Over the last two weeks, my Facebook newsfeed has been filled with condemnation of the Oregon Senate Republicans. They staged a walkout that made national news, absconding to Idaho so that even the state police couldn’t force them back to work. You can read about it all elsewhere, for instance here.
The gist is that they left to prevent a quorum, so that no votes could be held and the majority Democrats couldn’t pass a cap-and-trade bill. As the end of the legislative session neared, Dems finally capitulated, agreeing not to vote on cap-and-trade. Republicans returned to work at the last minute, allowing the Dems to quickly pass a raft of other progressive bills.
The whole process incensed my liberal friends here in Oregon. Facebook was full of rancor: Republicans were refusing to “do their job;” they were being undemocratic and unprofessional. The GOP Senators were portrayed as whiners and crybabies, and as beholden to corporate interests.
When you’re in the minority, the narrative goes, the voters have spoken. You owe it to them to still show up, so the legislation they want can be passed.
But I didn’t share my friends’ ire. I read all their posts with a touch of bemusement. As a liberal, I do share their heartbreak that cap-and-trade won’t happen this year—its aim is to curb climate change, and I’m distraught by Republicans’ utter lack of interest in literally trying to save the human race from annihilation!
However, my friends’ posts weren’t mainly focused on climate change. They centered on the injustice of the walkout itself. And as a veteran of Wisconsin’s 2011 protests, I cannot get on that bandwagon.
Back in 2011, I and my liberal friends from Wisconsin were cheering on our Senate Democrats for staging their own walkout.
That year, Republicans held all three branches of Wisconsin’s government, just as Democrats hold all three of Oregon’s now. The Wisconsin GOP was ramming through a lot of conservative legislation, including an anti-union bill that provoked massive protests at the state capitol.
To prevent the legislation from passing, Senate Dems fled the state. This earned condemnation from conservatives that now sounds comically familiar to me: “Get back to work!” and “Do your job!”
Republican leaders also accused them of kowtowing to union bosses—because just as Big Business is demonized by liberals, Big Union is demonized by conservatives.
To all of us who were protesting the anti-union legislation, our Democratic Senators were our heroes. Their walkout felt gleeful, an exciting act of civil disobedience we could rally behind. T-shirts were made thanking the “Wisconsin 14.” Friends of mine wore the shirts proudly.
With these memories in mind, as I witnessed the Oregon GOP walkout, I knew the issue of walkouts was more complex than it appeared to many liberal Oregonians.
I looked up the history of such walkouts; it turns out they go way back. Abe Lincoln himself participated in one as an Illinois state senator, famously jumping out of a first-story window to escape the state capitol and prevent a quorum.
While this is far from an ideal way to govern, it actually does have a place in the traditions of our country.
It’s fair to be disgusted when legislators stop doing their jobs in order to get their way. But I’d like everyone to step back and reconsider where that disgust should be aimed.
It’s not right to aim it solely at the minority party for walking out. It’s not honest to claim that their walkout is unvirtuous unless you’re equally prepared to condemn your own party for doing the same thing when the tables turn. I have a feeling there are very few who would do that.
Very few of us would feel truly angry at both the 2019 Oregon GOP and the 2011 Wisconsin Dems.
I suspect that’s because most of the anger isn’t actually about the walkout, but is partisan anger in unconscious disguise. When we feel upset at the other side’s policies, it’s easy to demonize their methods.
Liberals scoffed at the majority GOP for ramming through legislation in Wisconsin, claiming it was “undemocratic” to push such legislation through without input from the minority Dems. And we scoffed at the Oregon GOP for walking out, claiming that that was undemocratic, too. But, conveniently, it was GOP methods that seemed to be in the wrong both times.
And on the flip side, conservatives were making the same arguments in reverse.
Beneath it all, what we all really cared about was the other party’s values and legislation, not their tactics.
My liberal readers may protest that there’s a difference between the two walkouts. The 2011 Wisconsin walkout represented the true will of the people, whereas the 2019 GOP walkout represented Big Oil and its efforts to stall progress on climate change.
Unions and corporations aren’t the same, after all. One, by definition, represents the interests of working people. The other, by definition, cares only about profit.
But I urge such readers to put that argument aside for a moment. However true it may be, it’s an oversimplification. Oregon Republicans are not only in power because of Big Business. They were voted in by real people, and those people feel their interests are being represented by their party.
While corporate money in politics is a big problem, especially in Oregon, it’s not the only cause of our political discord.
Here’s where I’d like us to aim a lot of our disgust instead: at our dysfunctional political climate.
This focus is emotionally harder. In acknowledging our dysfunction, we have to consider that we ourselves might have a role in the problem. Dysfunction is almost never the fault of just one party in a conflict. The discord becomes all of our fault, at least to some extent, and all of our responsibility to fix.
It’s easy to get angry at the other side, or to write off their policies as the product of murky, big-money interests. It’s much more challenging—but also more honest—to step back and recognize that we, too, might be part of the problem.
As I see it, walkouts often occur when the majority party fails to work well with the minority party. Sometimes this happens because one party is utterly in the wrong—there are instances when drawing a line and refusing to work together is warranted. But on most issues, there should be room for compromise.
Liberal readers may argue that climate change is an existential threat and thus a time to draw a line. I might agree—except that refusing to support this specific piece of cap-and-trade legislation, which really might hurt rural communities, isn’t the same as denying climate change.
I’m admittedly not an insider and not privy to the background on this bill. But I’m at least willing to entertain the possibility that the Oregon Republicans’ objection was sincere, and that the Democrats might have prevented this walkout by working more closely with them.
Given our political climate, that doesn’t seem farfetched.
Both parties have obviously been guilty of such failure in different states at different times. When we hold power, we all seem to feel we’d better ram through legislation as quickly as possible, because our political divides are so great that power feels like a fleeting opportunity in a constant ball game with incredibly high stakes.
Once we have the ball, we race to make up for all the time we lost when the other side had it, passing our own agenda before they regain control and undo much of what we’ve done.
And in that rush, we largely shut them out. The minority party is left with few options to be heard. They resort to stall tactics and, occasionally, to walking out in protest.
A much more functional, sustainable way of governing would be to work across parties regardless of who is momentarily in control. I think the majority party would have to play a key role in making this happen. Political victory needs to be seen not just as a mandate to pass legislation, but also a mandate to wield power responsibly by bringing the minority into the fold.
Tyranny of the majority is a real concern. Oregon votes consistently blue, but Republicans represent at least forty percent of the state. It’s no wonder if those red voters feel consistently unheard.
As much as I want climate-change legislation to pass, and as badly as I want the progressive agenda to make headway in my home state and everywhere, I can also see that every bill enacted with zero conservative support is at risk of being undone in the future.
And I can acknowledge that, as smart as we think we are, my fellow liberals and I can’t possibly know what’s best for this whole state. We’re overwhelmingly located in cities, while many Republicans live in small, rural communities. Those communities must have some needs and priorities that differ from Portland’s and Eugene’s. We simply cannot know what all those needs are.
A walkout is a signal that communication and trust have completely broken down. In most cases, this is not because one party has a monopoly on truth and virtue, but because the majority is shutting out the minority.
These breakdowns occur not only among legislators but among their constituents. Legislators will only walk out if they believe a certain number of constituents will support them. That means it’s partly up to us, the constituents, to expect more of ourselves and our legislators.
We need to build trust across parties—in our own lives and among those who represent us. By bringing civility back to politics, we might ultimately get more done for the future.
