Gov. Tina Kotek blamed Republicans for the state Legislature’s failure to pass a bill this session that would have provided enough funding for the Oregon Department of Transportation to avoid layoffs.
That is one crazy take given the Democrats super majority in both houses.
“I have workers, 600 to 700 workers, in the Oregon Department of Transportation, who are now facing layoffs because, for whatever reason, people couldn’t come together as Oregonians to fund that,” she said. “And I would put that at the feet of the folks who could have made that happen — and that is the Republican leadership
Yeah, the GOP hated the largest tax increase in Oregon history. That’s no surprise. What’s stunning is that you could wrangle your own cats to get the bill passed.
Republican leaders pointed the finger at Democrats, who they said used a secretive behind-the-scenes process that left Republicans out of critical discussions and resulted in bloated proposals shared too late in the six-month session.
“All session long, people asked us: ‘Well, what do you think of the transportation package?’ And we’d say: ‘We haven’t seen it,’” House Minority Leader Christine Drazan, R-Canby, said at a news conference Friday night. “So part of this issue, too, is getting to this last-ditch tax package that nobody supported happened today. That’s ridiculous.”
That seems a little misleading since the GOP has opposed the bill, apparently without seeing it, for weeks.
Kotek met with lawmakers individually from late afternoon through the late evening to lobby for votes on the bill. She said she had them, but Democratic leaders in the House and Senate had called for an end to the session before the House could finish voting on bills that were still on the table, and they took an early vote on the $1 billion end-of-session budget bill that would have been the last ground on which Democrats had standing to bargain with Republicans. Agencies, lawmakers and lobbyists often use the bill, called the “Christmas tree bill” to negotiate extra money for projects that didn’t get much attention earlier in the session.
By the time the transportation bill made its way to the floor of the Oregon House Friday night, Republican lawmakers voted not to suspend rules that would have allowed them to fast track its final vote, meaning lawmakers would have had to stay until Saturday or Sunday, which they opted not to do.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The Democrats are holistically bad at politics.