Yes, it was a terrible injustice. But it was trumped this past week by further injustice, the indictment charging Susan Johnson, Rick Carpenter and me with conspiracy to defraud the state of Oklahoma for allegedly "willfully" violating the state's residency statute. For this alleged crime Attorney General Drew Edmondson seeks to imprison us for up to ten years.

Susan says she can't even remember ever getting a speeding ticket. Rick and I have both admittedly sped before . . . but our occasional automotive misadventures did not quite prepare us for the current prosecution.

While I keep pinching myself to wake up from this nightmare, you might be wondering what on earth is going on?

You see, stopping the people from voting to cap spending wasn't enough. The people who run the state of Oklahoma want to make certain that upstart reformers like Rick Carpenter don't dare attempt any future initiatives, and that professional petition managers like Susan Johnson or "outside agitators" like me quickly think better of providing any assistance to such citizen-initiated efforts.

The goal is to scare, to intimidate, to silence; it is happening more and more in Oklahoma at the hands of Attorney General Edmondson — and throughout the country as our politics becomes increasingly regulated, controlled, and criminalized. Politics has lurched off the highway of democracy, off the curb and back into the old insider system, the gutter method of accumulated power.

Once upon a time you could participate in politics without a battery of attorneys. Once upon a time you could lose an election without fear that one's opponents would use the power of their office to imprison you. No more.

Well, it is definitely scary. Personally, it's not fun to think of what impact this legal truncheon to the head could have on my wife, kids, grandchild. But we'll not allow our rights to be bullied away. Nor will we stand idly by while the one process capable of reining in corrupt politics — citizen initiative and referendum — is threatened into non-existence.

We, the Oklahoma 3, didn't conspire to break the law. Instead, we sought to understand it and abide by it, even as we sought to change other laws. We now face the full onslaught of the state of Oklahoma. It is apparent that this retaliation is not for any crime, but for our political beliefs and our audacity to put them into action.

Maybe it's time for all Americans — conservative, liberal, populist, libertarian — to "conspire" together to take back our political system from the gutter.

Before it's too late.