Democrats deliver, while the House GOP throws a temper tantrum

Kari Chisholm

Late last night, we posted a news item about the House Republicans playing political games with some of their education "reform" legislation - including the ridiculous 65% distraction.

Nevermind that the best reform of all has already passed under Democratic leadership - a big 18% boost in K-12 budgets, and a big 22% boost for the higher-ed budgets. (Which, because of the years of GOP disinvestment, are only the beginning of the road for rebuilding our schools in Oregon.)

If you haven't read about yesterday's shenanigans, do that first. I won't recap here. There's some good chatter there on the policy, but let's talk about the politics.

Given that they knew they'd fail on the votes, what are the House Republicans really up to?

Two things:

First, they're setting up attack mailers - perhaps now, perhaps during the election season. We've already seen them engage in a series of unprecedented during-the-session attack ads -- which serve only to undermine any attempt at bipartisan trust and comity.

Second, they're starting their campaign to blow the end-of-session deadline. In an historic move, the Democrats - led by Jeff Merkley and Peter Courtney - committed to end the session on time, on June 29. After all, when the Republicans were in charge they proved that they couldn't end a session anywhere remotely close to on time (and they still needed bunches of special sessions).

As a result, the Republicans would love nothing more than to bollix up the last ten days and force the Democrats to extend things into the following holiday week.

This parliamentary silliness is only the beginning of their collective temper tantrum.

When the nights get long, and the legislative work pushes through the weekend, and maybe even if they extend the session by a day or two... make no mistake: it's the House GOP that's throwing monkey wrenches into the process.

Crybabies.

By Kari Chisholm June 20, 2007