Guns, Money And Bullshit: How Oregon's Legislative GOP Hacks Bult A Model To Destroy Climate Action
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Predictably, the bill’s opponents have framed the policy debate as a battle in an old culture war, one fought between the urban, mostly liberal I-5 corridor and the state’s rural, largely conservative expanses. The villains in this narrative are out-of-touch Democrats using their legislative supermajority to run roughshod over loggers, ranchers, and other working people, while the corporations actually affected by the regulation are largely invisible. On Thursday, streets approaching the state capitol building in Salem, Oregon, were clogged with logging trucks honking their horns in protest. Members of the III% militia were spotted on the capitol steps in black sweatshirts. (Law enforcement canceled a planned legislative session last Saturday over what it considered a credible militia threat.) “This state was built by the timber industry and by farms, ranchers, construction, and other blue collar industries,” the sheriff from a rural southern Oregon county told the crowd. “Not on coffee businesses and marijuana dispensaries.”
A key organizer of Thursday’s protest was a newly formed group called Timber Unity, which describes itself as a grassroots effort but also has connections to Andrew Miller, the CEO of Stimson Lumber and a wealthy conservative donor in Oregon. Miller is one of the leading opponents of the cap-and-trade bill, and he provided the largest donation to Timber Unity’s new PAC. (Willamette University professor Seth Cotlar has more on the significance of Timber Unity here.) In May, Miller’s company announced that it would lay off 60 people at one of its Oregon mills in response to a new tax increase to fund schools, a clean fuels program, and the cap-and-trade proposal.
In reality, the lines of allegiance are not as neatly divided as they appear. The timber industry is not a monolith, and some of the state’s largest forestland owners wrote letters in support of the cap-and-trade bill. While Republicans accused Democrats of ignoring the concerns of stakeholders and shutting Republicans out of the legislative process, the final version of the legislation included a number of exemptions for business, as well as rebates to help low-income Oregonians deal with the expected rise in fuel prices. The bill also targeted some of its investments directly to timber, ranching, and farming communities. Meanwhile, a few progressive groups opposed the bill because of its focus on market mechanisms, with local chapters of 350.org and Democratic Socialists of America remaining neutral. Any serious policy to reduce carbon emissions involves real trade-offs—but ultimately a serious debate about those choices was superseded by a public drama.
The conflict carries obvious echoes of the Bundy brothers’ takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. On display is a similar antidemocratic belligerence, a willingness to resort to dramatic gestures and threats of violence to get one’s way. This is not so much a local phenomenon as an ascendant mood on the right nationwide, one that President Donald Trump embraces. (The Bundy occupation was initiated almost entirely by non-Oregonians, and was not warmly embraced by locals.) Republicans have tried to shield themselves from electoral accountability through various means of rigging the system, from gerrymandering to more overt voter suppression. With those options out of reach in Oregon, lawmakers simply ran away. And not for the first time: Earlier this year Republicans used the same tactic to block a tax bill, returning only after making a deal that Democrats would shelve unrelated vaccine and gun safety bills in exchange for a promise from the GOP that they wouldn’t walk out again this session. So much for that.
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https://www.thenation.com/article/oregon-republican-walkout-climate-change/
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