Cheryl Baber for State Senate District 35

State Sen. Gary Stanislawski is term-limited, and there are three Republicans and three Democrats who have filed to replace him as District 35 State Senator. Sen. Stanislawski, and his predecessor, former Sen. Jim Williamson, have endorsed Cheryl Baber to be their successor, and I concur.

Cheryl Baber is semi-retired as an attorney, volunteering with Tulsa Lawyers for Children. She served from 1998 to 2009 as a Law Clerk for Federal judges in the U. S. Northern District (based in Tulsa). In 2001, Baber published a law review article on Alternative Dispute Resolution in the Federal courts; at the time she was law clerk to Federal Magistrate Judge Claire Eagan, who was appointed as a Federal District Judge by George W. Bush. She then served about five years as an Assistant U. S. Attorney here in Tulsa; OSCN records show her representing the IRS in many foreclosure cases. She is a graduate of Columbia Law School, has a master's degree in international history and politics from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, and her bachelor's degree is from Midwestern State in Wichita Falls, Texas, not far from her hometown of Walters, Oklahoma. She has been in Tulsa since completing her law degree in 1993.

In 2015, Baber was chosen by Republican activists to represent Tulsa County on the Oklahoma Republican State Committee for a two-year term, during which she was also elected as a delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention. In 2018, she ran for the open House District 71 seat, winning the Republican nomination in a runoff, but lost to former TV personality Denise Brewer in the general election. She has the joint endorsement of several local conservative groups, including the Tulsa Area Republican Assembly.

Baber is active in the First Baptist Church of Tulsa. I encourage you to read Cheryl Baber's eloquent responses to the iVoterGuide survey.

Baber is opposed by retired District Judge Linda Morrissey and attorney Kyden Creekpaum.

Cheryl Baber is the only candidate in the race with the good sense to oppose SQ802, while Morrissey supports embedding Obamacare in the state constitution, and Creekpaum gave a non-committal answer.

Morrissey was a registered independent until re-registering as a Republican sometime in 2011 or 2012 (according to voter registration records available to me), but her husband, John Nicks, was chairman of the Tulsa County Democratic Party and a Democratic canddate for Attorney General and Tulsa County Commissioner. Everyone else registered to vote at her address was registered as a Democrat as of June 9, 2020. In 1992, Morrissey and her husband were listed by the political director of the Oklahoma Democratic Party as expected guests at Bill Clinton's 1993 inaugural gala, an honor typically given to the most fervent supporters of Slick Willie.

As a district judge, Morrissey had a history of being reversed on appeal. Morrissey answered only four questions of the dozens in the iVoterGuide questionnaire. (Their summary rating of "somewhat conservative" is puzzling and without any apparent basis. Should you get credit because you avoided giving a liberal answer by not answering at all?)

Morrissey has the smallest bankroll of the three Republicans, has no history of involvement in the Republican Party or conservative causes, and I suspect she will not survive the primary. Morrissey's major donors include Stuart Price, an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress in the 1990s, and Clark Brewster, a Tulsa attorney who is a generous donor to Democrat candidates and the lawyer for "adult entertainer" Stormy Daniels in her lawsuit against President Trump.

Kyden Creekpaum is an attorney who grew up in Tulsa and moved back to Tulsa in 2017 after eight years in Paris and Washington with Hughes, Hubbard & Reed. His parents were public school teachers; his father Eddie Creekpaum ran for City Council as a Democrat in 2000 and is a prolific writer of letters to the editor.

Kyden Creekpaum has an impressive educational background: Double major in political science and piano at OU, master's in public health from Johns Hopkins, law degree from Georgetown, master's in law from Sciences Po (the Paris Institute of Political Studies).

When I was introduced to Creekpaum at the Tulsa County Republican Convention, I said, "Ah, the Kaiser candidate!" which elicited a sheepish response. Creekpaum is an attorney with the Frederic Dorwart law firm. Dorwart is president of the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF) and, until Tuesday, chairman of the University of Tulsa Board of Trustees. (Dorwart is stepping down as chairman as of June 30, but will remain on the board's executive committee.) The Dorwart firm handles legal matters for many branches of what Michael Mason has labeled "the Kaiser System," including Kaiser-Francis Oil Company, GKFF, the Tulsa Community Foundation (TCF), and the Bank of Oklahoma.

For religious conservatives, the involvement of the Kaiser System in a Republican primary is worrisome, as donations may be used as leverage to get elected officials to devote taxpayer dollars to Kaiser's preferred policy prescriptions. Kaiser's "giving statement" reveals him to be a materialist: Given enough money applied scientifically to education, nutrition, and health care, poverty and misery will vanish. Moral and spiritual aspects are absent from his analysis of the cause of societal problems. However pure his intentions, Kaiser's approach is bound to fail because it fails to address the fundamental problem facing humanity: fallen human nature.

As Mason documents, the Kaiser System's approach to charitable giving is one of control and "strings attached." Mayor G. T. Bynum IV, who posed as a conservative when he first ran for City Council in 2008, and who served as a federal lobbyist for GKFF, began working to impose leftist views of sexuality on Tulsans shortly after his first re-election in 2009 -- right about the time he became a GKFF lobbyist.

Creekpaum has the biggest warchest of any candidate in the race, $145,750.00 in contributions, plus $5,398.48 in in-kind expenditures. He filed his statement of organization with the ethics committee on March 19, 2019, and within 12 days had amassed $50,100. Baber has raised about $35,000, a decent amount for a State Senate campaign, and she has loaned her campaign $100,000 to try to keep up with Creekpaum.

A good chunk of Creekpaum's money has come from people in the George Kaiser orbit, including $1,000 from Kaiser himself, $1,000 from Kaiser-Francis CFO Don Millican, $1,500 from GKFF board member Phil Frohlich, and maximum $2,800 donations from Frederic Dorwart, his wife Nanu Dorwart, and several of the firm's partners. Elizabeth Frame, daughter of former Mayor Kathy Taylor and CEO of the Taylor Lobeck Family Foundation, and former Democratic Congressman Dan Boren, now president of corporate development for the Chickasaw Nation, have each contributed $1,000 to Creekpaum.

Creekpaum has used his money to run television ads attacking Cheryl Baber because her service as an Assistant U. S. Attorney fell during the Obama administration. Baber has responded:

One of my opponents is misleading voters by calling me a hypocrite because I was an Assistant U.S. Attorney during the time that Obama was President and Holder was the Attorney General. EVERY person who works for a federal administrative agency works for whomever is President or Commander-in-Chief at the time! That includes postal workers, park rangers, ALL military, and about 2 million employees throughout the world! There are 94 U.S. Attorney's Offices, employing thousands of people who are from every political party or none. Further, I actually worked as a federal law clerk when President George W. Bush was President! And I chose to leave the U.S. Attorney's Office, in part, because Obama won re-election in 2012.

Kyden Creekpaum is the candidate spreading lies, not me. He is the one supported by donors who gave $404,000 to Obama, Biden, and Hillary. He is the one whose current law firm sued to block President Trump's voters from rallying at the BOK Center. Those are documented, verifiable facts which informed voters deserve to know if they do not want a legislator who will likely vote to advance a liberal agenda. I am the one who has been active in, and endorsed by, Tulsa area conservative Republican organizations.

I haven't verified Baber's math, but I do recognize many names on the Creekpaum campaign reports whom I know to be generous donors to Democrats.

Creekpaum claims to be a conservative, pro-life Christian, and he may well regard himself as such. I can't find any indication online that he has ever taken a public stand on any political issue prior to running for office. Creekpaum did not complete the iVoterGuide survey. He did give "yes" answers to all the questions on the Oklahomans for Life survey.

Baber answered four of the 12 Oklahomans for Life survey questions with a "no": She would allow rape and incest exceptions to a ban on abortion, disagrees with Oklahomans for Life's proposal for $1 million in annual funding for a state-funded guardianship system "to advocate for vulnerable persons at risk for denial of life-preserving care," disagrees on assisted suicide, and disagrees with a proposal for a mandatory retirement age for Oklahoma Supreme Court justices. She does however support Oklahoma's existing strong legal protections against the imposition of euthanasia on the elderly and disabled. I disagree with her on those "no" answers, but her answers to the iVoterGuide survey suggest she would be persuadable to a more consistent pro-life position.

It may well be that these wealthy progressives who give consistently to Democrat candidates for President are backing Creekpaum because they think he's a wonderful, smart guy who would serve the State of Oklahoma well, and they don't mind that he will apply his intelligence and energy to advancing a socially conservative, anti-abortion, free-market agenda. I doubt it. To me, he looks like a politically ambitious young man who has come home to start his climb, and he has found the people who can fund that ascent. My bet is that his loyalties, if elected, would incline to the Kaiser System, not to the conservative voters of Senate District 35.

RESEARCH:

I went through the very tedious process of downloading each of the campaign reports filed by each of the Republican candidates from the Oklahoma Ethics Commission's Guardian website, and I have compiled all the reports into a single file for each candidate:

• Cheryl Baber campaign ethics reports
• Kyden Creekpaum campaign ethics reports
• Linda Morrissey campaign ethics reports