 * “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
—Helen Keller
Thanks to everyone who joined our monthly Town Hall online last week. (What, you didn’t? You can still catch it here.) They’re always on the third Tuesday of the month. We’ll be back live with the next one on May 16 at 5:30pm.
The Great Slowdown creeps along
You might remember last November’s passage of Measure 113, which made it harder for the minority party to walk out to stop a necessary quorum from assembling (I say “harder,” not impossible; as the session gets more intense, walkouts aren’t hard to imagine). So in an attempt to run out the clock—constitutionally, the session has to end by June 25 this year—the minority party has turned delay into an art form with a whole basket of tactics, described here.
I’ve written a couple of times about the most obvious of these: insisting on the constitutional requirement that bills be read out loud and in their entirety before we can vote on them (the minority party can waive that requirement with a simple motion, and in normal times almost always does). That’s what has us on the Senate floor for hours at a time, listening to a computer voice read every comma and hyphen of every bill at a blistering speed.
But they’ve also turned what has been a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver into a daily routine that has been chewing up the first hour or two of every floor session. Each day Republican Senators rise one by one to make motions to withdraw favorite bills from where they’re stuck in committees directly to the Senate Floor for an up-or-down vote. They tend to be the most ideologically dramatic bills they brought to the session, knowing in advance that they have no chance to become law with Democrats holding majorities in both chambers. (As I write these words at my floor desk, Republican Senators are rising one after the other to explain why we should pull Senate Bill 875 to the floor and pass it. This will give you the idea.)
But they can become the grist for political campaigning, and that, after wasting our limited time, is the second purpose of bill withdrawal motions. And if you’re sitting in the Senate Gallery through all this you might be struck by how simply good these bills sound. You hear everything that’s right and noble about them and, of course, none of the downsides or shortfalls that shaped a chair’s decision not to move them to the floor. Citizen input and deliberating over conflicting evidence, the work of committees, is the step in the legislative process that bill withdrawals strive to cancel.
 But if you measure the success of this maneuver by how much floor time it grinds up, they’re doing pretty well. Here’s how.
The minority caucus comes to the day’s session with a list of several bills. Senators will take turns making a motion to withdraw the first one to the floor, making an argument of up to five minutes for the wisdom of immediately taking up that bill for a debate and a vote. Then the rest of them can each take a turn arguing the same point. When they’re all done, the Senator making the original motion can make closing comments, pretty much repeating his or her opening comments.
Then we vote on the motion to withdraw. The result is always the same: an “Aye” from every single minority member and a “Nay” from every member of the majority, every single time. What everyone knows will happen happens.
But we’re not done. After the Senate President declares the motion failed, the minority Senators can rise one by one to file a vote explanation. This option is available to every Senator after every vote, but until now it’s pretty much always done in a note to the Secretary of the Senate, who makes it part of the written record. But that doesn’t take up floor time, so our colleagues have been turning them into speeches. They can take up to two minutes each to lay out explanations that are near-verbatim repeats of the argument they made minutes earlier, before the vote was taken. When everyone’s done explaining, another member of their team will rise to make the motion to withdraw another bill from committee, and the process begins again. The whole loop will run, beginning to end, for however many bills they have on the list that day.
Other than saying “nay” when our name is called, we mostly stay quiet as the series plays out. Challenging their arguments in real time would essentially reward their effort to turn the floor sessions into committee meetings, minus the citizen testimony and well-vetted data that good policy-making needs, as well as boost their efforts to run down the clock to adjournment day.
Which, I’ll add, won’t work. There are two full months left, sixty days. We could stay on the floor ten hours a day on every one of them if we have to. That gives us a lot more hours than the maximum allotment of walk-out days, entire bill-readings, long “courtesy of the senate” messages, long remonstrances, bill-carry speeches, bill advocacy speeches, bill withdrawal motions, motion support speeches, redundant vote explanations, and (just imagining this part) fire drills from accidentally-triggered alarms, all of them put together, can burn up. I have a pretty comfortable sleeping bag.
While ‘nay’ votes on these withdrawal motions are important to protect the lawmaking process, I felt torn about several of them. Some of what Republicans were saying we should talk about should be talked about, whether or not they’re in good faith. One example: they recently moved to withdraw a set of bills to pare down the Governor’s emergency declaration powers. These came directly from their belief that one person on her own imposed too many strict emergency orders for too long through the pandemic.
I think they have a point. The legislative branch pretty much sat on the bench for two years while the executive branch made the consequential COVID decisions. Whether you agreed with them or not, that vested more power in one single person than Oregon’s laws and constitution intend, at least as I read them. I flinch when I imagine what would happen if certain current political figures were elected Governor and vested with that kind of power.
So an open-minded legislative conversation about executive emergency power makes sense to me. Sticking with my team when Republicans moved to bring it to the floor didn’t feel great. I don’t know why it wasn’t addressed in committee; it may be because we all want to steer clear of anything that seems like publicly slamming one of our own. That wouldn’t matter so much if we didn’t live in a time when the partisan knives are constantly drawn, looking for a chance to strike. But it does, because we do. It’s not a backdrop for great policy-making.
Your thoughts?
Campaign Finance Reform Rides Again
It’s two and a half years now since Oregonians voted nearly 4-1 to amend the Oregon Constitution to clarify that the legislature, local governments and the people (through the initiative process) have the authority to limit and regulate campaign spending. So where is the legislation to actually impose limits?
We haven’t been able to get there. House leaders have repeatedly sent over bills I can’t support because of the pathways they leave open for enormous checks to candidates. This year’s offering, HB 2003, seems to come from the same mold, though enough is left vague that it’s hard to tell for sure.
There’s a better way, mostly designed by the skilled and committed folks at Honest Elections Oregon. Oregon Live just laid out the current lay of the land here. Chances that we’ll overcome differences to get a bill to the Governor’s desk are…maybe I better hold off on that until we get some old-fashioned negotiation under our belts.
What hasn’t changed over the course of this long, long conversation is the reality that we’re unlikely to solve any of our biggest issues until we get money in politics right.
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Take care. Enjoy the fresh warmth as spring moves toward summer.
 Senator Jeff Golden, Oregon Senate District 3
 Carrying HB 3164 to the Senate Floor for dabate today, Thursday.
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Oregon Capital Chronicle: Oregon Senate passes bill to expand college access for prison inmates
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