Throughout the week, comedians both national and local have been having a lot of fun with the notion of sending National Guard troops into Portland to protect the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building from the few dozen demonstrators who have gathered there. Jokes about a need for troops to address shortages of oat milk, or to fix a series of disorganized Little Free Libraries have abounded — and they’ve certainly made us chuckle.
But in all seriousness, the notion of turning the troops of our state (and now, troops from California and Texas) against people exercising their right to petition the government for redress of grievances is no laughing matter. Violating the principles of the First Amendment should be bedrock enough to get anyone upset — but if the idea of the federal government attempting to shut down the very American right to dissent is not enough, then let’s consider the economic matters.
This administration is declaring war on cities that don’t align with the President’s politics, at a time when the federal government is shut down over efforts to cut Medicaid. In eastern Oregon, home to Congressional District 2 where voters lean more conservative, some 42% of Oregonians benefit from an expanded Medicaid program that we call the Oregon Health Plan. Across the state, some 57% of children are covered by Medicaid. As we have seen through the expansion of Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, having more people covered by insurance actually lowers the cost of health care for everyone. When fewer people are covered, expenses go up.
The people covered under these plans are not the undocumented people that continue to serve as targets for MAGA cuts and anti-immigration rhetoric. Basically, Republicans are saying that the 42% of eastern Oregonians who now receive adequate medical coverage are expendable in the effort to wage war.
In a time when the national debt is soaring, what happened to the conservative deficit hawks? Just last week, the Oregon legislature began to talk about where it’s going to cut the Oregon Health Plan in order to balance a budget that will be severely limited by federal cuts. If those federal cuts were done in a spirit of deficit-trimming, that might be palatable to more people — but that’s not the case.
Wars — like the ones in Portland and Los Angeles — are expensive. In spite of the several Temporary Restraining Orders that were issued over the weekend, dozens of California National Guard troops still flew into Oregon Sunday, at no small cost. Feeding and housing them isn’t a negligible expense. Heck, even the effort to block these unnecessary troop deployments costs the Oregon Department of Justice money in staff time and a raft of ongoing lawsuits.
While the federal government deploys troops, real Oregonians are on a health care precipice. Federal tax dollars are being spent on troop deployments, as untold numbers of Oregonians are in danger of getting kicked off their health insurance. We don’t believe the expenditures on troops and immigration issues will have a return as great as investing those dollars in an increasingly shrinking health care safety net. Hopefully, some of the fiscally responsible folks in Washington, D.C., will prevail in reining in the more warlike tendencies of the current administration.
This article appears in the Source October 9, 2025.
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Asking where the deficit hawks are is an excellent question. Where are the “state’s rights” folks? What happened to conservatives championing the 10th amendment? That so quickly vanished from republicans focus as well. Please also note that the Big beautiful bill cut grants to state and city governments that would have paid for additional law enforcement. This is a manufactured crisis.
Graffiti is not peaceful protest. Blocking sidewalks, streets, or building entrances is not peaceful protest. Vandalism is not peaceful protest. Throwing objects at other people, especially law enforcement, is not peaceful protest.