To better understand Oregon Republicans’ obsession of late with walking off the job, it helps to wind back the clock to 2001. That year, fresh off a census, Oregon’s legislature was set to draw new voting districts. Republicans controlled both chambers of the statehouse, which gave them first crack at redistricting. The House and Senate agreed on a plan, but no Democrats supported the new map. Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber said he wouldn’t support the redistricting bill; without his signature, the task would eventually fall to the Secretary of State, also a Democrat.
Republicans had a workaround, though. They were going to pass the redistricting plan as a resolution, which doesn’t require the governor’s signature to go into effect. The move would surely have sparked litigation, which likely would have ended up in the state Supreme Court. Dan Gardner, the House minority leader at the time, didn’t let it get that far — he initiated a walkout. Republicans didn’t have enough members for a quorum, and business at the Capitol ground to a halt. They caved soon after, and the Secretary of State redrew the maps.
Gardner, who now works for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said in a recent interview that the 2001 walkout “was a constitutional issue of whether or not redistricting could be done without the governor’s signature.”
What’s going on now, however, is a more routine use of walkouts by Republicans, Gardner said. For the second year in a row, Republicans outgunned in the Senate walked out to deny Democrats quorum, which requires two-thirds of lawmakers be present to conduct business. “That’s a totally different thing,” he said. “I’m always in favor of quorums, but not for just any old bill that comes down the pike, and not continually, as they’re doing. It’s just silly.”
Both times, Republicans were able to stymie the controversial legislation at hand — a cap-and-trade bill designed to curb Oregon’s greenhouse gas emissions — but the 2020 walkout had a sharper point. Senators this year were joined by their House counterparts as they fled the Capitol, and the session was gaveled to a close last week, three days early.
“This is a challenge I did not expect to face in my time as speaker,” House Speaker Tina Kotek said on the chamber floor. “I did not expect to face a constitutional crisis in which so many of our colleagues simply decide to stop showing up for work until they get their way.”
Now, Oregon lawmakers must wade through the constitutional quibbles and find a way to legislate again. Dozens of bills were abandoned during this short-made-shorter session, and it’s likely climate legislation will continue to divide this polarized statehouse. If lawmakers can’t find a way to work together, other bills will keep falling into the chasm that divides the two parties.
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The walkouts have been widely framed as a partisan divide between urban and rural Oregon, fueled by GOP lawmakers who feel steamrolled by the Democratic supermajorities in both chambers and the governor’s office. But House Minority Leader Christine Drazan said it’s not so simple. In an interview, Drazan said climate change legislation isn’t something Republicans won’t consider. But the cap-and-trade policy wasn’t, to use Gardner’s term, just any old bill coming down the pike. Drazan said there were “substantial constitutional questions” about the policy. For instance, the state constitution mandates that any tax on oil and gas go toward schools and not exceed 6 percent, and that taxation bills originate in the House (though it’s unclear whether Senate Bill 1530, the cap-and-trade legislation, legally constitutes a tax). Moreover, Drazan said, her caucus’ demands were simple and narrow — refer the bill to voters, and let them choose its fate in November.
“Voters are the ones who are going to end up having to bear the financial burden, because there are so many carve-outs for emitters,” Drazan said. “So that meant, for us, voters should get to decide.”
Gardner, the former minority leader, doesn’t sympathize with his modern counterpart. For one, many of those industry carve-outs came at the request of corporate interests and Republican lawmakers during years of negotiations. As for the ballot referral: “Why would the majority do that to make the minority happy? If the minority wants to do that, all they have to do is gather signatures.”
Twenty lawmakers did return this week to pass emergency funding for, among other things, flood relief and coronavirus response, but more than 100 other bills — including bipartisan forestry legislation — wilted. Priscilla Southwell, a University of Oregon political science professor, said the walkout was “a dereliction of duty on the part of Republicans,” but there was more to be done by Democrats, too.
“The cap and trade bill needs more work,” Southwell said. The concerns of Drazan and others that low-income Oregonians would be gouged by higher gas prices, she said, are justified. “Do I think it justified the walkout? No. But Democrats should’ve brought it to the table, brought up these issues, and maybe even extended the session.”
Oregon’s Democratic leadership didn’t respond to requests for comment, but speaking with Oregon Public Broadcasting, Senate President Peter Courtney made some ominous predictions. “I guarantee you other states are gonna start copying this … that’s how dangerous this is,” he said. Further, Courtney argued the Legislature was punting the state’s climate responsibility to Governor Kate Brown.
Courtney’s first prediction is unlikely — Oregon is one of the only states with a two-thirds quorum requirement; in others, the party in power needs only a simple majority to advance bills. But he was correct on the latter. This week, Governor Kate Brown signed an executive order directing the state’s Department of Environmental Quality to reduce emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 — the same target of the cap and trade bill, but without the mechanisms to fund the technological and regulatory elements of such a drawdown.
Drazan said Brown’s executive order is unfortunate but understandable. “Her authority on that issue … seems clunky, and it appears like it’s going to be really vulnerable to a legal challenge,” she said. “But as governor, she gets to roll the dice on that.”
Should a legal challenge come, Oregon’s neighbor to the north offers an example of what could take place. After a pair of carbon-pricing bills failed in Washington in recent years, Governor Jay Inslee used executive action to curb greenhouse gas emissions in his state. In January, though, Washington’s Supreme Court ruled that fuel companies can’t be punished for the emissions of their product; only “actual emitters” can be regulated. In other words, Chevron can’t be punished when you burn its gasoline.
“This decision has made it even more abundantly clear,” Inslee said at the time, “that we need to take action in the Legislature.”
In Oregon, that’s exactly what Gardner expects will happen again — regardless of Republicans’ walkouts. “[Democrats are] in the majority. They want this passed. Matter of fact, next time they come into session, they’ll likely do it again. You don’t capitulate everything to the minority on a bill like this.”
