The Oregon governor’s race is off to a fast start with all three candidates launching a flurry of television spots well ahead of the election. Spending on the race will almost certainly break 2018’s record $37 million.
Unlike 45 other states, Oregon still has no limits on campaign contributions despite 78 percent voter approval of a 2020 constitutional amendment clearing the path for reform.
How could the legislature have failed to act by now?
Lawmakers struggled during the 2021 session to come up with a bill that would limit contributions. They met privately with business interests, public and private unions, and good government groups to find common ground. The discussions were doomed from the start.
With public employee unions at the table, there could be no compromise. They have a long history of getting their way, and legislators fear their punishment, such as this furious reaction (directed at Democrats no less), the last time they dared to touch PERS.
Predictably, the meetings went nowhere.
All three current gubernatorial candidates were in the legislature at the time, and all of them stood on the sidelines and watched as the discussions failed. Why get in the way of failure when your political career depends on it?
Of course, nothing prevented lawmakers from coming up with a bill anyway. But in the alternate universe of the Democratic super-majority, there was another option: choose unions over 78 percent of the voters. The issue was dropped and was not addressed at all in the next session. The Democrats calculated public reaction correctly. Oregon citizens were largely silent.
But the story doesn’t end there.
When the legislature failed to act in 2021, unions filed three ballot measures designed to protect their ability to continue making large campaign contributions, while limiting contributions from others.
The League of Women Voters and the organization Honest Elections filed their own set of measures that placed significant limits on contributions and mandated strong donor disclosure requirements.
What happened next tells us everything we need to know about how undue influence by special interests can warp the political process.
Suddenly applying a rule that had not been enforced in years, Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, who received $3 million from public employee unions in her 2020 campaign, disqualified the measures filed by the good government groups on the grounds that the measures did not include the full text the law being changed. But she did so only after waiting nearly two months after the measures were filed, making it nearly impossible for supporters to correct and refile them in time to gather signatures.
After special interests piled on to block an expedited court review, the disqualified measures were effectively dead, killed by the tag-team of special interests and an elected official that got into office with huge union help.
The three measures filed by unions were left untouched by Fagan, leaving us wondering how the unions just happened to submit their measures in compliance with the newly enforced rule. Serendipity or something else?
The unions then promptly ceased work on their measures. Why bother? They got everything they needed with Fagan’s disqualification of competing measures.
This deplorable chain of events has put Oregon politicians’ addiction to money and the dysfunction it has created on display for everyone to see. We now know the chance of the legislature ever enacting reform is near zero. Why? Politicians suffered no consequences when they chose to keep the money flowing over a 78 percent voter mandate demanding reform.
The Honest Elections group has already filed its campaign finance reform ballot measures for the 2024 ballot, including one which would require a three quarters majority for the legislature to change previously enacted reform. Of course, special interests will undoubtedly file competing measures designed to protect their ability to continue with very large political contributions while limiting others. And they will spend huge sums to promote them, something Honest Elections may not be able to do.
How all this plays out remains to be seen. If the special interests get their measures passed, we will have a worse system than we have today. A few special interests would be in complete charge of Oregon politics, having shut off the flow of money from everyone except them.
It’s a mess, really, all due to the dysfunctional, money-driven legislature to whom voters do not matter.
[…] Previous […]