Oregon legislative procedures allow lawmakers to fast-track some of the most controversial measures, skipping opportunities for public testimony that other bills receive.
Republicans in the minority in the House and Senate want that practice to end. They sent Democratic leaders a letter last week asking for changes before the Legislature convenes in 2024 to ensure that policy committees in both the House and Senate get a chance to scrutinize every bill that moves through the legislative process.
“Prior leadership has claimed that a solution is simply untenable,” minority leaders Rep. Vikki Breese-Iverson and Sen. Tim Knopp wrote in their letter. “We disagree. Instead, in our view, prior leadership have been unwilling to change the status quo for fear that their hand-picked policy preferences will suffer from additional scrutiny by policy committees and public hearing.”
Most legislation follows a process familiar to anyone who’s taken a government class or watched Schoolhouse Rock. A senator or representative introduces a bill and it’s assigned to a policy committee. If the committee approves of the bill, it goes to the full House or Senate for a vote. Then it goes to the other chamber and the process starts over again.
But if there’s a cost associated with a bill, it goes from a policy committee to the budget-writing Joint Ways and Means Committee. Bills recommended by that committee skip policy committees in the second chamber.
Republicans who oppose the practice are most concerned about two of the more controversial bills awaiting House votes: House Bill 2002, which aims to guarantee access to reproductive and gender-affirming health care, and House Bill 2005, a gun control measure that would raise the minimum age to purchase some firearms and ban untraceable guns.
Both carry monetary impacts – it would cost the state about $6 million to implement HB 2002 and about $350,000 to implement HB 2005. Because of that, both bills went through the Joint Ways and Means Committee and won’t receive hearings in the Senate.
“The Democrats are using this system to make a unicameral legislature out of Oregon,” Senate Republican Leader Knopp told the Capital Chronicle. “And I think it violates the constitution.”
The current system can mean fewer opportunities for Oregonians to have their voices heard on key pieces of legislation.
For instance, the measure on abortion and gender-affirming care received a single five-hour public hearing in front of a House committee, with only two hours open for testimony from Oregonians who weren’t part of panels selected by legislative supporters and opponents. Hundreds of Oregonians submitted written testimony supporting or opposing the measure, and several people who waited for hours to speak during the public hearing didn’t get the chance.
In contrast, representatives and senators on the Joint Committee on Semiconductors held five public hearings on Senate Bill 4, a $210 million boost to the state’s semiconductor industry, between late February and March. Lawmakers also heard hours of public comments at twice-weekly meetings in January and February while crafting the measure.
Bills that don’t have monetary impacts receive at least one public hearing in both the House and the Senate. For instance, a bill passed unanimously by both chambers to allow parking in meter-regulated spaces when the meters are broken had two chances for public testimony, even though no one chose to comment.
Senate President Rob Wagner, D-Lake Oswego, in a meeting with reporters on Wednesday rejected the idea that the abortion and gender-affirming care measure not receive a hearing in a Senate committee limited public comment or the ability of Republican senators to vet the measure.
He noted that the bill resulted from a work group that met over the summer and the concept was presented to the Legislature months ago. People have had plenty of time to weigh in on the proposal, he said.
Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, a Portland Democrat and co-chair of the Joint Ways and Means Committee, led a group in 2021 that considered and never adopted possible changes to the process. She said it wasn’t ideal, but that it also wasn’t anything new.
There are technical issues with changing how bills move through the Legislature, Steiner said – for instance, the legislative bill-tracking website, OLIS, would need to be changed if bills follow a different route.
“There’s no perfect process, and we’re going to continue to work on this because we do think people should have input, but there’s nothing to prevent senators from sitting in on House hearings,” Steiner said. “There’s nothing to prevent people from testifying in House hearings, or House people testifying in Senate hearings. We do it all the time. I’ve had House members testify in front of policy committees I’ve been on. I’ve testified in front of House committees. You can do that, and people engage in it. So I think it’s a little bit of a false flag, to be honest with you.”
A spokesman for House Speaker Dan Rayfield, D-Corvallis, said in an email that he and Breese-Iverson, the House Republican leader, speak regularly and she hasn’t brought the issue up with him directly.
“The outline proposed is a significant structural change to how the Legislature has historically operated and would take significant thought and discussion if the body wishes to move in this direction,” Rayfield spokesman Andrew Rogers said in an email.
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Julia Shumway is deputy editor of Oregon Capital Chronicle and has reported on government and politics in Iowa and Nebraska, spent time at the Bend Bulletin and most recently was a legislative reporter for the Arizona Capitol Times in Phoenix. An award-winning journalist, Julia most recently reported on the tangled efforts to audit the presidential results in Arizona.
