Walkout: Oregon State Senate

Jeff Golden

Climate Change is a partisan issue.

A strong majority of Democrats think climate change is real, urgent, and that we should do something about it. 

So Oregon Democratic legislators acted accordingly.

Most Republicans disagree. They doubt it's a problem and most don't support actions that would cost money or inconvenience citizens. 

So Oregon Republican legislators acted accordingly.

Logjam. Walkout.

The Oregon state senate made national news. For the second time this year, GOP senators left the state, thus denying the state senate a quorum, thereby blocking passage by the majority of senators of a bill to create a carbon tax, trade, and rebate program. 

Here is an explanation of the bill: Click Here

We are seeing representative democracy at work. Among Democrats, 78% think climate change is "very" important and 84% think the government needs to do something. Among Republicans, only 25% think it is important and only 32% think the government should do something.  Click: ABC poll

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Democratic-Republican partisanship is aligned with urban-rural geography, and people in urban areas drive fewer miles than do rural residents, and therefore Republican legislators calculate that the burden of the bill falls more directly on rural--i.e. Republican--voters.  Democrats are elected almost entirely from urban districts. This re-ignites the age old resentment of policies pushed onto rural Oregonians by the Portland population juggernaut.

(If the plan to reduce fossil fuel use were a tax on cars idling while stuck in traffic at intersections, then the burden would switch to a different set of voters. Portland legislators might feel differently.)

Jeff Golden is a Democratic State Senator, representing an unusual district for a Democrat, a mixed one that includes forested areas, plus the college town of Ashland. He supports the bill. He also recognizes that his district includes lots of people who, especially in decades past, worked in the lumber industry, a well organized interest group opposing the bill. 

Click: Amazon

He sent a newsletter, expressing his views on the walkout, a newsletter noteworthy for its expression of empathy to people in that industry. He is voting agaienst what they perceive to be their interest, but he appears determined to show that neither he--nor environmental politics generally--are the real villain. "The timber companies who made billions off of Northwest forests could have done much more," he says, but they did not.  

We have an up close look at the Oregon version of the struggle we see in the Midwest "rustbelt" and in Appalachian coal country, the disappearance of one kind of traditional job, with industry--and Trump--
blaming it on environmentalists and out of touch urban liberals, and Democrats objecting to that explanation.

Golden is familiar with this industry/environmental conflict. He wrote a novel about it twenty years ago. The issue persists.

Here is how Jeff Golden is handling this difficult communication issue, verbatim from his newsletter:

"I write this at my desk on the Senate floor, surrounded by all of my 17 Democratic colleagues and none of my 11 Republican colleagues. We’ve been here for five hours now, chit-chatting, filling each other in on the bills we’re still working on, catching up on constituent e-mail, talking or Face-timing with local media outlets. What we’re not doing is the public’s business we were sent here to do. 

That’s because the Republican Senators, if this afternoon’s reports from CNN are right, are in Missoula, Montana. They apparently flew there early this morning in order to leave the jurisdiction of the Oregon State Police. A couple hours later, at the Senate President’s request, Governor Kate Brown ordered OSP to do everything possible to bring these folks back to the Capitol. 

For the second time this session, the Republicans have walked. The 
purpose is to deny the Senate a quorum; the state Constitution allows us 
to do business only when 2/3 of us, 20 out of 30, are present. In May they 
left for four days to keep us from passing the Student Success Act, which included a $1 billion/year Corporate Activities Tax. They came back after a closed-door deal (and the Student Success package has since been passed and signed into law) that killed a couple of unrelated bills they didn’t like. At the time more than a few of us wondered what the Republicans would take away from that experience. “I have a three-year-old,” one of my colleagues said then. “And the last thing in the world I’d do if he pitched a tantrum is give him a piece of candy.” Today it’s especially easy to see what she meant. 

Part of that regrettable deal was the Republican’s promise that they wouldn’t walk out again for the rest of the session…wouldn’t do, that is, exactly what they did today. This time the triggering issue is HB 2020, the big climate bill that’s grabbed so much energy and attention all session.  This bill is so grotesquely horrible, they keep saying, they had no choice but to flee Salem. “Senate Republicans,” Senator Tim Knopp (R-Bend) wrote today from his out-of-state perch, “have chosen to use the last option available to protect our constituents by denying the Senate a quorum to pass HB 2020.” This follows on the heels of a big rally in the Capitol this week of loggers and log-truck drivers; one had the logs he was hauling spray-painted with the message "No more. This is my life.” 

This tone of desperation has been a steady thread of the HB 2020 debate for months. Some of it has been manufactured. Sen. Herman Baertschiger (R-Grants Pass), passing the time somewhere in Montana as I write, is the 
leader of Senate Republicans. This afternoon's TV news quotes him saying that HB 2020 will devastate anybody in the natural resource industry. “They’re afraid,” he said of rural Southern Oregonians. “They’re afraid that their livelihood is gonna go away.” 

Yes, many of them are afraid. I’ve received my share of mail from people fearing that HB 2020 will trash their way of life. Last March, when we held a public hearing on the bill at Central High in Medford, something like 60 people spoke for the bill and some 50 against it; of the second group, about 25 said the program would “crush”—always that same word—the economy and their lives. 

Why Are People This Scared?  

I think there are three reasons. One is that people who’ve made their living with their hands, in the forests, on farms, on fishing boats or in mines, in factories and shops, have found themselves on the short end of a very short stick for years now. They used to be valued workers; now they’re replaceable production inputs in a world very different from the promising one they grew up in. Hundreds of professions across the country that used to promise a decently secure future and retirement just don’t anymore. The truth is that most blue-collar workers everywhere are scared for good reasons. 

The second reason is a case study of the first. Thirty years ago workers in our valley took a huge and sudden hit when the rules of federal forest management changed almost overnight. Whatever you think and whoever you want to blame for those hard times, thousands of Southern Oregonians were knocked out of middle-class security into economically rugged lives. It’s not hard to scare people who’ve gone through that kind of change. 

The third reason is simple. A lot of people are scared out of their wits about this bill because high-profile voices are working hard to scare them out of 
their wits. Take the claim that HB 2020 “will devastate anybody in the natural resource industry.” Seriously?  If you’ve followed this debate since January, you can’t possibly count the number of times you’ve heard how this Cap and Trade program will devastate, destroy, decimate, ruin, demolish or crushOregon and Oregonians or both. 

I want to say this clearly. The politicians preaching fire-and-brimstone about HB 2020 either haven’t read the bill, don’t understand its provisions, haven’t bothered to look at the economy-boosting impacts of carbon pricing wherever it’s been tried**, or are cynically exploiting the natural anxiety about change to for political purposes. With the worried hopes of so many working people on the line, that’s a deeply cruel thing to do. And it’s cruel to imply to the people they say they’re fighting for that things will be fine if we don’t act boldly on climate. The evidence, up to and including last summer’s hellacious fires and unbearable smoke, loudly says that’s not true.  

I’m angry about that. Mixed with that feeling is real sadness about that logtruck driver—“This is my life”—the scared comments (some tinged with rage, some not)  I’ve read on email and heard in public hearings. Whenever there’s a major social/economic shift—again, the Timber Wars come to mind—the ones who profited the most from the existing order seem to be held harmless while their workers take the biggest hits. That’s not the way it has to be. The timber corporations who made billions off Northwest forests could have done much more during the transition to help the workers that labored to create their wealth. The immensely lucrative fossil-fuel industry, which year after year raked in the largest profits ever recorded by any industry, could be helping workers through the transition now.   

But that’s not how things work. Pick a major economic transition from any historical moment and you’ll find the heaviest load landing on the shouldersthe least privileged, however hard they may have worked creating wealth for others.  We’re trying to do it differently with HB 2020. 

The intensity of today’s fight is fueled by forces even bigger than this big issue.  One of them is the emotional clash of cultures I described earlier in the battle over coyote-killing contests. It lays bare the core belief of many working people, so evident in the last presidential election, that they’ve been dismissed and ignored.  

That has fostered another major force: a challenge to government’s basic legitimacy that would have been hard to imagine ten or even five years ago. We saw it in the 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. Some say it’s playing out on the national level as the Executive Branch refuses to comply with lawful subpoenas and other orders from the Legislative Branch. And we’re seeing it right now as I sit amidst of cluster of Democratic Senators, without a Republican in sight, wanting to finish our constitutionally-required work. When Republicans essentially say “never mind that policies like HB 2020 resulted from which legislators the voters chose; the only way we have to protect Oregonians is to shut down the Legislature,” they are starkly challenging the legitimacy of government. I think the Mail Tribune editorial got it right."