Oregon Democrats may have a supermajority in both chambers heading into the 2019 legislative session, but the two majority leaders said Friday they aren’t taking anything for granted when it comes to passing their agendas.
“I don’t know that I can count on us moving as a block on almost anything,” Rep. Jennifer Williamson, a Portland Democrat and House majority leader, said during the City Club of Portland’s Friday Forum. “There’s been a lot of focus on how people will vote based on party affiliation. That’s not an assumption you can make.”
Williamson was joined on the panel by Sen. Ginny Burdick of Portland, her counterpart in the Oregon Senate, and Rep. Carl Wilson of Grants Pass, who leads the House Republican caucus in Salem. Dick Hughes, former editorial page editor of the Statesman Journal, moderated the discussion.
A three-fifths supermajority gives Democrats, assuming they stick together, the ability to pass tax measures with no Republicans on board. With a $2 billion education ask from Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, they will likely try to come up with new revenue. Burdick said she expects an increase in business taxes, "hopefully, with a reduction in personal income tax rates."
But she and Williamson said Republicans won't be shut out. Three Republican lawmakers were given committee chairmanships this year and offices and floor desks are allocated based on seniority, regardless of party, Burdick said. Furthermore, some Democrats hail from conservative areas, such as Coos Bay, and since each House member represents 60,000 people, there is always some diversity among their constituents.
“It’s an oversimplification to say just because we have a supermajority, you can count out X, Y Z,” she said.
Burdick knows what it’s like to be in the minority when the other party has a supermajority, which happened when she first came into office.
“I was at the wrong end of a 20-10 split in the Oregon Senate,” she said. “I learned a lot from that experience. ... I felt we really were irrelevant.”
As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she could have gotten controversial bills through and “rolled representatives,” she said.
“I chose not to do that,” she said. “You get better policy” if you engage the other side.
For his part, Wilson said the Republicans have certain tools they can use to “make a point, but in the long range, they don’t mean much.”
“We don’t have much to do with the success of the session,” he said. “Our attitude is we’re going to work with the majority party when we can, and if when we have to oppose them because we’re diametrically opposed, we’ll do that to the best of our abilities.”
There will be some “interesting affiliations,” such as when he crossed the aisle to pass the legislation that legalized recreational marijuana, Wilson said.