Making 2005-07 the "Minnis Session"

Jeff Bull

The return from the 4th of July weekend brought plenty of talk of the Oregon Legislature with it, including some speculation as to how deep in the record books this current session will go by way of duration. Despite a healthy backlog of bills loitering around House committees – most of those named here having more to do with the rules under which we live than the "business" of government – it's mainly the stalled budget that keeps adjournment at bay.

With the handy number of $50 million – the dollar figure for education funding that separated the GOP from the Democrats - often described as the key obstacle, one has to wonder what might have been had House Speaker Karen Minnis (R – Wood Village) not pulled the House out of the Joint Ways and Means Committee. This seems doubly true in a political world in which partisan gridlock and animosity amount to standard operating procedure. But how does the Ways and Means Committee normally keeps things moving? Mainly by keeping folks talking – indeed compelling them to talk by making them sick at the sight of one another. Stray lines from a pair of articles provide enough to bring home the point.

Here's an excerpt from an Oregonian report on the now-passed "crunch time" in the 2005-07 legislative session:

"…the breakup of the Joint Ways and Means Committee a month ago makes budget writing both more difficult and time-consuming."

"Senators and representatives, when they're not sitting next to one another everyday in Ways and Means subcommittees, aren't talking and striking budget deals. That leads to confusion."

The other (and better) comes from a column by Dana Haynes written around in the same time in the Salem Statesman-Journal:

"Part of the problem is that the Legislature has done away with the traditional, bipartisan budget-writing process, which is called Ways and Means. That's where both chambers, both parties, sit around a common table to dicker and deal. To hammer out a budget."

"Instead, what we have is the House crafting its own budgets and the Senate crafting its own, then sending the budgets to each other. Where they'll get unwritten, unraveled and unimaginably messed up. At which point, they'll go back to their originating chambers to be recrafted and re-recrafted."

As mentioned earlier, Karen Minnis owns the decision for formally ending Ways and Means for the current session. Of course, she'd point to the role of some creature very much like "Democratic obstructionism" as the cause of the breakdown (I believe she once said, "there was no process" or something very much like that). But the fact remains that she ultimately made the decision to withdraw the House from the process, choosing instead to draw a line across the capitol – in a manner reminiscent of the Brady Bunch kids drawing a line through the middle of their shared bathroom – and have each house, each controlled as they are by the opposite party, make separate and equally useless budget bills that, yes, still must be reconciled before a budget becomes operative.

So, pulling out of Ways and Means counts as bad idea, right?

With that in mind, I open the floor to proposals/slogans as to how to tie Karen Minnis' name directly to this long, potentially frustrating, 2005-07 legislative session.

By Jeff Bull July 05, 2005