After a near clean sweep of contested legislative races in November, Democrats are in a strong position to push their agenda in the 2015 five-month legislative session.
That could mean fast action on bills mandating “cleaner” gas in cars and trucks, expanding background checks on gun sales, and automatically registering voters when they get or renew a driver’s license, Capitol observers say.
That’s because a larger majority in the state Senate should enable Democrats to bypass key swing vote Sen. Betsy Johnson, a Scappoose Democrat, who joined with Republicans to narrowly defeat those policies and many others in recent sessions.
“I think we’ll first see all the ‘Betsy Johnson bills’ moving forward, and they could start out flying through,” said Jim Moore, a political science professor at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Ore.
Out-of-state billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg “also put money in several big legislative races, so I think we should expect action” on some environmental and gun control bills, Moore added.
Still, Democrats will be wary of a backlash if they push too much too fast, Moore and Lane Community College political science instructor Steve Candee agree.
“I expect a lot of moderation actually,” Candee said. “Democrats haven’t shown a lot of guts when they’ve had the upper hand before. I don’t see them going out on a limb and making a lot of bold moves.”
A proposal to require employers statewide to provide paid sick leave, for example, may not be a slam-dunk to pass, despite support from party leadership, Moore said.
“Getting everybody lined up on that is going to be tricky,” he said. “It all comes down to the specific details of the policy.”
One of the key battlegrounds next year in state politics is likely to be education funding.
Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber “did an interesting thing” in his proposed 2015-17 budget, Moore said. “He took pretty much the full increase in education funding and put all that money into his targeted education initiatives, while leaving K-12 (public education) funding flat.”
Moore says he expects Democratic lawmakers to push back against that proposal and ultimately provide a bigger boost to K-12 funding next year, while providing money for only some of Kitzhaber’s initiatives.
“The K-12 budget usually wins out,” he said.
Meanwhile, lawmakers must also figure out how they will roll out recreational marijuana in Oregon, after voters chose to legalize it in the November election.
Special legislative committees in both the House and Senate have already been formed to debate several contentious issues. They include whether to give more revenue from marijuana sales to local governments; whether to allow local governments to restrict marijuana sales in their jurisdictions; and whether to merge the recreational marijuana market with Oregon’s medical marijuana system.
“We have the advantage of not being the first state to deal with legal marijuana,” Candee said. “But there’s still lots of issues to resolve. … My sense is that Oregonians tend to be very independent-minded. If local governments have an option to regulate marijuana, many will exercise it.”
Another storyline to watch in 2015 is individual state lawmakers’ taking on bigger roles and higher profiles as a result of a series of campaign scandals that have lessened Kitzhaber’s political standing, Moore said.
Much of the controversy centered around Kitzhaber’s fiancée, Cylvia Hayes, who, among other things, admitted to illegally marrying an Ethiopian immigrant in the late 1990s for money and so that he could stay in the United States to get a college degree.
“Because the governor is relatively weak … there’s a more open playing field for lawmakers,” he said. “I expect several of them to try to stake out a position in a particular policy area and use that as a platform to eventually seek higher office.”
Moore believes that possible candidates for bigger roles include House Speaker Tina Kotek of Portland, House Majority Leader Val Hoyle of Eugene, or even newly elected Sen. Sara Gelser of Corvallis.
