After six bumpy months, one of the oddest and least productive sessions of Oregon’s State Legislature wrapped up last week. Although few significant bills survived and became laws that will govern your life, the session was rife with nail-biting tension–sort of like a low-scoring, but emotionally charged, World Cup soccer game.
The session began with an agreement between Speaker of the House Mark Simmons (R-Elgin) and the Senate President Gene Derfler (R-Salem) to avoid any contentious bills–a policy that pleased environmentalists who have scrambled during the past several sessions to play defense against a pro-industry legislature. That decision, though, left juicy issues like the death penalty, gay rights, and abortion to be wrestled over in voter initiatives. (Already, Lon Mabon has filed for an anti-abortion initiative.)
In spite of the lack of earth-shaking progress, several bills that will effect your everyday life did evolve into laws this past session. There also was a good deal of fancy footwork, which one disgusted lawmaker described as re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. With as much audacity as a Ritalin-free kindergarten class, Democrats staged a five-day walkout in order to derail Republicans plans for redistricting.
It was perhaps the strangest new trend in law-making: By refusing to provide a quorum, no laws could pass. Earlier in the session, hoping to stop a vote to kill a bill favoring inclusion of birth control in health care plans, Democrats fled from the Senate floor like rats from a ship. Republicans called in State Police and found one Democrat hiding behind an office door; another eluded capture by hiding under his desk.
If one theme emerged from this past session, it was the people’s stern desire for laissez-faire government–getting the government’s hands off our lives. Given the childish maturity level of this year’s lawmakers, perhaps the fewer decisions they made about your life, the better.
DIRTY DIAPERS
A few early threats to abortion rights died quietly, as they were corralled into committees and suffocated under bureaucracy and politicking. Back in January, the mean-spirited Sen. Roger Beyer (R-Molalla) proposed that no state funds could be provided for health providers who perform abortions. Another bill to criminalize partial-birth abortions also stormed out of the blocks. Both bills died quick deaths.
Yet, in spite of this session’s tempered sentiment towards pro-choice, a block of staunch Republicans quashed a bill (SB 608) that would have mandated all health insurance polices cover prescription birth control. Although Democrats–the slim majority–initially persuaded enough moderate Republican senators to pass the bill, as SB 608 edged towards its final ratification, far right senators pulled their party ranks together and demanded–for the love of God and the Grand Old Party–to attach an anti-abortion “informed consent” bill to SB 608. After that sinister move, without Democratic support, SB 608 slowly sunk into oblivion.
But the legislature wasn’t done with fetuses and babies yet: Perhaps the strangest law to emerge from the Oregon legislature is the aptly titled “baby abandonment bill.” As a Dicksonian compromise between right-to-life and the mother’s wish to live her own life, SB 199 anointed hospitals, police bureaus, and fire stations as baby dumping grounds. Under the new law, parents may leave their newborn at one of these “safe zones”–no questions asked, without fear of prosecution. That peculiar law–and those bills that were defeated–has left abortion foes and proponents scratching their collective heads, trying to figure out on what side of the argument the legislature falls.
THEY DID INHALE!
Explaining the straight forward logic behind the legislature’s decision to stymie local efforts to ban smoking in taverns and bowling alleys, Sen. Randy Miller (R-Lake Oswego) said, “If people don’t want to go to smoky places, they won’t.” After the City of Salem and a few other city councils threatened to enact ordinances banning smoking in restaurants, the state legislature stepped in to stop to such clean-air nonsense.
After several contentious House sessions raged over who can smoke and where, a compromise bill emerged–HB 2828. Under the new law, there will be a ban on smoking in public work places statewide. In exchange, the law protects restaurants (seating over 30), bowling alleys, and bars by banning city governments from passing any new no-smoking ordinances.
SCI-FI MEDICAL
If laws truly spring from the minds of senators, then someone in Salem has been reading too many sci-fi novels. From now on, all felons will be required to register their DNA material with the state. Like taking fingerprints to connect known criminals with the scene of the crime, this Orwellian concept steps up surveillance in Oregon. Meanwhile, a bill geared towards cloning humans that would have outlawed medical experiments, died.
LOVE YOUR ANIMALS
With very little comment, several legislators voted against a bill to outlaw bestiality. Even so, the bill realigned Oregon’s existing laws with the sensibility that while we may love all God’s animals we may not love all animals. But, in dealing with the rest of the animal kingdom, the legislature sent mixed messages about how we should treat livestock and pets. A bill to outlaw breeding roosters for cockfighting was smothered but the legislature criminalized elephant abuse and went on to re-affirm elk farming and slaughtering (which had been banned).
DRIVE FREE OR DIE
The esteemed Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe gained a certain intellectual notoriety for posing the question, “Do you own your car any less because you can’t drive faster than 65?” By this, he intoned that government control over our vehicles and property in some way lessens our rights of ownership. By raising the speed limit to 70 mph, the Oregon legislature decided that we can own our cars just a little bit more.
While New York became the first state to outlaw Driving While Celling, Oregon took a step in the opposite direction. Rep. Jim Hill (R-Hillsboro) sponsored a successful bill that trumps any restrictions on cell phone use. Under the law, no cities or towns may pass an ordinance outlawing cell phone use; such a law makes certain that only the legislature may decide if such vehicular activity is dangerous–an opinion that they do not currently hold.
And, in case the keep-your-laws-off-our-cars message wasn’t clear enough, senators dog-piled on top of a bill to tax studded tire use. Remarking that studded tires chew up our highways and residential streets–and cost upwards of $10 million a year in road repairs–Rep. Vicki Walker (D-Eugene) tried to place a minor $20 tax on studded tire use. But senators from Bend and other snowy counties bellyached that the tax would burden their constituents, and they killed the bill.
Finally, in the closing days of the session, the House pushed through a $400 million bond measure to build more roads and expand current highways–the first such financing in more than a decade–proving that if the 2001 state legislature cared about re-claiming anything, it’s the American dream of driving fast on the wide open road.