It has been the talk of Tulsa since Friday after the close of business. President Donald J. Trump endorsed Mike Mazzei for Oklahoma Governor. On Truth Social, President Trump wrote, “Mike Mazzei has my complete and total endorsement to be the next Governor of Oklahoma — HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”
Forty years ago, Oklahoma learned a hard lesson about local power without oversight. Some now want its schools to return to a system it once abandoned for a reason.
In the early 1980s, the FBI ran an undercover operation in Oklahoma called OKSCAM. What it uncovered was a public corruption scandal remarkable for its sheer scale: at least 230 convictions touching 60 of the state’s 77 counties, all tied to a tidy and depressingly simple scheme (Holloway & Meyers, 1992). Suppliers padded invoices for road-building materials. Commissioners signed off. Kickbacks flowed back. Rinse and repeat.
It is tempting to file OKSCAM under “bad people taking advantage of the system,” close the report, and move on. That is the comfortable reading, and it is the wrong one. The reason it is wrong has very little to do with roads. It is a lesson about what happens when public money is spent where no one independent can see it — and four decades later, that lesson is being relearned in Oklahoma’s public schools.
Governor Kevin Stitt recently signed into law a permanent, statewide “Bell to Bell, No Cell” policy, delivering on a commitment he has championed to get phones out of Oklahoma classrooms.
The new law requires Oklahoma school districts to adopt policies prohibiting student cell phone use on campus during the school day, with common sense exceptions for emergencies and documented medical needs.
Recently, the Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act (EDEA) of 2022 as applied to the Oklahoma Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS) – a ruling that adds to a growing record of Oklahoma prioritizing economic good sense over political convenience.
The EDEA was intended to protect the state’s energy sector, giving the Treasurer’s Office the power to compile a “blacklist” of financial institutions perceived to be boycotting fossil fuels and required public bodies like OPERS to divest from any firm that appeared on it. The Oklahoma Supreme Court’s majority, led by Justice James Edmondson, identified this problem precisely. The EDEA created a “dual purpose” forcing pension managers to serve a political directive alongside their fiduciary duty to members, which the court found irreconcilable with the state’s foundational law.
Analysis: Oklahoma’s limited-government ethos, where every new state mandate should raise red flags, Rep. John Pfeiffer (R-Orlando) has delivered a masterclass in regulatory creep. His HB 2166, now signed into law by Gov. Kevin Stitt, doesn’t slash taxes, slash bureaucracy, or slash the size of government. It does the opposite: It rewrites state law to create two official classes of “legal newspapers” qualified to publish the flood of government-mandated public notices that counties, cities, and local entities must run. The result? A fresh layer of state-defined checklists, audits, court petitions, and content quotas that protects the print newspaper industry’s cozy, taxpayer-funded revenue stream while pretending to “modernize” transparency.
This isn’t deregulation. It’s the print paper lobby – led by the Oklahoma Press Association (OPA) – getting exactly what it negotiated for after “years of study and analysis,” as Pfeiffer himself admitted. And Oklahoma taxpayers, already squeezed by local government spending, will foot the bill through higher publishing fees passed on by the very entities required to use these “qualified” outlets.
