Squandering Precious Tax Dollars

If this session proved anything, it’s Oklahoma’s current crop of lawmakers has an insatiable appetite for testing the Constitution’s limits.

And why not?

When legislation ends up challenged in court, its authors – and those who vote for it – never directly receive a bill to defend it like they would if they were plaintiffs in a civil case.

The costs are shared by taxpayers, buried in the attorney general’s operating budget. Out of sight, out of mind.

That’s a problem, if you believe every tax dollar is a precious investment in vital state services that help fulfill a shared social contract that builds roads and schools, protects vulnerable children and families, and ensures public safety.

Next year’s state budget, of course, is nearly $12.5 billion. A whopping amount, right? Hardly – it’s actually less than a bare minimum given the state’s historic bottom-feeder status in most socioeconomic categories.

And yet, instead of tackling real problems like the fact nearly one in five Oklahoma children goes to bed hungry, the statehouse Republican supermajority prioritizes Culture War-style measures clearly designed to please its political base.

This session’s prime example: HB 4156’s fascistic “show me your papers” anti-immigrant law that attempts to usurp federal authority. It doesn’t take effect until July 1, yet it’s already spawned two legal challenges – one from the U.S. Justice Department, the other from civil rights groups and a Mexican national whose parents brought her to the U.S. as a baby.

But – wait! – there’s more …

As the clock expired on this year’s session, lawmakers barreled ahead with two more wholly unnecessary proposals destined, if signed into law by the governor, to end up in taxpayer-funded court battles.

HB 1425 would permit students to earn class credit for completing off-campus religious instruction. HB 1449 would define gender as the “natural person’s biological sex at birth” – a missile clearly aimed at transgender Sooners.

That both survived the legislative sausage-making is a national embarrassment. One can only imagine the potential social media lampooning of stone-age, Taliban-style thinking by the state’s elected elite.

It’s also an insult to clear-eyed Oklahomans who in a 2016 referendum resoundingly affirmed the state Constitution’s strict church-state separation and who don’t need [or want] lawmakers pretending to be experts in science and medicine.

Legislative chicanery at its worst? Or the definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Either way, it is beneath the Legislature’s dignity. And it should be unacceptable to state taxpayers who want their dollars spent on fixing real, not imagined problems.

Sadly, this nonsense is likely a natural consequence of term limits. When voters in 1990 expressed their displeasure with the Legislature by capping service at 12 years, institutional memory became the exclusive purview of the Capitol’s special interests – which never leave.

Thus, taxpayers have been on the hook to defend myriad legal challenges to clearly unconstitutional laws – often involving church-state separation or reproductive rights.

Remember the Ten Commandments’ monument on the Capitol lawn? And the state Supreme Court’s repeated rulings that Oklahoma women have a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy if their life is at risk?

None of this is ancient history. Indeed, some isn’t even history yet. See, for example, the current legal battle over a state education board’s funding of the nation’s first public religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School in Oklahoma City.

Opening the door to students earning class credits for off-campus sectarian religious instruction and legalizing discrimination against transgender Oklahomans simply tees up more costly court battles the state cannot win.