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Steve Lewis served as Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1989-1991. He currently practices law in Tulsa and represents clients at the Capitol. You can sign up on his website to receive the Capitol Updates newsletter by email.
Session has been over for a week, but a week is not enough. It takes a while for legislators, legislative staff, the executive branch and probably the public to decompress from the questions, debates, challenges and proposals considered in a session like the 2016 edition of the Oklahoma legislature. The highs and lows that occur from one day to the next during a legislative session are not unlike a 7-game basketball playoff series. The pace is rapid, and the results are suddenly final.
Whatever your issue, you can go from the high of a momentary success convincing you that you’re on your way to victory to the depths of dismay when your proposal fails in a vote — or worse, never gets a vote for a reason you may not ever truly know. Or if you’re on the other side of the coin, trying to stop what you view as bad legislation, the same pressures apply. A bad idea dead in one bill pops up in another bill to live another day. Nothing’s over ’til it’s over.
Most assessments of the session have not been great. Even the participants gave themselves middling reviews like, “we did the best we could under the circumstances.” Taking a long view, I see this as a transitional rather than a transformational year. There was a recognition that things need to change, but the change just launched. It didn’t actually happen. That will have to wait for another day.
In his final speech to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin, then 81, urged his colleagues in the convention to sign the document they had composed while admitting it was not a “perfect production.” He reflected on their challenge, a difficulty that has lasted through the ages regardless of time, place or circumstance: “…when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.” If that was true of the founders, we can sympathize with our legislators if they occasionally display some of the same qualities. So let’s rest up, have an election, and prepare for a successful session next year.
