Over at Vox, David Roberts has written an excellent piece on the latest walkout by Oregon state representatives and senators aimed at stopping a climate change bill backed by Democrats. He correctly zeroes in on the larger story here — the minority party’s violation of democratic norms to thwart the will of the majority on behalf of a overwhelmingly white, right-wing base and fossil fuel-devoted corporate interests.
Even though the Democrats have a supermajority in both the House and Senate (and control the governorship), the Oregon state constitution contains a strict quorum requirement that two-thirds of legislators have to be present in either chamber for it to conduct business (in most states, a mere majority is needed). For decades, both parties respected this rule, and refrained from using it to block legislation. Yet, in the space of just the last 10 months, “Oregon Republicans have walked out more times [. . .] than all Democrats have” in all states in modern history, stopping not just climate legislation but measures on gun control and limiting religious exemptions from vaccinations.
Roberts takes apart the arguments the Oregon GOP has made regarding its opposition to the climate bill: that it was “crammed down our throats” (in the words of a logging company owners); that they are merely doing what their voters want them to do; that it’s better addressed through state initiative. As he explains, the cap-and-trade bill under dispute has been literally years in the making, and this latest version represents extreme revisions from previous versions in order to obtain Republican buy-in. He also reminds us that money from business interests belies claims that voter interests are first and foremost in the politicians’ eyes; state senators and representatives “get 65 percent of their donations from corporations, in particular corporations like Koch Industries with assets that stand to be affected by cap-and-trade.”
As I noted, though, for Roberts the bigger story is the Oregon GOP’s reliance on an anti-democratic measure — abuse of the quorum — to thwart majority rule. Critically, he makes clear that what’s happening in Oregon is a microcosm of the larger movement by the GOP nationwide to embrace anti-democratic rule to preserve the power of its declining base of white Americans. There are particular Oregon elements, but the story is a national one:
In national US politics, as in Oregon, it’s increasingly clear that the population is urbanizing and diversifying and there simply aren’t enough rural and suburban white Christians to constitute a majority anymore. If that demographic — which has now become an intense, all-encompassing political identity — is to maintain its traditional hold on power, it can only do so through increasingly anti-democratic means.
[. . .] An overwhelmingly white, rural minority of voters is holding an entire state’s business hostage. Oregon Democrats played by the rules, got more votes, and developed legislation through appropriate channels. Now fewer than a dozen lawmakers, heavily funded by the very industries they are defending, are blocking it, at will, using an anachronistic quirk of the state constitution.
There is no conceivable justification for it, no possible democratic rationale. It only makes sense in the context of white supremacy: the notion that rural white Americans are more authentically American than other groups and deserve outsized representation in its politics and veto power over its legislation.
Roberts identifies what’s happening in Oregon as a microcosm of what’s occurring in the U.S. more generally, yet Oregon’s situation is particularly galling. Over many years, Oregon Democrats have benefited from demographic changes in their state that have made it more liberal, but have also proactively responded to the wishes of this growing Democratic majority. Against a flood tide of corporate money fueling the GOP, they have clawed their way into a supermajority in both houses of the Oregon legislature. They have played by the democratic rules, and won, and won again, through years of hard organizing, occasional defeats, and unforced catastrophic errors (see: disgraced Democratic governor John Kitzhaber, who resigned in connection with his partner’s use of First Lady status for grifting purposes). Having won by playing by the rules, the GOP has changed those rules, in a direction that leads to the end of majority rule, and thus democracy, in Oregon.
Apart from this larger story, what has Roberts (and The Hot Screen) increasingly vexed is the failure of both the great majority of the press and of the Democratic Party itself to accurately describe and call out this new American political reality. Roberts notes the “both sides do it” reporting by various sources, such as an Associated Press story about the walkout. Even more discouragingly, he recounts how Oregon Democratic elected officials have time and again retreated in the face of the GOP’s legislative hostage-taking. His description of Senate President Peter Courtney repeatedly, literally begging the Republicans to return to the capitol is especially upsetting, signaling weakness in the face of a cowardly abdication of duty by the GOP. Why will the GOP stop the walkouts if they keep working? Answer: they won’t.
From a certain perspective, it’s laudable that Oregon Democrats still seek compromise on an environmental bill with a party that denies the existence of human-caused climate change: but it should be obvious at this point that Oregon Republicans will never pass a bill that offends their corporate overlords, not when they can keep demagoguing about how it will cripple rural economies and bankrupt Oregonians every time they fill up a tank of gas. This is not the politics that most Democratic elected officials are familiar with, but they need to get up to speed with the new reality quickly. The GOP is no longer a party that can be reasoned with, but only defeated and discredited. Otherwise, minority rule will become entrenched in our state as the new (undemocratic) normal.
This means that the only way forward is to make the GOP pay an electoral price for its contempt for democracy. Fortunately, Oregon Democrats have good options for enforcing this cost on their opponents. With the GOP’s latest display of contempt for Oregon voters, Democrats have fresh ammunition in campaigns to flip a few more seats from red to blue to end the GOP’s abuse of the quorum rule. There are also initiatives being pursued that would reform the state constitution so that the two-thirds rule no longer applies. If the GOP refuses to abide by democratic norms not written into law, then it is high time to write those norms into law.
But reforms that deny the GOP the ability to stymy majority rule are only part of a necessary strategy. Democrats need to get much more aggressive in publicly identifying the transformation of the GOP into a white nationalist party that see its survival rooted in riling up its dwindling base against the diverse American majority. Not forcing the GOP to account for its de facto white nationalism in states like Oregon is at this point foolish. My guess that Democratic leaders both in Oregon and nationally fear that they will be accused of calling their opponents racist — but this can be overcome by a smart, calculated strategy that pairs this accurate description of reality with an acknowledgment of the cultural resentments, anxiety about demographic change, and reality-based economic fears that underlie this growing white tribalism. To acknowledge accelerants to white nationalism does not mean excusing it, but rather is a way to begin to undo its irrational power, to expose it as grounded in weakness, not strength, and to no longer allow its unacknowledged appeal to frame the terms of our political debates.
In Oregon, this also means redoubling efforts to aid rural counties that have been left behind by the post-recession growth that has fueled increasing wealth in urban areas like Portland. A readiness to call out the Republican Party’s swing to white identity politics needs to be paired with outreach to GOP voters betrayed by their current representatives, who would have them believe that rural Oregonians will somehow thrive if climate change decimates the state’s vast natural resources, or that there is no future beyond industries like forestry and agriculture that have long dominated in large parts of Oregon, or that they will somehow benefit by pretending that those who live in cities and don’t look like them aren’t real Oregonians.