Oral History Interview with Cleta Deatherage Mitchell

Oral History Interview

with

Cleta Deatherage Mitchell

Interview Conducted by Tanya Finchum June 21, 2007

Women of the Oklahoma Legislature Oral History Project

Oklahoma State University Library Women of the Oklahoma Legislature Oral History Project

Interview History

Interviewer: Tanya Finchum Transcriber: Jill Minahan Editors: Tanya Finchum, Juliana Nykolaiszyn

The recording and transcript of this interview were processed at the Oklahoma State University Library in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Project Detail

The purpose of the Women of the Oklahoma Legislature Oral History Project is to gather and preserve memories and historical documents of women who have served or are currently serving in the Oklahoma Legislature.

This project was approved by the Oklahoma State University Institutional Review Board on November 10, 2006.

Legal Status

Scholarly use of the recordings and transcripts of the interview with Cleta Deatherage Mitchell is unrestricted. The interview agreement was signed on June 21, 2007.

Oklahoma State University Library Women of the Oklahoma Legislature Oral History Project

Cleta Deatherage Mitchell – Brief Biography

Cleta Deatherage Mitchell was born in 1950 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ms. Mitchell earned both a law degree in 1975 and a bachelor’s degree in 1973 from the University of Oklahoma. She is a Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University, as well as Shapiro Fellow at George Washington University Law School of Media and Public Affairs.

Ms. Mitchell served in the Oklahoma State House of Representatives representing District 44, which includes Norman, from 1976-1984. She chaired the House Appropriations and Budget Committee, making her the youngest woman to serve in a House leadership position, and worked for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

After her term she began a law practice in Oklahoma City focusing on litigation and administration law until she became director and general counsel of the Term Limits Legal Institution in Washington, D.C. in 1991. In 1998 she co-founded the law firm Sullivan & Mitchell P.L.L.C, which merged in 2001 with Foley & Larder, where she is currently a partner and member of the Public Affairs Practice Group in Washington, D.C. She practices before the Federal Election Commission as well as other federal and state enforcement agencies. She focuses on political law, federal affairs, and strategic communications. Ms. Mitchell is admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia, the State of Oklahoma, the Supreme Court of the United States and federal district and appellate courts.

Ms. Mitchell has received a number of honors for her dedication to hard work. These include receiving the “Rising Star” Award in 1993 by Campaigns and Elections magazine, the South Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce's Native Daughter Award, and being recognized as Outstanding Female Attorney in 1980.

Ms. Mitchell is very active in politics. She represents a number of republican candidates, campaigns, and members of Congress. She serves on the Board of Directors of the American Conservative Union, National Board of Governors for the Republican National Lawyers Association, and the Board of Directors of the Washington Scholarship Fund. She is a member of the General Counsel of the Vanguard Org., the Sports Industry Team, Chi Omega Sorority, the NRA and Phi Beta Kappa, and has served on the executive committee of the National Conference of State Legislatures. She has also served on the legal counsel to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. She is a frequent speaker on election law and politics and wrote the article The Rise of America’s Two National Pastimes: Baseball and the Law, which was published in 1999 by the University of Michigan Law Review.

Ms. Mitchell is married to Dale Mitchell and has one daughter, Margaret.

Oklahoma State University Library Women of the Oklahoma Legislature Oral History Project

Cleta Deatherage Mitchell

Oral History Interview

Interviewed by Tanya Finchum June 21, 2007 Washington, DC

Finchum My name is Tanya Finchum. I’m with the Oklahoma State University Library and we’re conducting an oral history project called “Women of the Oklahoma Legislature,” and today is June 21, 2007. I am at the 3000 block of K Street in Washington, D.C. talking with Cleta Deatherage Mitchell who was in the House of Representatives from 1976 to ’84, correct?

Mitchell That’s correct.

Finchum Thank you so much for talking with us today.

Mitchell Happy to do that.

Finchum I generally start people with asking them a little about their childhood, where they were born, their family background, that type of thing so…

Mitchell Well, I was raised in Oklahoma City not too far from the Capitol, as a matter of fact, in Northeast Oklahoma City. I lived in Oklahoma City, grew up and went to Classen High School, Old Classen. I went to Millwood, which was not a high school then and then I went to Northeast for one year, which was very near the Capitol, and then my junior and senior year in high school I went to Classen High School. Then I went to the University of Oklahoma. I’m Sooner born, Sooner bred and when I die, I’ll be Sooner dead, but I do have an honorary degree from OSU [Oklahoma State University]. I received an award when Beverly Crabtree was Dean of the Oklahoma State University College of Home Economics. I did a lot of work with Dean Crabtree and a number of people at OSU. One year they gave me an award and made me an honorary alumna of the Oklahoma State University College of Home Economics. I was always very proud of that.

I went to OU [University of Oklahoma] Law School and then I ran for

the legislature right after I graduated from law school. I had worked my way through law school as a legal assistant at the Oklahoma Human Rights Commission. The director wanted me very badly to become the lifer, stay at the Commission and succeed him when he retired, but I said, “You know, I wasn’t really cut out to work for a state agency,” so I ran for the legislature.

Finchum So how early did you get interested in politics?

Mitchell I was always interested in politics. One of my earliest recollections was when I was a little girl, asking my mother please not to go vote till I got home from school. She would take me with her to vote and I would stand outside while she would go into the voting booth. As I got into grade school and a little older, then I would study all the voter guides and tell my mother who I thought she ought to vote for. I just always was very interested in politics.

I actually thought I would be a journalist. I went to college initially on a journalism scholarship but I was always active in student council from the earliest days of student council and junior high and high school and student government at OU. I ran for student body president at OU and lost because they’d never had a female. I’d like to think I paved the way for Denise Bode who did get elected a couple of years later as student body president [at OU] but my favorite was one of the things they said about me. I got into a run-off, and—the only two elections I’ve ever lost were run-offs. I lost the run-off for student body president at OU. I lost the run-off for lieutenant governor of the state [of Oklahoma] in 1986, but I lost both of those in run-offs. Run-offs are not good for me but (Laughs) some of the guys were saying that I might—“If you had a female student body president, what if she went to the regents meeting and started to cry?” That was during the days before anyone’s consciousness was raised about women.

I was just always very interested in politics and journalism. The reason I switched from journalism was because I thought that I was too opinionated to be just an observer. I didn’t realize that by being a journalist these days means just putting your opinions in your articles, but those were the days when journalists were supposed to be unbiased and objective and I had strong opinions.

Finchum Anyone else in your family interested in politics?

Mitchell Not really, not in that way. It was always something we talked about growing up, current events. My mom always subscribed to the newspaper and news magazines. When John Kennedy was elected President, he was the first President who had press conferences in the

afternoons and, I would race home from school and watch President Kennedy. He was inaugurated when I was in the fifth grade and I would race home from school to watch the President doing his press conferences. I was just always enthralled with all of that.

Finchum Did you have a role model then that was in politics?

Mitchell Well, you know, it’s interesting because when I was about eleven or twelve, I read an article in McCall’s magazine about Margaret Chase Smith and she was really an enormous role model for me. She was in the United States Senate. She succeeded her husband and was elected—I want to say in the early fifties. That would have been in the early sixties when I read this interview with her. I could still remember part of what she said. She had this motto, these things that you needed to do if you were a woman in politics. I had the great joy, when I was in the legislature the Panhellenic Association at the University of Oklahoma brought Margaret Chase Smith to campus to speak. I got to meet her and to introduce her. I actually went to the library, you’ll appreciate this, to the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, (Laughs) which nobody knows about anymore and I found that McCall’s magazine article so that I could tell her all five of the things that she’d said that women in politics needed to do. It was a great honor to get to meet her.

Finchum And have you done all five of those things?

Mitchell Well, the five things that she said—and I think I can only remember three or four of them, but I know there were five—and I need to go back to the library and get this, but she said, “Listen more than you talk; take care of the home folks; work, work, work was one of them.” I think there were two more, but those are three pretty good ones. “Listen more than you talk; take care of the home folks; and work, work, work.”

Finchum And you’ve done those three, obviously.

Mitchell I did those things. Yes. (Laughs)

Finchum Well, tell me about your first campaign for the legislature.

Mitchell It’s interesting because I had worked for a lot of other people. I had worked for other candidates. I’d been involved in politics in a lot of different ways. When I was at the university, I did student politics but I also helped other people campaign. I’d helped several people run for the legislature, for the school board and all in Norman. I always used to laugh and say, “I was the first person I’d ever voted for who won,” because everybody I worked for always lost.

I got involved and interested in the legislature really by virtue of the fact that I was working on women’s issues when I was a student at the University of Oklahoma. I was traveling around the state working on the Equal Rights Amendment [ERA] and doing things at the legislature. I would spend a lot of time at the legislature even while I was in law school. I was on the governor’s Commission on the Status of Women and really working on issues related to the legal status of women. In 1971, I was one of the five original conveners of the Oklahoma Women’s Political Caucus.

I was involved with a lot of women who were working on women’s issues, getting the law changed to recognize that women who are homemakers had, in fact, contributed actual value, monetary value, to the acquisition of the estate because the Court of Appeals of Oklahoma had ruled in the late sixties that a woman who was a homemaker, when her husband died, none of it was hers. It was all his because she hadn’t contributed money or money’s worth. They didn’t count being a homemaker as money’s worth, legally. Those were things that we worked on getting changed. So anyway, I spent all this time around the legislature, sitting in the committee rooms, talking to legislators, sitting in the gallery and literally the more time I spent there watching and listening and talking, I thought, “I could do this. If I could stay awake, I could do it as well as half these people.”

I’d worked for a couple of other people for the legislative seat and it was held by a republican, Mina Hibdon. I decided that I would run against her. I had encouragement from a couple of really key people. Richard Bell, who is still a lawyer in Norman, encouraged me. He really encouraged me before anybody else. I decided to do it and it was a scary thing because I had just graduated from law school. I had no income. I had no money. We raised and spent $30,000, which in 1976 was a lot of money. And we had no paid staff and no television, so everything was mail—paying for postage, printing and advertisements in the Norman Transcript, the Oklahoma Daily, which is the University of Oklahoma paper, and some radio spots. Everything else—I mean, it was printing, postage and print advertising, and that’s it…and still $30,000. That was a lot of money in 1976.

I had a primary and I won that one without a run-off (Laughs) so I had two opponents, but I won the primary. It was the best organized campaign I’ve ever been in. I give credit for that to a woman who lives in Norman who was my law partner and still is one of my best friends, Becky Patton. She organized, we really organized down to every person and that was before the voter rolls were computerized. We had to go to the election board and copy all of the registered voters’ names down on index cards. Then we had voter lists. Everything we did was manual.

A funny story, when I was in the legislature, how I got the county commissioners to computerize the voter rolls so I didn’t have to keep doing that—but we literally organized a grass roots campaign. I personally canvassed the entire district door to door to door starting—I want to say I started early July and it took through election day. We had the precincts organized in order. We knew which ones needed to be done first, middle and last. I knew when I would come to somebody’s door their name. All the things I talk about today, micro-targeting and all, we did that with index cards in 1976 and Becky was a hard taskmaster. You could only really canvass door to door from about 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. on weeknights and then from about 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. on Saturdays, and then from about 2:00 p.m. till—through the evening on Sundays because you couldn’t do it during church and you couldn’t go too early and you couldn’t go past 9:00. Once it starts getting dark, you have to quit earlier.

So Becky would send me to the bowling alleys at night and in the daytimes to the fire stations and to beauty shops. I would walk in and hand my brochures to women sitting under the hair dryer. I finally had one guy—and if you go to the football game, standing outside the Norman High games, standing outside the OU games—it was so funny. This one guy finally said, “Oh my God.” I was standing outside one of the football games. He said, “You’ve been at my son’s football game. You’re standing out here today. You’ve been to my bowling league. You’ve been to the fire station where I work.” He said, “You’ve been to my house. Uncle. I’ll vote for you.” (Laughs)

I made it a point to try to ask everybody. And then in addition we had team captains for every block and we had a postcard campaign where people sent postcards to their friends and their church directories and their civic groups so that people were endorsing me from other people that they knew. We did a big endorsement effort, not just a big, bunch of names on a page, but we had photographs of people from all walks of life in Norman saying why they were supporting me. So it was the best organized campaign that I’ve ever been in, I have to say.

Finchum You didn’t do it to that degree the next three or four elections, did you?

Mitchell Well, you didn’t have to.

Finchum Name recognition was there?

Mitchell I didn’t have an opponent the next election in ’78. I won in the primary and I beat Mina Hibdon pretty handily. I was the only person to beat an incumbent in the fall general election that year. No—there was one incumbent who lost in the primary, one incumbent who lost in a run-off,

and I was the only one who defeated an incumbent in the general election of ’76. It’s hard to beat incumbents. I always say before I die, I want to run something called Challengers, Inc. because I actually do know how to beat incumbents and it’s a lot of fun. (Laughs) It’s my favorite kind of thing. (Laughter) But then in 1978, I didn’t have an opponent. In 1980, I did have an opponent but I beat him pretty handily. I did not have an opponent in ’82, and in the spring of ’84—really June of ’84 is when I decided not to run for re-election and basically handed the seat to Carolyn Thompson because we didn’t tell anybody. I’d already had my kick-off to be re-elected—for my re-election, and that’s a long story. We can get to that if you want, but that was the best campaign.

Finchum So there was a woman before you, then you and then a woman after you?

Mitchell And then a woman after her, Laura Boyd. So it went from Mina Hibdon to me to Carolyn Thompson to Laura Boyd.

Finchum Who’s doing it now, a man then?

Mitchell Yeah. I think they finally decided they’d had enough of us girls. (Laughter)

Finchum Well, once you got into the House, did you have someone that took you under their wing or did you even need someone to do that?

Mitchell You always need somebody to do that. I always tell young women and young men, “You need mentors. You really need mentors.” I had so many people who helped me and were my mentors. It’s really hard to even thank all of them but I had a number of mentors. Hannah Atkins was such a role model to me. She’s such a lady, such a lovely person, and I was honored to serve with her. She is really a very special heroine in Oklahoma.

Finchum She did a lot of ERA stuff, too, didn’t she?

Mitchell She did. I first knew her through ERA and she had been in the civil rights movement. She just was a quiet but very firm, lovely, kind brilliant woman and always looked great—just a beautiful person.

I learned from my colleagues. I had a lot of colleagues. I was very young and there were some of those guys that really had a hard time with the fact that this young, pretty, opinionated blond from Norman was—you know—I became chairman of the Appropriations Committee and so that really bothered some of them. I really tried to listen and learn from them

and appreciate the differences. The farmers from Western Oklahoma and the business guy from Yukon—they had a different perspective and a different group of people to represent. I just really loved it.

I will tell you one of the people who was obviously a great mentor to me was Dan Draper. He was the representative from Stillwater, and of course, he and I used to always have our rivalry between OU and OSU. In the final analysis, you know, we were representing the two comprehensive research universities and so we really did a lot together in that regard. He was a brilliant guy and I helped elect him speaker. One of my best friends in the House was Jim Fried. He was elected the term before me and we worked hard. I had a lot of really smart colleagues and we did a lot of good, I think. And some of the things that I thought should have been done we didn’t do, and as I look back that’s probably a good thing. (Laughter)

I was awfully young and I would be a different kind of legislator if I went back today. I would do some things differently, although I wouldn’t do a lot differently. The fact is I would understand that frankly public education is so broken in our country. We got a lot more money for education when I was in the legislature. I was the queen of education reform. You name the reform bill, I introduced it and got it passed. When I went for my OEA [Oklahoma Education Association] interview and I was running for lieutenant governor, I knew more about their issues than they did. I just knew that I was very dedicated to trying to help the university and help the schools. I chaired for five years the Education and Appropriations Subcommittee.

I really immersed myself in substantive issues and in the process, the whole legislative process and crammed about twenty years into my eight years of service.

Finchum Do you remember the first day you were sworn in?

Mitchell Oh, I definitely do. I still have the dress that I wore. I couldn’t get into it, but I still have it—oh, yes. I will never forget that. It was just such— being sworn in, in the House chamber and being sworn in to the State Bar Association in the House chamber. I had been sworn into the Bar Association in April of that year, of 1976, and then was sworn into the legislature eight months later—so that was a big year for swearing-in ceremonies for me in the Oklahoma Legislature.

Finchum And where was your office?

Mitchell Well, my first office, back in those days, I was actually just in the Capitol earlier this year and it’s changed so much. I mean, it is amazing

to me. It’s beautiful. Actually, I authored a bill that created the State Capitol Preservation Commission. Frank Keating and I authored that and got that passed because I was very concerned about preserving the state Capitol. It’s a beautiful place and the original design was quite beautiful. Richard Huddleston, who was the clerk of the House for years and years, had—we were very fortunate. He doesn’t get any credit for this. Nobody knows this, but he had hired an architect in Oklahoma City to design some new House meeting rooms and when they did that, they took over some space that had basically covered up the walls and had covered up these beautiful murals. He had an architect who was historically committed and had come in and designed these conference rooms and committee meeting rooms that restored the original walls and pulled off the paneling so you could see these murals that had been done during World War I and actually won national awards for it. That’s really what got me interested in realizing that there was so much that had been covered up and hidden over the years in the Capitol and that’s what got me to introduce this State Capitol Preservation Commission which got passed.

A few years ago, I was invited to come back for the dedication of the restoration of the House of Representatives and I saw the architect who had done those original House meeting rooms and had become the architect for all of the Capitol restoration. He told me, “You know, just so you’ll know, this is all because of the work that you did,” and it really laid the groundwork. It’s quite amazing to me to now see it. But, back to your question, where my office was then, the State Department of Education had had a hallway on the third floor and that all got moved to the Department of Education building. So we had offices along that floor, on the third floor and we shared offices. My office mate my first term was Charlie Morgan from Prague, Oklahoma. He and his wife, Mattie Morgan was someone I’d met and worked with in the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women and the Equal Rights Amendment effort, so he and I shared an office and he was a character. He was in the oil field servicing business and he was a character. That was a whole new side of life for me to meet Charlie who’s a businessman, entrepreneur who got hit pretty hard, I think, later in the oil bust when all the oil servicing companies in Oklahoma basically went bankrupt because of the federal government. But anyway, he was funny and I found a picture just the other day that he and I and our secretary had gone down and had our picture taken with Governor Boren.

Governor Boren, David Boren was governor my first two years, my first term. Then he ran for the Senate in ’78 and that’s when George Nigh was elected governor. I served under Governor Nigh and Governor Boren when I was in the legislature.

Finchum Do you remember the first bill you presented on the floor and what that was like?

Mitchell Well, interestingly enough, I had a couple of very interesting experiences my first year. The two that come to mind the most were—I was very committed to the whole concept of open meetings and we didn’t have an open meetings law. I had said that I would author the open meetings law and be co-author. Well, it had failed in the House before. So I went to the authors, the principal authors. Charlie Elder from Purcell was the House author and a fella named Phil Lambert was the Senate author. He had been an Oklahoma County district judge and then he got elected to the state senate. I went to Senator Lambert and I went to Chairman Elder, Representative Elder, who chaired the House Judiciary Committee and I said, “I would like to be your co-author. I’d like to help with this.” And of course, you know, they both look at me and I look like I’m about twelve. They said, “Okay, sure.” Senator Lambert said, “Well, we passed it in the Senate before, and it died in the House, so why don’t you all take it and do it in the House first?” I said, “Okay.” So I went to Representative Elder and said, “Are you going to re-introduce this?” and he basically said, “Well, you know, you take it and you handle it. I’ll help you with it.”

I introduced the bill and re-wrote it. I had the legislature covered by the open meetings law because I’d been around the legislature as a volunteer outside the legislature for enough time that I saw some things that I thought needed to be changed. Mainly that from statehood, they didn’t record the real votes because the House would meet at 1:00 p.m. for the full session. We’d have committee meetings in the morning and the House would go in to session at 1:00, maybe 1:30 and we would dissolve into Committee of the Whole and that’s when we’d do all of our business, in Committee of the Whole. At the end of the day we’d rise and report. Then all the bills that had passed and all the debates and everything, we would have the—all the fights had been won or lost by then so if a bill had passed out of Committee of the Whole then all the people who had voted against in Committee of the Whole would vote for it on final passage. The records were lost of the real votes—and you didn’t have votes on amendments so you really didn’t know how people were voting.

I had spent enough time around the legislature that I knew this was a problem. So I had included the legislature in coverage of the open meetings law, and the open meetings law would require they would have had to post agendas in advance, that they couldn’t just take off and go meet in a hotel room someplace, which literally the Oklahoma City Council had done on a big issue, previously. So, I put this bill together and introduced it. Charlie Elder was—I think he may have been listed as

the principal author, but I was really the driving force. Well, I was so green, I didn’t realize that when a bill gets assigned to three committees, the speaker assigns all of the bills and that when the bill gets assigned to three committees and that means there’s a problem with your bill. (Laughs)

So I go to the first committee and I get it out of the committee, and I go to the second committee and I get it out of the second committee, and then the third committee was the Judiciary Committee and Charlie Elder was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. So I think, well this is a no-brainer because I’ve gotten it out of these two committees and it’s the last day for getting bills out of committee. I am supposed to do a debate on Channel Four with Charlie Elder in the afternoon, it’s a Thursday afternoon and it’s the last day for getting bills out. He and I are supposed to do this debate. We’re going to tape a debate on the ERA because he was against it and I was for it. Well, this committee had to finish its work and he’s the chairman of this committee. So the Judiciary Committee is meeting after the session to finish up all the bills that were still on the calendar. Well, Charlie Elder leaves to go to Channel Four because he said, “Well, I have to go tape a TV thing.” I’m thinking, “Well, Charlie, they can’t start without me. I’m not leaving till this bill gets out.” He turns it to the vice chairman. There aren’t half a dozen of us still there and, of course, I’d organized people to come and talk about the bill. The bill gets voted out.

Well, I find out later that the bill was supposed to die. It was supposed to die in the first committee. It was supposed to die in the second committee, and then it was supposed to die in Judiciary, but I didn’t know that because it never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t get it out of committee. So it’s on the floor. It’s coming up on the floor and the Speaker, Bill Willis, comes and sits down on the floor in front of me, in the chair in front of me and turns around and puts—he’s just the sweetest, most wonderful man whose daughter lived in my district and had campaigned for me, and he was a great mentor—and he turns and leans over onto the desk, my desk, and he says, “Now Cleta,” he said, “This bill is coming to the floor,” because I’d gone and gotten it on the calendar to be on the floor. He said, “And there’s going to be an amendment that’s going to remove the legislature from coverage under this bill because we think that’s unconstitutional to put that in the statute, so when that amendment comes up, you’re not going to oppose it. Do you understand that?” I said, “Yes, Mr. Speaker.”

So the amendment came up. I didn’t say anything. That amendment passed and the bill passes but just barely. It just barely passed because all the county commissioners around the state, the election boards, the school boards, all these local bodies, were all of a sudden saying, “Oh,

this is gonna be awful that we’re gonna have to post everything and people are gonna have to know what we’re gonna do.” They had been lobbying really hard against it. But the one thing we were talking about—something like open meetings, you’ve got the press on your side. I had a lot of editorial support and it barely passed. I think it passed with a bare majority and I didn’t know enough about the legislative process at the time to know that I needed to move immediately upon passage as the principal author for reconsideration for purposes of preserving my ability to control the bill. So, one of the opponents moved for reconsideration and then I had to go learn what that meant. I learned what that meant—and that’s when I learned that I needed to learn the rules so nobody would ever out-fox me on the rules on the floor. I did learn a lesson from that.

I really ginned up the newspapers after that. I said, “You know, we won, but this reconsideration thing could kill us, and you’d better be beating up on your hometown people.” So when they brought it up for reconsideration on the Thursday morning to try to kill it, that was not successful—just barely passed. So I take the bill over after it passed, after reconsideration dies. I go racing over to the Senate to tell my Senate author and I’m all excited—you know, “We passed it! We passed it in the Senate before so now you can pass it in the Senate again,” and he used to go around and tell people the story, “I got this little snot-nose kid out of Norman coming in telling me, yeah we pass it in the House— Oh, yeah, right. There’s no way she’s gonna get—not a snowball’s chance in hell that she’s gonna get that bill passed in the House.” He said, “And before I know it, here she comes back saying, ‘All right, big boy, we did it. Now let’s see you do it.’” He said, “So I didn’t have any choice but to pass it again.” He said, “I never dreamed that that bill would ever become law.” And I just didn’t realize that those guys had introduced it, but they really weren’t committed to it. I just more or less forced their hand, but that was a big thing for me, actually. The open meetings law was a big achievement in my first year.

Finchum For a freshman, it’s very good.

Mitchell Yes, it was really—I think in some respects it’s better that I didn’t know all the pitfalls. I didn’t know what was coming. I was just completely dedicated to getting it done.

Finchum Well, did you socialize with some of the other women during all this?

Mitchell You know, I would tell you that my best friends were the men until Nancy was elected. When Nancy Virtue was elected and—I didn’t serve with Carolyn [Thompson Taylor]—obviously she succeeded me but when Nancy was elected then we would do things with our group of

guys. But it’s more of your colleagues that you share districts and sort of a common grouping, and that’s really who I socialized with.

Finchum What do you think your biggest hurdle was, being female or young or…

Mitchell I think being young and being from Norman and representing the university. That was probably as hard as anything. My age, the fact that I looked a lot younger than I was, and the fact that I represented the university and so historically in every state—this is not uncommon—but the representatives from the universities are considered a little “iffy” by people who live particularly in the rural areas. So I think that that was probably as big a hurdle and the fact that I was a female.

I really always had great support and I’ve always said that one of the things I learned was that they say, “Behind every successful man is a woman.” I always used to say, “Behind every successful woman is a man who’s willing to take the risk.” I had male colleagues who were willing to support me and take the risk with me. They supported me.

Finchum And what was it like being the first woman to be the chair of the Appropriations Committee?

Mitchell Well, I was vice-chair for—let’s see, was it three years or two years? I can’t remember which because Don Davis was the chairman when I was appointed vice-chair, and then he left to go become president at Cameron [University]. Then I became the chair after he left. So I had been the vice-chair and whenever I was in something like that, I was always looking at ways to fix it or make it better.

I would tell you that I think I made a lot of significant changes, and I don’t know if they’re still doing it, but when I became the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the system historically had been that the governor’s budget would be introduced, the chairman and vice-chairman of the House and Senate Appropriations Committee were automatically assigned the authorship of the bills. They were all separate appropriation bills and then you’d go through the appropriations process. When you’d get to the end of the session and the conference committee would be appointed, the bills would revert back to the way they were when they were introduced. So it was like the whole legislative session, everything you’d done, had absolutely no effect. So I said, “Well, you know, we’re not gonna do it that way.” The first thing I said was, “I’m gonna read these bills and decide whether I’m going to introduce them as is.” Speaker Draper—and he would tell me sometimes, “Now you don’t get to change that.” So I would say, “All right, well as a courtesy.” He said, “We’ll do that as a courtesy,” but I made sure that the governor’s office and the executive budget office understood the budget

office worked for the governor, not the legislature. The budget office worked for the governor, and so I said, “We have to have some of our own staff people to be able to help us think through whether we want to support the budget that the governor has introduced because there’s a legislative prerogative here and our job is to decide whether we agree with the governor’s budget or not.”

So I did get approval and we did start to hire a very small staff, and I divided the Appropriations Committee into permanent subcommittees that mirrored the subcommittees of the conference—Joint Conference Committee on Appropriations. Each of those subcommittees—there were five of them—each of them had a chair. And I said, “Each of you is going to be responsible”—heretofore. All the appropriation bills were always handled on the floor by the chairman of the Appropriations, of the full committee. I said, “I’m not going to do that. You guys are going to be responsible for bringing your subcommittee work to the full committee, getting it through the full committee and then you are going to handle it on the House floor.” I really disbursed authority and gave them responsibility. I said, “Here’s the other thing we’re going to do. When we get to the conference committee, we’re going to start with the exact bills as they have come through the legislative process. We are not going to go back and disregard everything the House and Senate have done. So if you boys want to load these things up like Christmas trees and think that it doesn’t matter, it matters because we’re going to start with that product and what we’re going to work on in conference is resolving the differences. We’re not just going to start over.”

My committee members and I got along great. It was people who weren’t on my committee who would take pot shots at me because they thought that I was “too big for my britches.” I was young and I was running all this stuff and it aggravated them. But the people on my committee, I gave a lot of responsibility and they, for the most part, rose to the occasion. I had one subcommittee chairman that I always had to sit—I sat next to him anyway on the floor—but I always had to know his bills as well as my bills because he could never answer any questions about his bills (Laughter) so I would have to tell him the answers on the floor.

But one of my greatest accomplishments, in my view, was that when I was chairman of the Appropriations Committee, I did get, for the first time since 1939, the sales tax had always been earmarked to go directly to the Welfare Department. I got that changed so the money from the sales tax would go into the general revenue fund and then the legislature would appropriate the sales tax, just like it does income tax or any other kind of revenues. Lloyd Rader was as powerful as the legislature because he had as much money to spend every year as the whole

legislature but that’s a whole story in and of itself, just dealing with Mr. Rader.

Finchum That didn’t win you too many friends on that side either, I don’t guess?

Mitchell Well, you know, it was interesting. What was interesting was anything that’s fundamental change is hard.

Finchum Well, I had read that when you were doing the ERA that John Monks had had some interesting things to say about it, too.

Mitchell Oh, John Monks was such a character. He really was a character and he rose to the occasion to play his role as a character. He’s the one who would stir around and say things about me but in the final analysis he and I always got along pretty well personally—sort of a persona that he took on.

Finchum Do you have a particular political philosophy?

Mitchell You know, I do and I think that one of the things that I realized sometime after I left the legislature was that some of my views on political issues didn’t quite match my personal philosophy. I was, believe it or not—people didn’t realize it—I’m very fiscally conservative. I was always very concerned about making sure that the taxpayers’ money was spent properly.

One of the things that I didn’t get done, but introduced, was a complete overhaul of the state employees’ paid leave and the non-salary compensation. We had just done this huge study of state employees’ salaries to try to make them competitive. How it is possible that we did this and I didn’t realize it at the time—this is one of the things Governor Nigh had proposed and he championed it. We did this major overhaul of the state employees’ salaries and didn’t look at their fringe benefits, their paid leave, and so I said, “You know, gosh,” there was, in particular, Bob Allen who was the OETA, Oklahoma Educational Television Authority, chairman, director. I don’t know if he’s still there, but he really built OETA and he kept saying, “You know, you need to look at this full-time equivalent employee thing. He’d say this to me all the time, “You really—Cleta, you need to look at this. There’s something wrong here.” And so I started looking at that, and we hired a company that reviewed it and, sure enough, we discovered the average state employee had forty-two paid days of absence a year. If somebody went off the public payroll that they stayed on for an average of two weeks, two and a half weeks, just with annual leave that they hadn’t taken and the cost of all of this was like eighty million dollars a year and we could have saved by re-doing just the way we did leave. Take your annual

leave, but create an opportunity for some long-term disability and sick leave, you know. They didn’t get to accrue sick leave but they got to accrue annual leave. I mean—it was crazy, totally crazy. So I proposed reorganizing all of that. State employees didn’t like that too well.

So I’ve always been really fiscally conservative, tried to figure out how government could do things better. I think probably what I realize now is that government can’t do things better. They just can’t. They don’t have the same kinds of pressures and accountability that the private sector has. They’re never going to go broke, and even when you’re broke, they’re not broke.

I’m a strong believer in education and personal responsibility. I know what it takes to raise, you know—think what it takes to get people to be self-sufficient and independent. Sometimes it takes tough love and I kind of had this different—there were some places that were not exactly—I thought at some point in my life that if some of my political philosophies were different from my personal philosophies, then they couldn’t both be right. Now on the side of my personal philosophy, what I’ve been raised to believe as a child was that that was right and so I think that’s why really when I moved to Washington and saw the National Democratic Party, I just thought, “I can’t do this anymore.” I moved here to work on term limits, which I still believe in, and I just—the democratic party became and has become the party of government and I do not believe that is the same as being the party of the people. I think that’s the antithesis of what our founding fathers had in mind. They had a limited government in mind to leave more space for the people and their ability to do what they want without being bossed around by the government. So I think that that probably, if anything, is the biggest change in my understanding. I don’t think it’s a change in my philosophy. It’s just a change in my understanding of how my personal beliefs fit into the political spectrum.

Finchum You mentioned term limits. That’s one of the things you’ll go down in history for. Talk a little bit about that experience.

Mitchell Well, you know that was after I left the legislature. I left voluntarily because I always said that when I got to the point when a new member came up to me and said, “You know, I’d like to try to do so-and-so,” and if I ever found myself saying, “Oh, we’ve tried that. That won’t work.” Then I would know it would be time for me to leave. And that’s exactly what happened. It just got to a point where I’d fought so many fights.

When Dan Draper was elected Speaker, he appointed me—I was the first woman to serve on the Rules Committee in the House. So my first Rules Committee meeting I proposed a rules change to record votes in

the Committee of the Whole and record votes on amendments, and the Speaker called me in because I had submitted my rules change in writing—you have to—and he called me in before the meeting and he said, “Do you have to do this? This is your first meeting.” I said, “Well, we’re going to adopt the rules.” So I said, “If I don’t do it now, we won’t do it for two years,” and I said, “It’ll be easier to do it my first meeting than, you know, I don’t know if I’m going to be on the Rules Committee two years from now. So, yes, I have to do it.” And so we had this knock- down-drag-out fight on the rules, and recording votes in Committee of the Whole—Charlie Elder was the one who was opposing it, and anyway, so we tied. It came to a vote in the Rules Committee and it tied, and the Speaker cast the tie-breaking vote in support of the rule change. Once that was done, Charlie Elder said, “We just might as well get rid of Committee of the Whole,” and so we abolished the Committee of the Whole and from that day forward—1979 forward—because ’77-’78 was my first term, ’79-’80 was my second term—and from that day forward and since, presumably, unless they’ve gone back to the dark ages, the votes in the House are recorded on the House floor. The votes on amendments—amendments are printed in the Journal upon request of the author, and so we recorded votes. So I did finally get that part done. But, the whole idea of—like I said, sometimes I think I might not have gotten some of the things done that I’d done if I knew more, you know.

So I found myself the spring of ’84, I was just getting married, re- married—I’d been married and I was divorced. I was getting re-married and I found myself telling somebody—“Oh, we’ve tried that. We’ve done that. It doesn’t work,” and I thought, “You know, I always said I’d know it would be time for me to leave when I started doing that.” I just thought, “You know, I think—there was something about running for re- election that bothered me. I’d already had my kick-off and I remember just—I went to church on a particular Sunday morning. I hadn’t deposited the money from my kick-off—this ice cream social, ten dollars a head. But my preacher preached a sermon called “The Price Tags of Life” and talking about, you know, every now and then you’ve got to stop and evaluate whether the ladder you’re climbing is the ladder God wants you to climb. My husband turned to me after church and said, “You think he preached that just for you, don’t you?” I said, “I sure do.” (Laughs)

Gene Garrison is the pastor, wonderful pastor of the First Baptist Church of Oklahoma City who married us and who baptized my daughter. I went to see him the next day and talked to Dr. Garrison about it. You know, I just decided not to run. And I called Carolyn [Thompson Taylor]. We were now about a week, maybe two—not more than two weeks away from filing, the first of July. I called Carolyn. She was getting ready to go to Israel on a Fulbright scholarship, and I called her

and said, “Carolyn, you talked about maybe someday wanting to be in the legislature. If you’d like to be in the legislature, now’s your chance.” She had to decide right then or I would have had to announce it and let people know. That maybe wasn’t the most open and democratic process but, you know. So nobody knew and on the last day for filing, she went in and filed instead of me so she didn’t have any real opposition.

Finchum She won without any trouble.

Mitchell Right, because I handed it to her. (Laughter) Which probably wasn’t the right thing to do, but it was continuing on the challenge. So I knew what it was like to leave office and to think about leaving office. I knew what a hard thing that is, and I really decided that, particularly incoming—I just decided that, particularly for federal officials, for Congress, I really think that there should be term limits. I believed it then. I believe it now.

I moved to Washington to run a non-profit legal foundation working on term limits and argued the term limits case in the Florida Supreme Court, in Arkansas, and was co-counsel on the case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court with former Attorney General Griffin Bell. We lost in a 5 to 4 decision. I still think they’re wrong. Clarence Thomas wrote a brilliant dissent. So after that, I decided that I’d better just get a day job and work but now I practice campaign finance and political law. I’m very fortunate to get to do law and politics to this day.

Finchum And you have one daughter?

Mitchell I have a daughter who just graduated from college, from the University of Pennsylvania in May [2007]. She’s moving to Dallas.

Finchum In politics?

Mitchell You know, not really. She’s interested in politics. She brought home a friend for a few days last summer and she told me later that he said afterwards, because you know we’re sitting there talking about Senator Frist and what’s going on in Congress and all and that he told her later, he said, “I had no idea what you all were talking about.” He said, “My family never sits around the table and talks about things like that.” So, you know, it’s just what we talk about. We talk about sports and we talk about politics. (Laughs)

Finchum Sports, as in baseball or…

Mitchell Baseball. We talk about baseball.

Finchum And you ran for lieutenant governor?

Mitchell I did.

Finchum And your campaign was quite a bit more expensive for that I would say?

Mitchell It was more expensive and it was hard because I’m so committed to grass roots organizing. The truth of the matter is what you really need in a statewide campaign, particularly a secondary race, is just every nickel you can pour into television—it’s really what it is. It’s a television campaign.

Finchum Were you the first woman to have tried that? Do you know?

Mitchell I think that’s right. I can’t remember another female who had been elected to an office, a state-wide office, without having been appointed. Norma Eagleton was elected to the Corporation Commission after she was appointed and so she ran as a sitting commissioner. And I like to think maybe I paved the way for Mary [Fallin] to be elected lieutenant governor.

Finchum It was a few years later, wasn’t it?

Mitchell A few years later.

Finchum Laura Boyd ran…

Mitchell Yeah, but didn’t win.

Finchum Didn’t win either.

Mitchell No. I was running as a democrat and I made the mistake of endorsing right-to-work and you don’t do that in the democratic primary. That’s more important actually to the public employees unions than anything else is right-to-work. They are, after all, unions.

Finchum As I was doing some research on you, I kept coming across a quote “if they introduced a new law, they need to take out the exact same number of words from the old one.”

Mitchell Right. (Laughs) Right. Metastasizing government is not a good thing. (Laughter)

Finchum And that seemed to be a general thread for about a year’s worth of newspaper articles.

Mitchell Right.

Finchum Have we covered everything? Anything else you want to make sure we get on record?

Mitchell Well, you know, I think a couple of other things I would say, I’m very proud of two additional things that I did. One was creation of the displaced homemaker centers. Oklahoma State University and the Vo- tech schools were very involved in that. It was something that I did sort of sitting at my kitchen table. One of the things that I suppose I did learn and I still do this actually— sometimes even if it’s my idea, if I can get somebody else to carry the idea, if I think somebody else might have a better chance of getting it done or if some guys might have a better willingness to listen if I get another guy to offer the idea, I don’t have a problem doing that. I learned that with the displaced homemaker legislation when I came up with the idea for creating a pilot project for displaced homemakers to be able to go to Vo-tech centers and get retraining and help in getting back into the marketplace after a divorce or after raising their kids and all. I got Don Davis who was chairman of the Appropriations Committee to be the author, and I did all the work. I organized everything, got it out of committee, but when it came to handling it on the floor, I didn’t want people like that taking pot shots at me and voting against it because it was my bill but they wouldn’t vote against it if it was Don’s bill. So, I learned to do that.

It is kind of what Ronald Reagan said, “If you don’t mind who gets the credit, you can get a lot of things done.” I certainly always got the credit from the people who knew what had been happening and what really happened, but I’ve just learned that the process really makes a difference. Be inclusive, letting other people, you know, be involved in having some responsibility, getting some skin in the game. I mean, that’s all really important.

I also authored the proposed—Oklahoma became the first state to have universal pre-school, and that was something I authored. I remember that people in the State Department of Education, Ramona Emmons— and now she’s Ramona Paul, she’s still there. Dr. Ramona Paul, she came over and said, “You know, we have this bill. We can’t get it anywhere. I’m having four-year-old programs, pre-school programs,” she’s an early childhood expert. I said, “You know what, Ramona? Just leave it to me.” And I said, “Don’t say another word about it. We’re not going to.” She said, “Well, we have to…” I said, “No, we’re not going to do a bill. We’re going to put it in the bill at the end of the session. We’re going to put it in as an amendment, but just be quiet.” (Laughs) So I put in $100,000 for pre-school pilot programs and the one thing I insisted on was that it couldn’t be means-based. It had to be universal, first-come first-served. That was a key decision because as people got the opportunity—and it wasn’t just some other people who were poor kids,

it was for anybody, first-come first-served, then it built up a market and a demand. We became literally the first state.

If you look at national studies, we’re one of the only states that has universal four-year-old programs in the schools. And I remember discussing it with Governor Nigh, and he said, “When I was in the legislature in the fifties, I wasn’t for kindergarten and now you’re telling me you’re going to introduce a program to have kindergarten for kindergarteners. Well, that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.” (Laughs) I just said, “Governor, we’re just going to try it. It’s just a pilot project. Just $100,000.” But (Laughs) that was pretty funny. So I was really proud of that. I’m proud of the open meetings law, proud of the State Capitol Preservation Commission, proud of the work that I did. I loved it. I was involved nationally in the National Conference of State Legislatures. I was the first chairman of the National Fiscal Affairs and Oversight Committee, which was my colleagues in committee— appropriations chairs from across the country. I chaired the Assembly on the Legislature where we met in state capitols and really studied the legislative process. I just, you know, I really loved it. It was great.

Finchum You accomplished quite a bit in those eight years.

Mitchell I did, and I think that there is life after elective office. I loved it. There is life after elective office, you know. I ran for the lieutenant governor’s job and I was mad about losing but my daughter was one when I ran and after I lost I would be putting her to bed at night and I’d be thinking, “Oh my gosh, what would I have done if I’d won? I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here to do this.” And I always say that, “Sometimes God doesn’t let you have what you think you want.”

Finchum Would you recommend other women do it?

Mitchell Run for office?

Finchum Yes.

Mitchell I recommend everybody run for office. I really think everybody ought to serve. I really think it is a bad thing that we’ve come to this professionalization of politics because that isn’t what this country was founded on. This idea—to have a really representative government, you have to have a system that allows people to take turns and go and spend a tour of duty in a legislative body or a city council or a planning commission or a school board. Those are the people who, in my view, really deserve the credit because those are generally volunteer positions. I decided I didn’t want any part of people trying to get me to run for the Norman City Council. I said, “Do I want people calling me in the middle

of the night because there’s a dead dog in their street? No, I don’t think so.”

Frankly my remedy for the cost of congressional campaigns is that one of the things we ought to do is to triple the size of the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s not written in the Constitution that we have 435. They used to increase them. Cut the district sizes by two-thirds so people can get to know and do those grass roots door-to-door campaigns. I mean, that was such an important part of my learning process to become a legislator was the campaign. I would bring home zinnia seeds and watermelons and people would give me money—twenty bucks and, I mean—“Come back and get some of this squash from my garden,” and I talked to people. My, campaign staff, my volunteers would say, “You are the slowest canvasser.” Well, that’s true because I really talked to people, and I really learned from them and listened to them. It’s not easy for candidates to do that, running for Congress or the U.S. Senate now because it’s all television. It’s fundraising and television and they don’t re-draw the state boundaries every ten years so Senators actually do have to maintain the boundaries. But for House members I really think that we’ve lost something in the retail politics that I think we could get back if we changed the system some.

I think everybody ought to do it, and I think people who think they’re not qualified—women always say they’re not qualified. That’s the first thing they always say. They’re not qualified. And I say, “Well, if you don’t think you’re qualified, then you just need to do what I did. Go sit in the gallery. Go listen. Turn on C-SPAN. You know, watch the local access channel. Watch your city council, and if you think you’re not qualified, you are just not paying attention.”

Finchum I need to do more of that.

Mitchell Everybody does, but particularly women. Women always think, “Well, I need to go get another degree or I need to get another course.” And I always say, “One more piece of paper is not what you need. You just need to know that you know what you know and you bring what you know to the table. And in a representative government, that’s what we’re supposed to have.

Finchum And listen.

Mitchell Listen more than you talk. Take care of the home folks. And work, work, work.

Finchum Okay. My last question, unless you have something else, is when history is written about you, what would you like for it to say?

Mitchell Well, I would like it to say that I made my little corner of the world a little better for the time that I was there.

Finchum I’d say you did.

Mitchell Thank you.

Finchum I thank you very much.

Mitchell Thank you.

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