The ongoing Oregon Senate boycott isn’t all that it seems.
Senate President Rob Wagner and fellow Democrats say the absent Republican and Independent senators are thwarting the will of voters, who overwhelmingly passed Measure 113 last year to forestall walkouts. Under that constitutional amendment, at least 10 of those senators now are disqualified from serving another term.
It’s true that voters in every Oregon county except lightly populated Lake and Sherman favored the ballot measure. But there’s a catch. Several, actually.
This week I chatted with pollster John Horvick about the walkout that keeps the Senate from passing bills and approving Gov. Tina Kotek’s latest appointments to state commissions and agencies. The typical voter likely viewed Measure 113 as an abstract principle, not a referendum on specific policy issues in the Legislature.
“There's a temptation to read into this that Oregon has demonstrated that walkouts are bad, and elected officials who walk out should be punished. That’s not wrong – wrong like ‘capital W’ wrong – but when I've heard people talk about Measure 113, they talk about it in isolation,” explained Horvick, senior vice president at Portland-based DHM Research.
“But I suspect most voters kind of see this as a process issue about rules and that's harder to get people to pay attention to than a major policy that they might feel is at stake.
“People care more about outcomes than they care about process. They care more about partisanship than they care about process. We passed [Measure 113] broadly across the state. But I think in reality, it's a second-order concern to most voters. They care about other things more.”
Based on his decade-plus of talking with voters, Horvick said he thinks most Oregonians would have a difficult time articulating issues behind the walkout.
“Voters generally don't pay much attention to what's happening in Salem,” he said. “It's possible at this moment that they're paying more attention because there's been some news about the walkout.”
Absent their own independent understanding of an issue, Americans tend to follow partisan lines, embracing the perspectives of people they trust. In this case, that means choosing between the Republican and Democratic narratives of the Senate walkout. Each side portrays itself in the best light while casting all blame on the other. Nuances are ignored.
Democrats run the Legislature; thus, more seems at stake for them. This becomes a test of Democratic political leadership from Kotek on down. Republicans are such a minority statewide that they have little to lose from shutting down the Legislature. Most boycotting senators represent districts where they would be reelected anyway. On the other hand, Senate Republican Leader Tim Knopp of Bend already was unlikely to achieve reelection because his district now is heavily Democratic.
Lawmakers have passed significant bipartisan bills this year to address homelessness and support Oregon’s semiconductor industry. Leaving many other bills on the table, even ones with bipartisan support, fits with a Republican view of limiting government against Democratic overreach.
Bear in mind, however, that taxpayer money and public employee time are being wasted while staff and lawmakers work on bills likely headed nowhere. The Senate pipeline is stacked up with hundreds of bills, and hundreds more sit in the Legislature’s budget committee.
The No. 1 legislative responsibility is to create and approve the state budget for 2023-25. Knopp says the absent senators will return June 25, which would be the 2023 Legislature’s final day, to make that happen. His pledge makes Republicans sound good while putting Democrats in a bind. It would mean sidelining key Democratic priorities, such as the contentious HB 2002 on gender-affirming care and abortion and HB 2005 on gun regulations. (By the way, past polling suggests that Oregonians’ support for certain aspects of those bills is not as clear-cut as advocates contend.)
Gov. Kotek could subsequently call a special session of the Legislature to pass a budget, but the governor cannot restrict the ultimate agenda or the session length. Would the boycotting senators return for a special session … or for the regular legislative session in 2024, which is an election year?
As for Measure 113, it shares the characteristic of too many initiative petitions: It is worded poorly.
It is unclear as to when and how legislators would be banned from continuing in office, although the Secretary of State’s Office already is developing rules.
Regarding Measure 113, Horvick said: “Voters have got to be confused about what the heck is going on. And when people are confused, they tend to just revert back to their partisan positions.”
Side note: Measure 113 is constitutional, according to a recent memo that lawyers Misha Isaak and Whitney A. Brown wrote for its supporters. But, as one of my colleagues noted, Isaak also co-wrote the 2021 memo arguing that Nicholas Kristof was legally eligible to run for Oregon governor. The Powers That Be decided otherwise.