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Posts published in “Stapilus”

The posse

The posse

March 16, 2025

One of the eerier threads of our authoritarian trend line is local, not national: The arrival of the "constitutional sheriff," who is sharp contrast to the actual constitution believes that he is above every law. No one outranks the county sheriff, some of them will say.

Most sheriffs are not part of this movement, but a significant number are. A book, The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, written by Jessica Pishko and published last September, outines the growth of the movement, as extreme as anything hanging around national politics (I can recommend reading the book). It's especially endemic (though not limited to) rural western counties.

A summary of the book says, "In recent years there’s been a revival of “constitutional sheriffs,” who assert that their authority supersedes that of legislatures, courts, and even the president. They’ve protested federal mask and vaccine mandates and gun regulations, railed against police reforms, and, ultimately, declared themselves election police, with many endorsing the “Big Lie” of a stolen presidential election. They are embraced by far-right militia groups, white nationalists, the Claremont Institute, and former president Donald Trump, who sees them as allies in mass deportation and border policing."

But guardrails can be placed on the office of sheriff, which is why a new bill in the Washington legislature is of note.

The website InvestigateWest two months ago reported on Klickitat County Sheriff Bob Songer who had gathered a posse - actually, since the group numbers more than 100, something much more than that. The old tradition is that posses would help hunt down criminals, but that's been less common in recent generations. Volunteers deputized by sheriffs in more recent times have often helped with crowd controls and search and rescues. Songer's apparently goes well beyond that.

The new Washington state legislation, House Bill 399, is aimed at limiting what these non-professional deputies can do. It provides some eligibility requirements, limits their use and a little more tightly describes what a sheriff and his deputies can do.

When the bill came up for committee hearing, almost three dozen people turned up to testify, and nearly all were in favor.

One Klicketat resident, Michelle Nijhuis, said “This large core of volunteers, while it’s intended to increase public safety, the wide variety of training and experience levels has in fact created more fear and distrust of local law enforcement within our communities, and it’s undermined law enforcement’s ability to protect us.”

It's a limited step, but it does send a useful message. We all cam use some guardrails, and law enforcement needs them especially. Most sheriffs probably don't need the reminder. But some evidently do.

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Diminishing services

Diminishing services

March 14, 2025

For all of Idaho’s vaunted population growth, a lot of people have been making their way out of the state, or opting out of providing services. Doctors, teachers, librarians and many more: For a variety of reasons, but specific legislature-passed state policy clearly among them.

Let’s add child care providers to the list.

This comes out of a report just released by IdahoStars, a block-grant-funded (so don’t expect this to continue long into the Trump Administration) effort run at Moscow through the University of Idaho, with the Idaho Center on Disabilities and Human Development and Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children.

It wasn’t put together by a private non-profit group, though some of the new reports’s conclusions could match up with one.

At a time when Idaho’s population continues to grow, IdahoStars report said more than 2,400 people working in child care in 2023 left work in that area, with turnover at a high 37%.

The overall number of people working in that field in Idaho fell by 3%, at a time when it should be rising. The number of available “spots” for children in Idaho child care centers has dropped around the same time by 1,321.

That in turn led to an estimated economic cost for the state of about $478 million, IdahoStars said.

Many of the reasons for that are endemic to the way child care operations usually run. Many are large in size and don’t pay especially well. Stress can be considerable. The report said, “Working in child care is rooted in a passion for early childhood, but the job is overly taxing and drives individuals out of the field. Low pay, long days, constant changes in leadership, children, co-workers, and requirements as well as the physical and emotional toll of the job all contribute to leaving the field.”

The workers were asked what would be needed to get them to return. More than two thirds cited higher pay, and almost half the rest talked about “bad management.” Obviously, that’s not true everywhere, but it seems to be common enough to represent a problem.

The turnover and diminished staffs are resulting in specific problems statewide: “High turnover rates lead to increased recruitment and training costs for child care providers. Constantly hiring and training new staff members to replace those who leave is not only time consuming but also financially burdensome for child care centers. These costs can strain the financial sustainability of child care businesses, potentially leading to increased fees for parents or closure of facilities.”

All that is worth bearing in mind in considering House Bill 243, at this writing House-passed and awaiting final Senate action, which hacks away at regulations covering child care, and would let child care centers set their own staff-to-child ratios. Convenient for center operators trying to save money and avoid finding hard-to-get staff; but problematic for children and parents.

The Senate committee hearing on it was heated. Christine Tiddens, executive director of Idaho Voices for Children argued, “Stripping these key safety standards from law opens the door to operators and bad actors who cut corners to save costs. In a child care setting, cutting corners results in babies being put into harm’s way.”

The bill supporters’ argument? Here’s Senator Brian Lenney of Nampa:  “I’ve heard cities and bureaucrats saying that they know how to run a day care better than a day care owner. It’d be like a bureaucrat telling a farmer the best way to milk a cow.”

If the bill passes, and it seems to have a good chance, we’ll know a year from now how well that logic held up. And how well Idaho children fared under its terms.

And we’ll know more - if there’s any money to pay for updated studies then - about how many child care providers still are offering their services in Idaho.The number may be down from where it is today.

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Old enough

Old enough

March 12, 2025

Sometimes the facts on the ground don't change, but attitudes toward them do.

In Oregon witness this session's Senate Bill 548., which has just passed the Senate with just one vote in dissent, and now heads to the Oregon House.

It concerns the youngest age at which two people can be married, which at present in Oregon is 17. The bill would change that to 18.

An organization called Unchained at Last, which focuses on forced and child marriages and which has weighed in supporting the new bill, said that from 2000 to 2018 about 200,000 people - mainly girls - were married, most of them 16 or 17 but some as young as 10 years old.

It estimates the number for Oregon at 3,891, about midway among the states per capita. (The number in Idaho, with less than half of Oregon's population, is 5,160, the second-0highest per-capita rate in the nation after Nevada.) No minimum age at all is specified in California. Oregon is one of nine states with the limit at 17, and would be one of just nine - Washington being one - set at 18.

This is a trend line with a long reach. Back  in colonial days, the typical marriage age for females was 12 and for males 14. That has adjusted very gradually over time, but only recently as a serious push for ending the practice really gotten under way. Legal ages for other things - voting, drinking, serving in the military, signing contracts and more - mostly have coalesced about age 18 (drinking being a relatively recent exception to that trend). But in many places, marriage can be carried out at younger ages, And states generally give full faith and credit to marriages from other jurisdictions.

Unchained pitched three core arguments against it:

1. Can easily be forced marriage, since minors have limited legal rights with which to escape an unwanted marriage (typically they are not even allowed to file for divorce);

2. Is a human rights abuse that produces devastating, lifelong repercussions for American girls, destroying their health, education, economic opportunities and quality of life; and

3. Undermines statutory rape laws, often covering up what would otherwise be considered a sex crime. Some 60,000 marriages since 2000 occurred at an age or spousal age difference that should have been considered a sex crime.

There are elements of perspective and culture in this (which doesn't constitute an argument against).

And the breadth of change seems broad. The backers of the new Oregon bill are bipartisan, including Representative Kevin Mannix of Salem, Senator. David Brock Smith of Port Orford and Senator Janeen Sollman of Hillsboro - two Republicans and a Democrat, respectively. And as noted, only one senator voted against it on the floor.

Committee testimony was unified as well, with 18 people submitting statements in favor and none against.

What once seemed clear and obvious enough in one direction has shifted. Progress can happen.

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Dealing with Threats

Dealing with Threats

March 9, 2025

Elected and other government officials are being threatened more often and in more ways than they were even just a few years ago, and legal pushback has been limited.

The effort to counter that wave of intimidation should be broader than most advocates have proposed in the past, but maybe framed in different ways — as an Oregon judge proposed at a legislative hearing earlier this month.

The hearing concerned Senate Bill 473, which would create a new crime of threatening a public official. It was proposed by the city of Eugene, and sponsored by Senator Floyd Prozanski, D- Eugene, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee. The measure would target a person who “knowingly delivers or conveys, directly or indirectly and by any means, a threatening communication to a public official or a member of the public official’s immediate family,” and it could be reasonably interpreted as a warning of violence. It would be a misdemeanor first time out, and felony for repeat instances.

Some opposition has arisen. In a few cases, it comes from people arguing it goes too far.

“This seems like a law that would be abused to silence members of the public and limit protected free speech,” one opponent said in written testimony.

The bill’s supporters pointed out, however, that only threats of imminent violence would be covered under its terms. Though differing in some details, it is set up along the lines of  existing laws on menacing, harassment, stalking and intimidation.

Similar bills have failed before, but the pressure to take some effective action has grown. One national study released in December said that in 2024 there were about 600 threat and harassment incidents targeting local officials, across almost all states, a number up by 19% from the year before and 108% the year before that.

In response to the proposal, the Taxpayers Association of Oregon said that, “During a three-year period of the Portland violent protests, the Taxpayers Association of Oregon documented many examples of violent threats placed upon local officials — including state lawmakers. These threats were sometimes placed on public buildings or accompanied by arson and vandalism. Three Portland elected officials had arson events outside their homes.”

The new bill came from the Lane County area partly because of a seeming explosion of threatening messaging there. The city of Eugene cited dozens of threatening emails to attorneys and others in the court system, Eugene’s mayor and chief of police and many others.

Much of the comment about the bill suggested, however, that limiting a new crime to threats of immediate harm wouldn’t go nearly far enough to address the problem.

The League of Women Voters, for example, urged that doxxing — the use of digital records to harass psychologically, economically and otherwise — should be barred.

Most provocative, though, was committee testimony from a judge of Oregon’s Court of Appeals, Ramon Pagan. Before his current posting, he was a Washington County judge assigned to the family law team.

While there in 2021, he encountered a litigant who, he said, behaved without problem at the trial but later began a pattern of threatening behavior. Pagan recalled that the man’s attorney said he “had become delusional, had started forming conspiratorial thoughts about me and had been repeatedly pointing out that he knew where I lived.”

The man started sending online maps showing, among other things, where Pagan and his wife walked their dogs. He even researched and copied paperwork related to his wife’s personal history.

Pagan said his life changed entirely because the man made a veiled threat but knew enough not to be direct about it.

This sort of harassment, which also included elements of doxxing, would not be covered by the new Eugene legislation.

Pagan had another suggestion: Instead of basing a law around prohibiting menacing or harassing conduct, the committee should consider a different angle and orient it instead around the idea of coercion.

“If the intent was either to affect a pending proceeding or to harass a judge for revenge for a prior proceeding it should be enforceable,” Pagan testified.

He suggested that it would be in the government’s interest to prohibit action that impeded or intimidated public officials from doing their jobs, whatever mechanism a harasser used.

That, too, is a complex question, and legislation would have to be crafted carefully to avoid reeling in people who are using their right to speak out in criticism of government action.

But Pagan’s broader argument, focusing on the specific problem resulting from the new-style campaigns of intimidation, probably offers a road map for developing a more effective law. As the Senate Judiciary Committee starts adjusting legislation, that might be something for lawmakers to consider.

(This column appeared originally in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.)

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Do voters matter?

Do voters matter?

March 7, 2025

When the highly controversial Idaho school voucher measure, House Bill 93, landed on Governor Brad Little’s desk, his office asked for comment from Idahoans about what he should do: Sign the bill, or veto it?

The bill had been passed by both chambers of the legislature, but not overwhelmingly: 42-28 in the House, and 20-15 in the Senate, meaning the Republican caucuses were split on it. A veto likely would not have been overridden. That means a veto would not have been performative or a statement of concern; it would be decisive.

It turns out that a veto is what most Idahoans want. We’ve known that for some time. In the Boise State University Idaho Public Policy Survey released in January, 53.3% said they opposed vouchers to 38% who supported them. The proposal was defined in the survey as “use of tax dollars to help pay for a private or religious education if a parent chooses not to send their child to a local public school,” which if anything may have been a favorable description.

But we don’t have to rely only on that to gauge Idaho’s attitude toward the subject. Actual opposition in Idaho may have been larger, to judge from the response to Little’s invitation. A lot of Idahoans did respond, as 37,457 phone calls and emails poured into the governor’s office. And 86% of them opposed the voucher bill.

Little, without making any direct reference to this, then signed the bill into law. In fact, the statement he released about his signing made no direct reference to the content (other than the cost) or the meaning of the bill at all, or the overwhelming wave of opposition to it.

This legislative session is packed full of bills most Idahoans, if informed of them, likely would oppose. But no significant roadblock or blowback has surfaced yet.

Most Idaho legislators no longer appear to see themselves as representatives of the people. In many cases, they seem empowered to do whatever they want to do - carry out their personal preferences. That’s constrained mainly by the will of a few interests - the state Republican Party organization, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a few others - which have outsized impact on Republican primary elections. Voters, whether aware of what their legislators are doing or not, have been imposing no political penalties for failing to represent them.

The Idaho Legislature keeps re-emphasizing the point, over and over and in recent years in session after session. Examples are all over the place. (And outside the Statehouse too, as shown by recent events at a Kootenai County legislative town hall meeting, in which citizens were largely reduced to being mute observers - and dragged out when that boundary was challenged.)

On Wednesday (March 5) the Idaho House approved a proposed constitutional amendment, House Joint Resolution 4, to allow only the legislature, not the voters, the ability to decide policy on marijuana and similar substances. (It still needs Senate approval to reach the ballot. That’s intended to work as a brick wall against a proposed ballot initiative to “decriminalize cannabis now,” petitions for which are circulating. (In 2022, an Idaho Statesman poll found that about two-thirds of Idaho adults favor legalization of at least medical marijuana.)

The point here isn’t who’s right on that subject. It’s that most Idaho legislators don’t trust the people who voted them into office to decide this issue for themselves.

To become effective, HJR 4 would need approval from a majority of the Idaho voters in the general election a year from November. Would they approve such a proposal to take power away from themselves and give it to legislators? Good question.

In all, the voters seem to figure less and less into these equations.

They could. They can. But it will take some work to make themselves solidly felt as a force legislators ignore at their peril - including the ouster of a bunch of legislators who currently ignore them.

 

Small offices, lots of effects

Small offices, lots of effects

March 5, 2025

The release by congressional Democrats of a list of federal offices - these including only those within the Department of Interior - may be swept under the radar, just another piece of the news from Washington. But it deserves more attention than that.

Those two million square feet of office space in 164 buildings amount to quite a lot of sudden closure, all set for June 30. Three of the offices are in Idaho, a Bureau of Indian Affairs building at Lapwai, an Office of the Solicitor location in Boise, and the Bureau of Reclamation office on Curtis Road in Boise.

The House Democrats pointed out that “The impact on Bureau of Indian Affairs offices will be especially devastating. These offices are already underfunded, understaffed, and stretched beyond capacity, struggling to meet the needs of Tribal communities who face systemic barriers to federal resources. Closing these offices will further erode services like public safety, economic development, education, and housing assistance—services that Tribal Nations rely on for their well-being and self-determination.”

But maybe because I have a little more of a link to the Bureau of Reclamation building - I worked across the street from it at the old Idaho Statesman office, and I’ve been in it a number of times - that one may have hit me more directly.

The idea of a closure of a federal building or two - they have lots and lots of them, right? - or the office itself may not register with quite a few people. But reality is that those offices do things. They’re there for a reason. And if one day they simply vanish, that will matter.

Southern Idaho has a rich agricultural base and a substantial and growing population in large part because of the Bureau of Reclamation, which for a century and more (sometimes under other names) the massive dam, reservoir and other projects that provide water to the area. If the Bureau of Reclamation did not exist, neither would be Magic Valley as we know it. It would instead be mostly unoccupied desert country, as it was during the Oregon Trail days.

But it’s not just history. Idaho is still heavily reliant on water management. A former BuRec staffer suggested, after hearing about the prospective closure of the Boise office, “this smackdown would hit the irrigation and water districts throughout the state with some adverse force.  The bureau is a vehicle by which the districts are still somewhat subsidized by the Federal government through water and facilities management and expertise.”

Boise happens to the regional Columbia River management office, and the former staffer asked, “If they shut down C-PNRO, where would the remaining and necessary administrative staff be located?  Denver?  Washington DC? Yakima? Grand Coulee?”

At a time when the president seems to have designs on Canadian water - as improbable as that sounds and is - closing the office most directly involved with managing Columbia River water coming from Canada would be a serious problem.

BuRec is a bureaucracy, of course, which means it generates massive amounts of paperwork, which for most people may not seem like much of an issue. It is, as anyone involved with water rights and engineering can tell you. The staffer: “At the office, there is maintained a large amount of legal paperwork -- such as water contracts, title transfers, facility maintenance contracts, etc. -- plus a large number of reports, maintenance files, etc. that only a bureaucracy can/does maintain until they are needed.”

And not only people in the agency need those records: So do state and local governments, water districts, canal companies, water users (agricultural and otherwise), attorneys and many more. The loss of those records could quickly throw Idaho’s (and the region’s) water management into chaos.

These points only scratch the surface of the problems associated with a rapid shutdown of the Boise Bureau of Reclamation office. The full range of impacts might need a book rather than a column to enumerate.

That’s one office among 168 in the recent round for closures; and that round may be be only one among several or many. And that’s just the Department of Interior; multiply all that by two dozen or probably more if you talk about federal office closures across the country. The effects already have started to hit in many places in the Northwest; the Forest Service may be the most prominent so far, but it is far from alone.

Donald Trump always has been President Chaos. We’re now about to see, writ large, what the impact of that will be.

 

State of the alternative

State of the alternative

March 4, 2025

On Tuesday night as President Donald Trump spoke to Congress, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon sat in the chamber and, when the subject of Ukraine arose, held up a blue and yellow Ukraine flag to show solidarity.

Oregon’s other senator, Ron Wyden, wasn’t there but he was plenty busy. For two hours, he answered questions at an online town hall.

Key items in the Trump speech included transgender people, buying Greenland, “wokeness,” mass deportations, praise for Elon Musk (and his DOGE operations) and opposition to semiconductor manufacturing.

The subject matter and the tenor of the Wyden discussion was a lot different: Medicaid and Medicare, firefighting, tariffs, Social Security. Threats to the constitutional order, Ukraine and budget cuts among them.

The participation was open, though the questions and online comments leaned strongly Democratic. A few people - or possibly in some cases bots, as some commenters suggested - took Trump’s side, but nearly all were either supportive of Wyden’s critical stance or complaining that it wasn’t tougher. Andm, for an online town hall held by a senator from one state, it was robust in size: More than 3,500 questions from more than 5,000 participants; both groups included people from all 36 Oregon counties, as well as a few from other states. .

Comments poured in at a rate of one a second or better over the two hours. Most reflected some of these sentiments:

 

People, Oregonians, are going to die without access to health care. It won't just be "hard times". It won't just be "sacrifice a bit". We will die. If our elected officials cannot fight for us, we will not survive possibly even this first year, let alone 4 more.

What legal actions can we as regular citizens (not wealthy) take to help stop this madness?

how can wed stop Trump and Musk from destroying our country. I am concern about loosing my Medicare.

How do we save SNAP, Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare?

Our democratic institutions are being dismantled in front of our eyes. Congressional Ds need to lead a coalition to push back hard!

If they cut Medicaid the way they have proposed, every single member of congress who votes for that is complicit in murder. People will die if they make those kinds of cuts to Medicaid.

Oregon Medicaid covers my home caregiver and that service is critical for me as a disabled person.

no kidding - I volunteer witgh North Plains Food Bank and we are seeing rapid growth in need.

Why would we need a drug-addicted depressive to take a chainsaw to our government? BTW, the poverty rate in Argentina is 50%, and that's who TRusk wants to emulate!

I want to know what our recourse is when SCOTUS lets us down again and we have no further recourse. What comes next if the Supreme Court doesn't support us because they are of course in Agent Orange's pocket as has been demonstrated in many situations,

They've always wanted to privatize social security and if it was we'd lose everything as stock market tanks. AS IT IS NOW

We receive electricity from Canada. Will Canada attach tariffs to our electric, impacting our bills?

Trump is heading towardsa Dictatorship, what are the Dems doing? People are scared! HELP!!!

 

Many of the others came from a similar perspective but with a harder edge:

 

I read Republicans are now getting death threats (a Dem lawmaker was the source--he'd heard it from colleagues). trump also threatened Stormy Daniels years ago...it's part of his toolbox. So it's not just fear of their jobs, it's fear for their lives …

Address how we stop Trump and Musk.

With all due respect Senator, Democrats are not doing enough, you're playing by the old rules of decorum when we live in a world of NO RULES.

This convo is too tame imo. Level 10 catastrophe being treated like a level 4.

is there anyway pressure can be put on Bentz to break with the Republicans?

 

For his part, Wyden had plenty of hard talk himself: “We’d like an alternative to Donald Trump’s no-reality … I think Elon Musk is stomping on the constitution … [DOGE activities at the Social Security Administration are] a warmup for a privatization of social security … [On the cutting of foreign health assistance] I think this is a four-alarm fire.”

It may have been an online town hall, but it was very much of a piece with those Wyden and other Oregon elected officials, and some officials elsewhere, have been holding in recent weeks.

It may have suggested some of the terms of conversation to come.

 

Many amendments, one main goal

Many amendments, one main goal

March 2, 2025

Two years ago, Oregon lawmakers faced several dozen proposed constitutional amendments that reflected a range of frustrations with the state’s governing document.

Even more of that is back in this year’s session.

Lawmakers and committees have introduced 50 proposed constitutional amendments, with about twice as many in the Senate than the House. Any that pass — and the odds are few will — would be referred to the ballot November ballot in 2026 for a final decision.

Some of these proposals are new this session, but others have been tried and failed before. Many would involve a reduction or expansion of one side’s governing leverage.

Some of the proposals are from Democrats, who hold a supermajority in both chambers, giving them the authority to raise taxes without Republican support. But most are from Republicans The new Senate Republican leader, Daniel Bonham of The Dalles, is one of the most prolific amendment sponsors, fielding a dozen.

As in past sessions, one of the most overtly political of topics — redistricting — is proposed for constitutional amendment. Two Senate Joint resolutions, 8 and 21, address legislative reapportionment by proposing a redistricting commission, an idea that has failed in the Legislature before. SJR 14 has another twist: It would increase Senate membership from 30 to 36, with each county electing a senator.

You might expect that Republicans, long in the minority, would look for ways to impede the majority’s ability to act, and you would be right. At least a half-dozen constitutional proposals seek to do just that by changing the rules for passing a measure.

Under current rules, bills pass with a simple majority except revenue raising bills, which require a three-fifths supermajority in favor.

Senate Joint Resolution 7, sponsored by Republican Sens. Bonham and Kim Thatcher of Keizer and Rep. E. Werner Reschke of Malin, would require a two-thirds majority in favor in each chamber to pass bills with an emergency clause to enact them sooner than normal. Now, such bills pass with a simple majority.

SJR 12 would mandate a two-thirds majority to pass bills in even-numbered sessions. SJR 26 would end even-year regular sessions completely.

Another amendment that could have unpredictable effects if passed, SJR 9 by Republican Sen. Fred Girod of Stayton, would “prohibit members of the legislative assembly from voting on legislative measures when faced with a conflict of interest. Permits a vote to occur if the legislative entity is otherwise unable to muster sufficient votes to pass or defeat the measure.”

Three more Republican-backed proposed amendments (SJRs 10, 11 and 23) would constrain legislative budget-writing.

Others with Republican backing would limit the Democratic-controlled executive branch. SJR 18 would limit the time spans of emergency declarations by the governor, and SJR 31 would block a governor or agency from mandating use of a vaccine. Under other SJRs, legislative approval would be needed for some pardons and other actions (19 and 20), or for new or increased fees assessed by agencies (HJR 1).

Approaching the question of control differently, a group of four Democrats  — Sens.  Khanh Pham of Portland and Jeff Golden of Ashland and Reps. David Gomberg of Otis and Nathan Sosa of Hillsboro — propose reducing the quorum needed to conduct business from two-thirds to one-half plus one. Republicans in recent years occasionally have used the high quorum requirement to block legislation.

Still others would affect voters, or ballot status for ballot issues, directly. Three — SJR 30 and HJRs 3 and 11 — would change the rules for petitions for initiatives, raising the bar for petitioners. Another, HJR 5 by Republican Rep. Greg Smith of Heppner, would add a new qualification for running for state office: a maximum age of 72 as of election day. (That would mean that current Republican President Donald Trump would be disqualified from running for Oregon office.)

Apart from the relatively partisan amendments, a number of substantive topics — generally with clear partisan appeal on their own — also have been proposed. Many were framed as “constitutional rights,” including:

  • A right to fish and hunt (SJR 13)
  • An end to the death penalty in Oregon (SJR 16)
  • A parental right to choose a school for their children (SJR 24)
  • A right to carry a concealed firearm (SJR 27)
  • A right to a “clean, safe and healthy environment’ (SJR 28)

Few of all these measures are likely to pass the Legislature and reach the ballot.

Voters, of course, can choose to gather enough signature to get them on the ballot themselves by petition. That could transform some of these ideas into political battles ranging far outside the statehouse.

This column originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

 

Town halls

Town halls

February 28, 2025

Last Sunday afternoon, I attended a town hall meeting. I’ll come back to it, but first you need to hear, if you haven’t already, about another one, the day before that, in Coeur d’Alene.

The event attracting about 450 people was held at Coeur d’Alene High School, organized by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, and featured most of the area’s state legislators, who all are Republicans. Most but not all of the audience was Republican, however; some were Democrats or at least not aligned with the party organization and the elected officials. Some of them shouted out at the speakers, who talked mainly about legislative activities. When one mentioned anti-abortion legislation, someone called out, “Women are dying,” and another said, “Doctors are leaving our state.”.

Teresa Borrenpohl, a Democrat who had run unsuccessfully for the legislature, was in the audience, and among other things called out, “Is this a town hall or a lecture?” She was warned to, basically, shut up, which she didn’t.

What followed was captured on many cell phone recordings, and has gone viral and international. (Another wonderful PR plug for Idaho.)  Sheriff Bob Norris grabbed her sleeve and told her to stand up and leave the room; she refused. He appeared to signal to three men, employees of a private security company (though they were not uniformed) who grabbed her arms, dragged her to the aisle, appeared to bind her wrists and then dragged her across the floor, out of the room. She asked these people who seized her to identify themselves (she said she was concerned she was being kidnapped). They didn’t reply.  She was later charged with offenses which, later still, were dropped.

The blowback has run the other way as well. The sheriff’s office said it would investigate, and the Associated Press reported that city ordinances require security personnel to be clearly marked as such, which these men weren’t. Since then the sheriff and the security service have been looked into.

You might expect that, as a matter of public relations, the Republican organizers might have tried to downplay or maybe deny most of this, but that seems not to have happened. Why? Gregory Graf, an activist from eastern Idaho who has had run-ins in recent years with Republican leaders, suggested this: “When those within their ranks use aggressive tactics, they are rewarded and platformed. Yet if anyone dares mirror even a hint of that behavior—a slip in response to years of torment—they are immediately branded as the aggressor.” Intimidation of opposition, then, is in their playbook.

As for what an actual town hall is:

The day after the Coeur d’Alene ruckus, I attended a town hall in Oregon, hosted by that state’s Senator Jeff Merkley. As a senator he has hosted at least one in every Oregon county every year, more than 500 to date. This one, energized (electrified?) by national events, drew about as many people as in Coeur d’Alene, many times the usual number for the location.

It was typical, though. Merkley spoke for three or four minutes, and the rest was devoted to randomly-chosen questions from the unscreened audience. The event went smoothly. No one was dragged away.

That was a town hall, placing large emphasis on open audience participation, not on passively listening to speeches. The event in Coeur d’Alene was something else. In fact, in Kootenai County there’s now an ongoing dispute over what kind of event it actually was and whether it was even intended to be public.

None  of this should discourage you from attending town halls. They are a fine example of how our system is supposed to work.

If your elected officials won’t encounter you and other voters - whether those voters agree with each other or not - and allow for actual conversation, then you need some new elected officials. I long ago decided that no elected official unwilling to meet me and other constituents face to face, and encourage questioning and comment even if they were critical, ever would get my vote.

I recommend that policy to you.