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Posts published in “Day: April 20, 2006”

Jessica and Vicki

April 20, 2006

Emotion spilled all over the floor of the Oregon Senate toward the end of Thursday's brief special session. That will happen when the subject is child sex abuse.

The emotion came in part from Senator Bruce Starr, a Hillsoboro Republican, who had pushed a very similar measure in the 2005 session. "Jessica's Law" - another of those measures named for a victim of a horrific crime - is relatively narrow, and easily gets widespread support. It applies to adults who sexually molest children under 12, and requires both a 25-year sentence and lifetime monitoring, since so many such offenders are compulsive re-offenders.

House Bill 3507 passed the House in 2005 and quickly got the support of most senators, but became snared in the Senate-House cross-battles over legislation, and died at session's end. Hardly anyone felt good about that, and when Governor Ted Kulongoski ordered up a special session, Senate President Peter Courtney pushed through inclusion of Jessica's.

In the meantime, it had become the subject of a major initiative campaign which seemed likely to get it on the ballot and to pass it; Starr was much involved with that as well. And he talked at length Thursday, sometimes in circular fashion. But he sounded a grateful note Thursday - he might have understandably felt undercut at this point - as the proposal approached its final passage (30-0) in the Senate.

Vicki WalkerA rather different note came from another bill supporter, Eugene Democrat Vicki Walker.

Her story was personal. She started out withthe blunt statement, "I was raped when I was five years old," and went on from there through experiences that went on more than a decade. She warned that most child sex abusers are family, neighbors or friends of the family, and cited personal experience to back that up.

You could see the senators squirming as they listened (she acknowledged the discomfort in the room as she was speaking), but the unease came not only from her personal story, harrowing as it was, but also from her legislative point: That crafting legislation which reaches into families, which aims at holding families together while also protecting children, is a tough thing to do. She and other senators are at work on it, she noted, and noted as well that the effort has drawn concern from a range of quarters. And that battle, she suggested, hasn't even properly begun.

"I'm sorry this offended some of your sensibilities," she said near the end. That sounded almost like a warning: If she's re-elected and back in the chamber in January, that offense may continue.

The gang that could get something done

April 20, 2006

The 2005 Oregon legislative session left a lot of Oregonians feeling sour on Salem. It failed to address a string of issues and failed to pass a clutch of ideas that had widespread support. And the governor, Ted Kulongoski, seemed to be painfully detached from the proceedings (a contrast to his Washington counterpart, Christine Gregoire, who brokered several big legislative deals that same year).

Oregon Senate adjourns sine dieOn Thursday, in just under six hours - one of the shortest if not the shortest special sessions on record in Oregon - both legislature and governor may have done a lot to repair their reputations.

Remember: This was no slam dunk. There were plenty of calls for Kulongoski to call the session, but doing it entailed risk. Special sessions have a way of either blowing up or of just behaving poorly. As this one ended, Senate President Peter Courtney reflected on how in his long legislative career he'd been through 16 (of the total 36) special sessions, and didn't think well of most. One, he recalled, lasted 32 days. In general, he said, when he took over the job as president of the Senate, the thing he dreaded most was heading into a special session.

There are reasons for that. As he pointed out, legislators who go to a special are there for a few specific topics mostly not of their making. They have no committee meetings (or few of them) to go to, and little to do. They're being asked to serve almost as rubber stamps. The usual circumstances are not propitious.

The preparation for this one was solid, however, and cooperation seemed to be close to universal. Having called the session, and in a year looking ever more perilous for him politically, Kulongoski involved himself quite directly in this one. Both Courtney and House Speaker Karen Minnis apparently got into it as thoroughly, both with agendas of their own, including the payday loan regulation on Minnis' part and Jessica's law on Courtney's. for the space of one day, everyone seemed to take a deep breath and say, "okay, let's do this." (more…)

A protest and its impacts

April 20, 2006

Protests sometimes change minds in the direction intended; sometimes they backlash. The suddeness, the size and the intensity of the recent wave of immigration protests - structured so as to blur the line between legal and illegal immigrants - is certainly having effect, but much of it seems to be in the form of angry reaction.

Our speculation is that this accounts for much of the sudden jump in the campaign revenues of Idaho 1st District representative candidate Robert Vasquez, a Canyon County commissioner who has made immigration his pre-eminent issue (as it has been, for him, for many years). He is fiercly anti-immigrant, his own family's history notwithstanding, and has spoken of an "invasion," and has described Senator Larry Craig for his support of guest worker-type legislation. A few months ago, Vasquez was getting limited traction. Now, he seems to be building steam.

Over in Idaho Falls, far from Vasquez' 1st district, resident Henry Morton writes today in the Post Register (no free link available), "What we do not need are the illegals who threaten us with economic terrorism if they do not continue to get the right to lie, steal, cheat and fraudulently acquire U.S. citizen benefits while paid-for bagmen like Craig stiff the U.S. citizen with more costs that leave their families with less. This is because the weak, incompetent, maligning politically correct types in Congress think everyone in the world comes before U.S. citizens."

Mind: We're not endorsing that viewpoint; there's more than a kernel of simple-minded "blame the other tribe" in it. But if you're looking for traction, you may find it there, alongside the idea of people like Larry Craig being abruptly thrown into the unholy category of the "politically correct."