Since Wednesday, a majority of Republicans in the Oregon Senate have been ditching work—to prevent a quorum and bring all legislative action to a halt. The walkout is intended to block votes on progressive legislation related to abortion, gun control, and transgender health care, and the Oregon GOP is using a little-noticed 44-year-old law to justify its actions. Their complaint, in short? The bills those ivory tower Democrats have been writing read too much like The Economist and not enough like Kevin Sorbo’s tweets.
State Senate Republicans have seized upon the 1979 law, which requires all bill summaries to be written at an eighth or ninth grade level, to insist that new legislation focused on the above-mentioned liberal priorities isn’t eligible for consideration. How do they determine that? Easy. They send the bills to Donald Trump, and if he eats only the pages with pie charts on them, it means he had no interest in the rest of the bill—ergo, too hard for a middle schooler to read.
I’m joking, of course. They use something called the Flesch readability test, which was developed in the 1940s to determine the readability of documents.
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Associated Press:
Democrats say Republicans didn’t take issue with the writing style of bipartisan bills they backed earlier in the session until hot button issues were on the table. The fate of the contested bills is now unclear; under a new voter-approved law, Oregon legislators who have 10 unexcused absences are banned from re-election.
“This is about abortion, guns and transgender rights,” said Senate Majority Leader Kate Lieber. “The timing of this is such that they’re walking out on important legislation that Oregonians sent us here to do.”
While this is a real law, and not an ad hoc nonsense rule made up on the spot to, say, prevent the seating of a Federalist Society-unfriendly SCOTUS justice, it is curious that it went unmentioned for decades—until representatives in deep-blue Oregon wanted to advance legislation that reflected the values of the majority of their constituents. It’s almost as if Republicans have noted the backlash against new abortion restrictions, as well as the erosion of their base relative to the rest of the population, and have decided their built-in electoral advantages aren’t enough. They need to resort to silly tricks to impose their will on the rest of us.
Meanwhile, the Republicans in Oregon are pretending they’re acting out of principle, and not simply engaging in petty obstruction in order to block bills they don’t like—like when they walked out in 2019 and 2021, to block school funding and a carbon tax, respectively. Ahead of the walkout, the Oregon Capital Chronicle reports, the state Senate GOP also tried other stalling tactics before embracing a law that was written eons ago—back when some elected Republicans still read at a 10th or even an 11th grade level.
The move marks an escalation of Republican protests. Senate Republicans attempted to remove Wagner as Senate president on Tuesday and have insisted on reading bills in full, a slowdown tactic that has led to late nights.
According to Senate Minority Leader Tim Knopp, a Republican analyst unearthed the readability law last month, but when asked by the AP about past enforcement of the legislation, Knopp “couldn’t say when the law has previously been followed, if ever.”
When asked whether this was simply about preventing the passage of progressive laws related to gender-affirming care, abortion, and gun control, he said, “It’s about every bill. But those bills specifically also don’t qualify under this law, and they refuse to fix them.”
Of course, it’s no surprise that Republicans felt compelled to reach into the (somewhat) distant past to justify their obstruction. It’s what they do, after all.
On a national level, they’ve continued to lean on the filibuster, a Jim Crow-era relic, to block key voting rights legislation and other popular legislation. And Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in the Dobbs decision ending many Americans’ reproductive rights infamously cited an obscure 17th century Englishman who presided over at least one witchcraft trial and believed there was no such thing as marital rape.
The Flesch readability test scores documents on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 being the easiest to read and 1 the hardest. According to the AP, the readability score of the gun control bill that had been poised for a Senate floor vote prior to the GOP walkout is 24, while the bill modifying protections for reproductive health rights relating to gender-affirming treatment received a score of 14.2. However, those scores aren’t markedly different from those of bills that were recently passed on a bipartisan basis.
In other words, the GOP, which represents a clear minority of voters, is throwing a monkey wrench into the works in clear opposition to the needs and wishes of the majority—because it can.
Sound familiar? Yeah, it should.
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Meanwhile, thanks to Oregon Republicans’ frequent walkouts—this is their fifth since 2019—and the wisdom of Oregon voters, this collective tantrum may just have an expiration date. Because legislators can now have only 10 unexcused absences before they’re barred from reelection, they may have to abandon their undemocratic protest sooner rather than later. “Republican lawmakers have until May 12 before those with 10 unexcused absences will be banned from re-election under the new law passed by 70% of Oregon voters last year,” wrote the AP.
Senate President Bob Wagner seems happy to accelerate that timeline, Portland’s KATU notes, as he’s scheduled weekend sessions. Knopp whined about it, of course. “He is retaliating against us by having Saturday and Sunday sessions, and it has been years since we have had a Saturday or a Sunday session, even during the end of the legislature--let alone in early May," he said.
It’s “been years,” huh? But has it been four decades?
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