Feuds in capitals stoke discord
Oregon faces political collapse
SALEM, Ore. — For the past month, the Oregon Senate has started its daily proceedings by dispatching a search party.
Unable to summon a quorum to vote on any legislation, the Senate president orders the sergeant-at-arms to track down the day’s missing senators, largely Republicans who are now on the fifth week of a boycott. The sergeant scales the stairwells of the Capitol, knocks on closed doors, questions staff members who coyly claim that their bosses are not present. When she returns empty-handed, the Senate adjourns, leaving hundreds of bills, stored in a growing stack of blue and yellow folders, untouched.
“I am sad to be on the front lines of watching democracy crumble,” said Kate Lieber, the Senate’s Democratic majority leader, after another fruitless day trying to keep Oregon’s government running.
Oregon has long had a pronounced political split, reflecting the natural divisions between its rural farm and timber counties and its liberal cities like Portland and Eugene. But the state historically prided itself on the way its politicians usually seemed to find ground for collaboration.
That political spirit, often referred to as the “Oregon Way,” allowed a Republican governor like Tom McCall to work through the 1960s and 1970s, brokering pioneering environmental and land-use deals with Democratic legislators.
Even up until 2009, Oregon had a Democratic US senator, Ron Wyden, and a Republican one, Gordon Smith, who worked so closely together that they were sometimes called a Washington odd couple. Now both US senators are Democrats, as are all statewide elected officeholders, and there is a Democratic majority in both houses of the state Legislature. A Republican has not won a governor’s race in 40 years.
The Republican boycott that has gridlocked the Senate since May 3 — one in a series of boycotts since 2019 — signals the degree to which bipartisanship has taken a back seat to strategic dysfunction.
The standoff comes amid a particularly tumultuous year in state capitols around the country, with tensions stoked by a wave of abortion legislation — moved in the wake of last year’s decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade — and hotly contested bills on transgender issues, gun control, and voting rights.
The Nebraska Legislature did not pass a single bill in the first two-thirds of its 90-day session after a progressive lawmaker mounted a series of filibusters against all legislation — including some she supported — to protest Republican efforts to pass a ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
That was also an issue in Montana, where Republicans barred a transgender lawmaker from the House chamber after she vociferously objected to a similar bill.
In April, Republicans in Tennessee expelled two Democratic legislators who had joined in protests calling for gun control in the wake of a mass shooting in Nashville. The lawmakers were reinstated after a national uproar.
And in Texas, acrimony between moderate and conservative factions of the Republican Party played out in the bipartisan vote on May 26 to impeach the conservative attorney general, Ken Paxton, with conservative members staunchly backing Paxton.
The discord shows no sign of abating, as red and blue states race in opposite directions on social issues and posture to combat one another’s policies across state lines.