Does your state lean blue or lean red? Check out our new report, highlighting partisan control of state government from 1992-2013.
About Oklahoma
Oklahoma City is the state capital of Oklahoma. The name "Oklahoma" comes from the Choctaw words: "okla" meaning people and "humma" meaning red, so the state's name literally means "red people." Oklahoma has the largest American Indian population of any state. Many of the 252,420 American Indians living in Oklahoma today are descendants from the original 67 tribes inhabiting Indian Territory.
Oklahoma is bordered by six states: Texas to the south and west, Arkansas and Missouri to the east, Kansas to the north and Colorado and New Mexico at the tip of the northwestern Oklahoma panhandle. [1]
The Legislature of Oklahoma consists of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Senate has 48 members serving four-year terms, while the House has 101 members with two year terms. The state has term limits for their legislature that restrict any one person to a total of twelve years service in both the House and Senate. In the 2007;2008 state legislature, the Republicans control the House of Representatives (57 to 44) and the Senate is currently evenly divided (24 to 24). This changes the government's make-up; before the 2004 election the Democrats had controlled both chambers since 1921. Republicans have never controlled the State Senate outright.
The state's judicial branch consists of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, and 77 District Courts which serve one county apiece. The Oklahoma judiciary also contains two independent courts: a Court of Impeachment (which is the Senate sitting) and the Oklahoma Court on the Judiciary. Oklahoma is unusual in that it has two courts of last resort, the state Supreme Court hears civil cases, and the state Court of Criminal Appeals hears criminal cases (the state of Texas uses a similar system). Judges of those two courts, as well as the Court of Civil Appeals are appointed by the Governor upon the recommendation of the state Judicial Nominating Commission, and are subject to a non-partisan retention vote on a six-year rotating schedule.
Portions of this article have been adapted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikipedia's Copyright Notice can be found here.
External links
