In a year of Capitol feuds, Oregon is in political meltdown

Last month, the Oregon Senate began its day-to-day business by sending a search warrant.

Unable to muster a quorum to vote on legislation, the Senate President directs the sergeant-at-arms to track down the day’s missing senators, largely Republicans now in the fifth week of a boycott. The sergeant climbs the Capitol stairwells, knocks on locked doors, questions employees who timidly claim their bosses are not there. When she returns empty-handed, the senate adjourns, leaving hundreds of bills stored in a growing pile of blue and yellow folders untouched.

“I’m sorry to be on the front lines of watching democracy crumble,” Kate Lieber, the Senate Democratic Majority Leader, said after another fruitless day trying to keep the Oregon government afloat.

Oregon has long had a marked political division, reflecting the natural division between the rural farming and timber counties and the liberal cities like Portland and Eugene. But the state historically prided itself on the way its politicians usually seemed to find ground for cooperation.

That political spirit, often referred to as the “Oregon Way,” enabled a Republican governor like Tom McCall to work through the 1960s and 1970s, striking groundbreaking environmental and land-use deals with Democratic legislators.

Even as late as 2009, Oregon had a Democratic U.S. Senator, Ron Wyden, and a Republican, Gordon Smith, who worked so closely together they were sometimes referred to as a strange Washington couple. Now both U.S. Senators are Democrats, as are all elected office holders statewide, and there is a Democratic majority in both houses of the state legislature. A Republican hasn’t won a gubernatorial race in 40 years.

The Republican boycott that has deadlocked the Senate since May 3 — one in a string of boycotts since 2019 — indicates the extent to which the two-party system has been pushed into the background by strategic dysfunction.

The standoff comes amid a particularly tumultuous year in state capitals across the country, with tensions fueled by a wave of abortion laws — in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. — and hotly contested bills on transgender issues, gun control, and voting rights.

The Nebraska legislature failed to pass a single bill in its first two-thirds of its 90-day session after a progressive legislator mounted a series of filibusters against all legislation — including some it supported — to protest Republican efforts to pass a confirm the ban on gender care for minors.

That was also an issue in Montana, where Republicans expelled a transgender legislator from the House of Representatives Chamber after she vociferously objected to a similar bill.

In April, Republicans in Tennessee evicted two Democratic lawmakers who had taken part 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, the acrimony between moderate and conservative factions of the Republican Party played out during the May 26 bipartisan vote to impeach conservative Attorney General Ken Paxton, with conservative members supporting Mr. Paxton resolutely supported.

The disagreement shows no signs of abating as red and blue states race in opposite directions on social issues and attitudes to fight each other’s policies across state lines. While Idaho lawmakers have taken steps to make it illegal to bring minors to another state for an abortion without parental consent, Oregon has taken steps to increase access to such care for out-of-state patients .

Republicans in Oregon’s capital have vowed to derail nearly all legislation unless Democrats agree to a new direction, though they haven’t spelled out exactly what direction that might be. They have singled out legislation on abortion and transgender issues, as well as targeted bills on drug policy and guns. Ten senators are continuing their strike despite a new voter-approved law banning lawmakers with 10 or more absences from being reelected, and Democrats now want to fine lawmakers for every day they miss. So far, neither threat has worked.

“Senate Republicans will not be bullied,” said the chamber’s minority leader, Senator Tim Knopp.

The collapse comes at a time when the state is facing crises on several fronts. The number of overdose deaths has almost doubled in recent years. Wildfires have made devastating incursions through the Cascades. Drought has put pressure on water systems. Portland has seen a record number of homicides. Mass homelessness has spread across the state.

Legislation that could address some of those issues has remained dormant, while lawmakers have waged a bloody battle over a bill that would change state law to improve access to abortion services, protect abortion providers from liability, and increase Medicaid coverage for medical care for transgender people.

Senator Daniel Bonham, a Republican, said he was particularly concerned that the measure would allow minors to have an abortion without parental consent, and confirm that teens as young as 15 can seek gender-affirming care themselves.

“Taking this position was a moral obligation for me,” Mr Bonham said. He said that when he left the senate chamber, he purposely left a bible on his desk, open to a passage where Jesus says that anyone who trips a child may have to be drowned with a millstone around his or her neck.

That such crippling divisions have left the Senate deadlocked is a disturbing turn of events for those who have long watched Oregon politics. The bipartisan partnership of the past led to groundbreaking legislation that declared Oregon’s beaches to be owned by the people, not private developers, as well as the nation’s first bottle bill that sought to solve a growing litter problem by giving people a penny for returning empties.

Priscilla Southwell, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Oregon, said the culture of finding common ground stretched from the state’s congressional delegation to communities and family dinners.

The shift in the political winds has been going on for years. There were battles over the timber industry in the 1980s and over taxes in the 1990s. In more recent years, the steady increase in the number of Democrats encouraged them to pursue more progressive agendas, even as Republicans began to dig in and prepare for conflict.

“That ‘Oregon Way’ has really almost disappeared from the scene,” Ms. Southwell said. “The current situation is just toxic.”

While both Democrats and Republicans have participated in brief legislative boycotts in recent decades, Republicans have stepped up the tactics; the latest boycott has lasted weeks longer than any previous one. Some conservatives have started a movement, with ballots approved in a range of counties, to examine Oregon secession and Idaho accession.

All but two Republican senators now face the prospect of being evicted at the end of their terms under the new law, though some party leaders have proposed legal challenges to the rule.

The boycotting Republicans, along with a former Republican who is now an independent, have continued to attend committee meetings, but have made it clear that, subject to Democratic concessions, they will not return to the Senate chamber until the end of the session to see what they see as critical bills on homelessness, affordable housing and the state budget — a proposal Democrats have called unworkable.

Senator Lynn P. Findley, one of those boycotting, said he had seen a steady escalation of polarization as lawmakers at the center were challenged by more extreme factions. He recalled his own decision two years ago to stay and vote against a Democratic-backed gun control bill, even as some Republicans refused to attend the vote and nearly denied Democrats a quorum.

The bill was passed and Mr Findley was the target of a recall by hardline members of his party, who claimed he should have joined the strike. That recall attempt failed, but it added to Mr Findley’s concern that there is a smaller number of lawmakers willing to debate and compromise.

“We can’t all run out the door if we don’t agree with the views,” he said. Mr Findley said he joined this year’s boycott because of a different concern: his long-standing belief that legislative material is written in a way that ordinary people cannot understand, in violation of a law that requires them to state in clear terms are written.

The Democrats are now looking at what tools they have to push back the Republicans. After a previous strike by Republicans in 2019, then-Governor Kate Brown unsuccessfully tried to get state troopers to round up lawmakers and force their return. The current governor, Tina Kotek, has made no such attempt.

The latest tactic, proposed by Democratic lawmakers, is a $325-a-day fine imposed on absentees, equal to their daily wages. It’s not clear if it’s a stick powerful enough to get results.

“Losing your legislative career seemed like a pretty big stick to me,” Ms. Lieber said. “That was a stick that didn’t work. So I don’t know if we have a bigger stick to force them.