Bend's Walkout King Leads Another Hypocritical Charge

You gotta hand it to Tim Knopp. After beginning his political career in Oregon in 1999 with three terms in the Oregon House, followed later by stints in the Oregon Senate that lasted through this January, he’s got a new gig working as the Oregon state co-chair for U.S. term limits. In the new role, he’ll advocate for Oregon to adopt a resolution supporting term limits at the congressional level.

“Now more than ever before, the need for term limits is crystal clear,” he stated in a press release from U.S. Term Limits, for which he now serves. “Polls show that one issue that unites all Oregonians regardless of political affiliation is the need for congressional term limits.”

Is this all a ploy for the recently departed state senator and minority leader — who only limited his own term in office by getting disqualified from serving again due to his repeated walkouts during the 2023 legislative session — to make a run for one of Oregon’s House or Senate seats in the near future? That’s tough to say — but it does give us cause for reflection.

Visit the offices of the Source Weekly and on the walls, you’ll find a limited archive of past Source covers, going all the way back to the newspaper’s birth in 1997. Every year, we place two covers on the wall, and going back as far as 1998, Tim Knopp appears there. In other words, Knopp’s political career in the Oregon legislature is nearly as old as this newspaper, yet he’s aiming to be the poster child in our state for limiting other people’s tenure in office.

On the one hand, thank goodness for term limits, because as we might be about to find out, the ones set in place for the president mean the clock is now ticking down for Donald Trump.

On the other hand, it’s tough not to notice the hypocrisy of the effort from Knopp, knowing that he’s served a very long time here… and added to that, that he was forced out of office for refusing to participate in the political process. As you’ll read in this week’s feature story, “Nowhere to Stay,” those walkouts, which shut down business in the legislature for weeks, continue to have consequences, including the failure to secure funding for a facility that could have housed people under 18 who are experiencing mental health crises. Deschutes County is experiencing an absolute crisis in suicide rates among those under 18, and those kids don’t have time to wait for more political machinations.

Implementing term limits at the congressional level is a heavy lift, requiring a change to the U.S. Constitution. If voters see fit to prioritize that, so be it – but here in Oregon, we can’t help but wonder what else, or who else, will slip through the cracks in the meantime.

This article appears in The Source Weekly January 23, 2025.