for paying for the big government to the average taxpayer who cannot afford to invest in the high-powered lobbyists' and politician's campaigns in order to manipulate the system for their benefit.

This means that in the upcoming years we can expect the federal government to reflect both the desires of the powerful special interests and the liberal politicians who seek to forever change our nation.

During the last session of the Oklahoma Legislature the House of Representatives voted to support House Joint Resolution 1089 by a 92-3 margin. HJR 1089 sought to reassert Oklahoma's sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and, according to the resolution's language, is "serving notice to the federal government to cease and desist certain mandates."

The Tenth Amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

The author of the legislation stated, "The more we stand by and watch the federal government get involved in areas where it has no legal authority, we kill the Constitution a little at a time. The last few decades, the Constitution has been hanging by a thread."

While this resolution passed with the strong bi-partisan support of the Oklahoma House it appears to have failed to receive a hearing in the Oklahoma Senate. This year, with a new more conservative leadership in the Oklahoma Senate I am hopeful that legislation such as HJR 1089 will receive a fair hearing.