What is the biggest obstacle to conservative legislation in the Oklahoma Legislature?

It’s Republican leadership.

State Sen. Joseph Silk, R-Broken Bow, has been unofficially blacklisted by GOP leaders, who control all the committee chairmanships and can manipulate what bills are heard and what bills are passed.

Silk’s crime was wanting to stop abortion in Oklahoma.

Ironically, those same GOP leaders all ran with a promise that they would be “pro-life” and would do everything they could to save the lives of unborn children.

Silk, a veteran, had the courage to craft a bill that abolished abortion. Even though he understood that the liberal Oklahoma Supreme Court would overturn it once it became law, an appeal – financed by private sources and not by the state – would take the issue all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. That could have meant a victory that could save thousands of Oklahoma lives.

But Silk’s bill was killed in committee. It never got a vote and came nowhere close to a floor vote in the Senate or the House.

Instead, Republican leaders pushed a watered down bill that would mean a statewide vote to ban abortion in case the U.S. Supreme Court ever overturned Roe v. Wade.

In the meantime, babies are chopped up in their mothers’ wombs while GOP senators campaign as “champions for the unborn.”

And Silk can’t get a hearing on any of his bills – good or bad – because the GOP hierarchy has blacklisted him and removed him as vice chairman of a committee.

This is what happens when you stand up for the innocent in the Oklahoma Legislature. Voters need to remember this in the next election cycle.