The MitchMessage
May 13, 2007
My next two town hall
meetings will be 7pm, May 22 at the Cedar Mill Community Library
(NW. Salzmann and Cornell Rd.) and 7pm, May 29 at the NW Library
(NW. 23rd and Thurman).
Obviously I produce the
MitchMessage to inform my constituents about the activities of
the Oregon Legislature and, of course, to brag about my
accomplishments. But there is another purpose for
the message and that is to serve as my own diary of my reactions to
what is happening in Salem. When I joined the
legislature in January of 2003 I thought I might want to write a
book about my experiences in the House. And as an
academic at heart I still haven’t given up that idea.
But it is not in my nature to keep a daily log.
Consequently, the MitchMessage is my
compromise. The reason I mention this is to
explain why I sometimes get off into flights of speculation about
the legislative process.
One of the readers asked me
to comment in this edition about the Oregonian article discussing
the strained relationship between Majority Leader Dave Hunt and
Minority Leader Wayne Scott. That led me
to consider the larger question of the relationship between the
majority and the minority caucuses, which of course is, to a great
extent, the framework within which the two leaders
operate. Several random thoughts come immediately
to mind. The first thought is that spending 16
years in the majority is lousy training for being in the
minority. It is much easier to transition from
the minority to the majority. It feels to me that
much of the behavior of the minority caucus during the first three
months of the session was triggered by the anger and frustration of
losing four seats (and the majority) during the 2006
election. It was clearly not something that they
expected. They seemed to discount the great
candidates we fielded and the nearly flawless campaigns they ran,
and blamed their disaster on national politics and on specific
campaign mistakes they attributed to their leadership.
Another random thought that came to
mind is that the creation of legislation is influenced by both
policy and political factors. While that is
obvious, it is easy to only consider how to achieve good policy and
to forget what an important role politics plays.
Or to think everything is politics. In
truth, the members of the current Democratic and Republican Caucuses
have very different policy positions on a number if key issues,
including the most important one, the role of state
government. On balance Republicans feel the
smaller the role state government plays the better.
On balance, Democrats feel that we must decide what needs to
be done by government and then we need to figure out how to get the
resources to do those tasks as efficiently as possible.
This becomes operational in discussing things that seem to
require new taxes, such as the Health Kids Program, which clearly
needs a new source of revenue. The Republican
position is stated as if it can’t be funded within the current
budget it shouldn’t be done.
On the political side, it is true
that both caucuses can’t help but keep one eye on the effect of
legislative activity on the next election. For
most of us, we begin thinking about the next
election the morning after the last election.
Socialization and House rules keeps a lot of that under
control. But for example it doesn’t stop the
Republicans from hiring a photographer to roam the gallery of the
House chamber looking for opportunities to get unflattering pictures
of our members. And it doesn’t stop the
Republicans from hiring robo-calls against five of our members the
morning after they took certain votes. Nasty
campaign mail immediately also followed against these same
legislators.
Finally, in the case of Hunt and
Scott you have to look to personality differences.
Wayne Scott is an extremely successful entrepreneur and is
the owner of several very successful businesses.
He is a straight A to B guy. He once told
me how frustrated he was with the legislature. He
said in his usual life three or four guys get together in a room,
decide what needs to be done, and then go off and do it.
Nothing like that happens in the legislature.
Dave Hunt on the other hand is very comfortable working
within collaborative relationships. He is a
transportation policy specialist, a Sunday school teacher and past
president of the American Baptist Convention.
They don’t always speak the same language.
I did, however, come upon Hunt sitting at Scott’s
desk on the floor this week, with both chatting
and smiling. I remarked to them I would have
liked to see that picture in the Oregonian.
In the meantime, it was a busy week
in the Salem version of Lake Woobegone.
We passed HB3540 and HB3546, the bills aimed at
correcting some of the problems of Measure 37.
HB3540 refers, for voter approval, changes to the
implementation of Measure 37. It focuses on
facilitating claims for building up to three houses on a tract of
land and ultimately limits most development claims under Measure 37
to ten houses. HB 3546 extends by one year the
period for government entities to review and act upon claims
submitted under Measure 37. Oregonians in Action
is not crazy about the bills and they passed pretty much on a party
line vote.
We passed a long overdue
bill (HB2372B) that requires employers of 25 or more employees to
provide unpaid rest periods and a private location to allow
lactating mothers to express breast milk at
work. This was an issue that couldn’t
even be brought to the floor under Republican
leadership. I always felt it wasn’t so much the
opposition of Associated Oregon Industries that stopped the bill,
but was rather the reluctance of Republican men to talk about
breasts in public. An irony of the AOI opposition
to the bill was that AOI have made accommodations for the female
lobbyist arguing against the bill to breast feed when she came back
to work after delivering a child. The bill passed
overwhelmingly and would have passed overwhelmingly had it come to
the floor in previous sessions.
We also finally passed
SB400, a bill I’ve discussed before.
SB400 allows public safety officers to include safety issues
under their collective bargaining process. The
first time the bill came up the Republican caucus refused to allow
it to be heard out of order, requiring 300 firemen to wait three
hours before the bill was sent back to committee after an hour of
debate. The committee made modest changes in the
bill that made it acceptable to a huge majority of House members and
it passed quietly and easily at this reading.
The autism epidemic received
recognition this week as well. Families with
autistic kids had a bill introduced by Rep. Peter
Buckley. The bill, HB2918, passed this week after
several hearings and much discussion.
It, among other things, requires the Health Resources
Commission to review evidence on the medical and behavioral
treatment of autism and to report on the state of the
art. In addition, in response to the hearings,
Dr. Bruce Goldberg, the director of the Department of Human
Services, and Susan Castillo, the state superintendent of education,
announced that they will form a joint task force to study the
problems of dealing with autism in Oregon and make recommendations
on how to deal with it. It was enlightening to
find the large number of House members with autism in their
family.
Several of my bills continue
to move along the process, thanks largely to my legislative director
Tom Powers. He keeps directing me to
Senate hearings about my bills, which mostly take place when I’m
supposed to be somewhere else. We passed two of
them (HB3267 and HB2733) without opposition out of
the House during the last two weeks. HB3267,
which was suggested by my friend Tony Biglan at the Oregon Research
Institute, creates a task force on Coordination of Behavioral
Science Research in Oregon. It is intended to
facilitate the ability of social and behavioral scientists in Oregon
to help the state, including our agencies, do its work better.
HB2733 is a
reaction to a couple of instances where health care facilities had
serious breaches in their data security systems.
It requires health care facilities to report on the state of
their data security systems each year and further requires that the
CEO of the facility (or health system) personally sign the
report. That signature signifies the CEO is
personally responsible for reviewing their data security systems and
also certifies that they have reported any problems with their
security systems to their board of directors.
Some of you have asked for
an updated health report, which I’m happy to
supply. Other than the fact that I’ve
been struggling with bronchitis since March, including about five
rounds of antibiotics, I’m doing very well. My
knees continue to improve and I’ve now gone through all stages of
transportation assists – wheelchair, walker, and cane and I’m
walking unaided. I’ve learned the corollary to
being there is 90% of the battle. It’s you need
to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Finally, recent tests continue to prove that my lymphoma is
in complete remission.
Keep the e-mail coming, my friends.
Mitch