Inside the building, every member of the statehouse and senate got his or her turn at the microphone. The current national situation, and Barry Soetoro’s proclamations, were discussed and dissected. Oklahoma was one of only two states in the Union where Soetoro had failed to carry a single county in the 2012 election. His popularity had continued to sink since then, and it was soon clear that he had few friends in the legislature.
One woman delegate from Norman, a university town and the state’s liberal bastion, argued that Soetoro would be out of office on January 20, 2017, a mere five months away, so there was no need for drastic action. “He’s not only a lame duck, he’s a dead duck. Why shoot ourselves in the head when he’s going to be gone in five months, regardless of what we or Texas or any other state does?”
The following speaker took issue with her. “You are the wildest optimist in the history of representative government in Oklahoma. What makes you think there will be an election? Soetoro’s party will lose if there is one, so he has manufactured this crisis to give himself a plausible excuse for calling off the election. He wants to be president for life. Or maybe king. Or emperor. Emperor Barry. We need to stand up for representative government here and now, regardless of the cost. We owe it to ourselves, for our own self-respect, and we owe it to our children and grandchildren. Five years from now, how will you explain to your grandchildren what happened to Oklahoma after you refused to do what you knew to be right? And we all know the right thing to do. But the right thing is hard. Let us do it now, and someday we can all stand proudly, shoulder to shoulder, in heaven before the ruler of the universe.”
There was more, lots more. One of the low points was a plea by a delegate from one of the districts encompassing the poorer section of Oklahoma City. “Nothing we can do here tonight will alter the course of our nation’s history. We here in Oklahoma are a sideshow. We are a thinly populated state, with only three million nine hundred thousand people. Do you really think we can realistically defy the federal government? The decisions that matter will all be made in Washington. I urge you to not compound the president’s problems by being defiant. Let us not beard the lion to see if, indeed, he will bite.”
Several of the following speakers heaped scorn on her position. One speaker summed it up: “Submit, submit, submit. Don’t anger the tyrant. I never thought I would hear such words from a free American.”
The criticism of the Soetoro administration kept rolling, mixing with a broad criticism of liberalism and federal judges. “I am sick of federal judges deciding that the United States Constitution requires abortion and same-sex marriage,” a state senator from Enid said. “I challenge you to read that document from end to end, and if you can find the word ‘abortion’ in it I will kiss your ass tomorrow at high noon on the capitol steps. Ditto gay marriage. What’s next? Plural marriages? Legalizing infanticide? We’re practically there now. I say it’s time we seized control of our own lives here in Oklahoma. Anyone wanting an abortion or to marry a homosexual partner can move to California or New York. We shouldn’t be forced to put up with it, and my constituents don’t want to. The real problem here is federal judges who enshrine their liberal philosophies in federal decisions instead of letting individual states vote their consciences in open, fair elections. Abortions, gay marriage, legalized pot, all of that should be decided by the states. Whatever happened to the governmental powers reserved to the states? Let’s declare ourselves independent, give the people of Oklahoma the right to decide which laws they want to live under, and tell Barry Soetoro where to go and what to do to himself when he gets there.”
Another delegate in the House had this to say: “Oklahomans are tired of being ruled by federal bureaucrats and judges, none of them elected. They decide everything from what can be taught in the public schools to what can be served to kids for lunch and whether the kids can have a prayer. They decree that welfare recipients are entitled to a color television and cell phone, all paid for by the working families of Oklahoma, some of whom can afford neither. They claim they have the right to regulate every creek, farm pond, mudhole, and wet spot in America, including here in Oklahoma. We have to pay for their crackpot regulations based on crackpot science, or no science at all. We have to pay the salaries of the bureaucrats and put up with the endless delays and mountainous paperwork. It’s high time to put a stop to bureaucrats and judges running our lives. Let’s take back control. Independence today, tomorrow, and forever.”
The Oklahoma Senate and House passed the declaration by overwhelming majorities and made the vote unanimous by voice vote, and the governor signed it. As in Texas, the declaration, which was almost word for word identical to Texas’, was read before television cameras on the statehouse steps to a wildly cheering crowd that commentators estimated at more than ten thousand people.
In New Mexico the legislature also met that evening, but decided to defer any action until Soetoro had made a definitive announcement about whether the presidential election would proceed in November. If it was canceled altogether, the New Mexico legislature agreed to revisit the issue. The governor of Arizona called the legislature to meet the following evening. The governors of Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah scheduled special sessions two days hence. The governors of Montana and Iowa called for a special session of the legislature in three days time, to give lawmakers a chance to canvass their communities. Other states, too, were mulling their options.
Although the legislatures had yet to be called, in Alaska and Hawaii the question of independence was also being weighed and debated, for different reasons. The previous year Soetoro had announced his intention to ignore the U.S. statutes and declare a huge chunk of northern Alaska off-limits to oil exploration. Many of the people of that sparsely settled state were outraged; oil development created good-paying jobs, of which Alaska had far too few, and severance taxes funded state and local governments and generated a check every year for every Alaskan. Oil development had never been the ecological disaster the save-the-earth crowd swore it would be. Soetoro’s announcement would slowly upend the Alaskan economy and affect every man, woman, and child who lived there. The devil of it was that the only people who visited the undeveloped Arctic were Alaskans who went to hunt and fish; the limousine liberals in Soetoro’s audience rarely if ever trekked the frozen north dribbling dollars as they went. Still, Soetoro would be gone in five months, they hoped, and his extralegal imperial declarations would then be history.
In Hawaii, independence talk had been around for years, especially among native Hawaiians, many of whom were still on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. There was also a large number of people of all races that felt the Hawaiians had gotten a raw deal in 1893 when white American businessmen played a large role in toppling Hawaii’s last monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani, an overthrow that even then-president Grover Cleveland thought an illegal act of war. The current political crisis on the mainland looked to many native Hawaiians like a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: perhaps the U.S. government would be too busy chasing Texas traitors to worry about the islands in the sea’s middle. On the other hand, the economic ties to the mainland were the bedrock of the economy. Could trade and tourism from Japan and China replace lost American dollars? Would the people of the islands be better or worse off as an independent nation?