With a Rushed Ending, This Legislative Session Was Not a Win for Oregonians

Many people in Oregon breathed a sigh of relief when, after an excruciating, record-breaking six weeks, Republicans in the state Senate returned to the floor, establishing a needed quorum and allowing votes on the floor to continue once again. After saying for weeks that Republicans would only return on the final day of the legislative session in order to pass the state budget, Sen. Tim Knopp (R-Bend) and his colleagues ended up returning earlier, on June 15 – early enough to pass a slew of bills in a rapid-fire manner.

To say these last weeks have been like drinking from a firehose in the Oregon Senate would be entirely accurate, if not an understatement. Some 600 bills ended up on Gov. Tina Kotek’s desk at the conclusion of the session – 350 of which she had yet to review as of this weekend.

Journalists and others who receive press releases about the passage of this bill or that one saw a barrage of those press releases — sometimes one every 10 minutes, issued by the same person or organization. If it’s a lot to absorb and understand for the governor or for the people who simply report on the news, imagine what it was like for the senators who were expected to understand the details of these bills before they voted.

While senators continued to attend committee meetings and to refine or weigh in on bills created by their colleagues, floor sessions are the place where those issues are hotly debated and negotiated. This, the longer of the two sessions convened by the legislature each term, is supposed to be the time for such debate and negotiation. The short session, which will start in February, is intended to be a session when legislators can work on fixes to the bills that came forward in the long session. That session may be doomed to be a mini-long session, filled with votes on bills that should have been resolved this session, with more partisanship and ire. As it stands now, the passage of a flurry of bills in the final hours of this past session will undoubtedly result in the need for a lot of legislative fixing.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, after facing the ongoing hassle of a historic walkout, declared victory at the end of this session. Each side felt vindicated by their ability to compromise and allow business to continue. We get the feeling that everyone is really just happy that it’s over, even if the outcomes aren’t ideal. Plenty of bills – including Kotek’s housing bill that would have allowed cities to slightly expand their urban growth boundaries to build more much-needed housing, and a bill that would have addressed online privacy – either died or lacked an adequate amount of debate to help them get passed. That’s a disservice to all Oregonians – so no, we’re not among those declaring victory about the outcome of this session.

But in case you need a little laugh today, here’s one more thing to think about:

Toward the end of the session, Senate Minority Leader Knopp asked the Speaker of the House to retroactively excuse the Republican (and one Independent) absences that now stand to make them ineligible to serve in the legislature in the future. You may fault them for skipping out on six weeks of session that could have been used for far more productive ends, but when it comes to that request, you gotta give them credit for the audacity.

This article appears in Source Weekly June 29, 2023.