A TV reporter interviews self-employed logger Bridger Hasbrouck, of Dallas, Oregon, outside the Oregon State House in Salem, Oregon, on Thursday, 20 June 2019, the day the Senate is scheduled to take up a bill that would create the nation's second cap-and-trade program to curb carbon emissions. Senate Republicans, however, walked out so there wouldn't be enough lawmakers present for a vote on House Bill 2020, which is extremely unpopular among loggers, truckers and many rural voters. Photo: Gillian Flaccus / AP Photo
A TV reporter interviews self-employed logger Bridger Hasbrouck, of Dallas, Oregon, outside the Oregon State House in Salem, Oregon, on Thursday, 20 June 2019, the day the Senate is scheduled to take up a bill that would create the nation’s second cap-and-trade program to curb carbon emissions. Senate Republicans, however, walked out so there wouldn’t be enough lawmakers present for a vote on House Bill 2020, which is extremely unpopular among loggers, truckers and many rural voters. Photo: Gillian Flaccus / AP Photo

By Charles P. Pierce
24 June 2019

(Esquire) – In these times, everything looks like an ill omen. The capitol is crowded with crows. But it is not an exaggeration to say that if you’re not following the ongoing insanity in Oregon, you are missing a look into a very dark future. It begins with a not-at-all-unusual squabble between the Republicans in the Oregon legislature and the Democratic Governor, Kate Brown. At issue is a huge bill aimed at dealing with the climate crisis [House Bill 2020 and a companion bill, Senate Bill 1051]. On Thursday, every Republican member of the Oregon state senate took a powder, denying Brown and the Democrats a quorum and effectively killing the bill.

Now this is not an unusual tactic. Not long ago, Democratic lawmakers in Texas and in Wisconsin blew town for the same purpose—to throw sand in the gears of a legislative act of which they did not approve and could not stop by conventional means. In Wisconsin, it was to slow down an anti-union measure. In Texas, it was about a redistricting map that gerrymandered the Texas legislature into a farce. The legislative lamsters all had a good time, taking goofy videos in what appeared to be Holiday Inn lobbies while Republicans back home fumed. (The Texans, it should be noted, won a temporary victory.) What makes Oregon different is what the fugitive Republican senators did.

The Republican senators—with the full support of the Oregon Republican Party—made common cause with armed domestic terror groups. (Calling them a militia is a misnomer, regardless of what they may think of themselves.) When a Republican state senator named Brian Boquist heard that Brown was sending the Oregon state police after them, he told a local television station:

“Send bachelors and come heavily armed. I’m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon. It’s just that simple.” […]

People with guns have involved themselves in a legislative dispute while the officials of one of the political parties was rooting them on, and one session of a state legislature was cancelled because of it. [more]

The Insanity in Oregon Is a Glimpse of Our Very Dark Future