Capital Chatter: Wildfires keep Brown in Oregon

Published 7:00 am Thursday, July 19, 2018

Summer typically is slow for politicians. Not this year.

Democratic Gov. Kate Brown and Republican gubernatorial challenger Knute Buehler made dueling pronouncements about health care, each reaching out to voters who favor the right to abortion. The Oregon GOP strongly endorsed President Donald Trump‘s pick for the U.S. Supreme Court. Wildfires kept Brown and other elected officials busy. Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley helped force Trump to withdraw an Oregon judicial nominee for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Meanwhile, legislative campaign volunteers have been ringing my doorbell and calling my phone, even though conventional wisdom is that voters are uninterested until after Labor Day — if then.

• Brown focused on wildfires: Brown was bypassing this week’s traditional gubernatorial-campaign debate hosted by the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association and instead had planned to attend the National Governors Association summer meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Brown similarly skipped that ONPA debate two years ago.

But with a bad wildfire season under way, Brown decided to not to leave the state. A spokesman said she was focused on ensuring fire officials had the resources they needed to combat the wildfires.

A campaign spokesman previously had said Brown chose to miss the ONPA debate because her work on health care and other policy issues took precedence over her campaign.

The NGA this week is expected to appoint Brown to an influential position dealing with health care. She has been vocal among governors in opposing federal attempts to weaken the Obamacare mandate that health insurance cover pre-existing conditions.

The NGA meeting includes sessions on strengthening business ties with China and with Japan; infrastructure, including attracting international investment; racial equality in the workplace; women in leadership; economic development through outdoor recreation; and the opioid crisis.

• You won’t have Ryan Bounds to kick around: Wyden said he was grateful that the Senate has come to its senses and Ryan Bounds’ judicial nomination had been withdrawn on Thursday. Bounds is an assistant U.S. attorney in Portland.

Taking to the Senate floor, Wyden said Bounds “flagrantly misrepresented his background to our bipartisan Oregon Judicial Selection Committee,” which vetted the nomination.

Wyden talked about his own family’s experiences fleeing Nazi Germany, including the execution of his great-uncle at Auschwitz, as he excoriated Bounds. As a college student, Bounds wrote newspaper opinion pieces that mocked multiculturalism. Wyden said Bounds had not fully recanted the disturbing, abhorrent and intolerant views contained in those pieces.

Roll Call reported that South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the lone black Republican in the Senate, planned to vote against Bounds. The majority Republicans pulled the nomination rather than lose the vote.

On his Twitter feed Thursday afternoon, Wyden said, “Here’s the bottom line: today, constant pressure against a bad nominee won out.”

• Kudos for another nominee: Oregon Republican Party Chair Bill Currier is enthusiastic about Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. Currier said Wyden, Merkley and other Democrats have painted themselves into a corner by focusing on judicial outcomes, such as the future of Roe v. Wade.

“President Trump fulfilled yet again a campaign promise to appoint justices that would adhere to the Constitution, be faithful to the rule of law and not be outcome-based,” Currier told me. “In other words, it wasn’t so much focused on the policy or their positions, but could they intelligently examine the case and apply law to it?”

• Abortion and health care: Republican Buehler, an orthopedic surgeon, released his six-point health care platform this week, including: “Regardless of changes in federal law, ensure that Oregon remains a prochoice state and that all Oregonians maintain full access to reproductive rights and health care.”

Abortion-rights organizations previously blasted Buehler as being inconsistent, saying Brown was the true pro-choice candidate.

• One fewer ballot measure: It’s shaping up to be an expensive, nasty campaign season for Oregon ballot measures.

Brown sought to bring business and labor together to resolve some potential ballot issues. One success was getting Our Oregon to drop an initiative petition that would have required publicly traded companies to make their tax information public by filing it with the state.

Our Oregon is backed by public-employee unions and their allies. The organization might have had a tough time promoting that measure (Initiative Petition 25) while also fighting two measures that would make it harder to increase state taxes.

Nike reportedly agreed to join the fight against the anti-tax measures in return for the corporate-transparency initiative being dropped. I was told Brown had “meeting after meeting, phone call after phone call” in working to keep IP 25 off the ballot.

Dick Hughes, who writes the weekly Capital Chatter column, has been covering the Oregon political scene since 1976. Contact him at TheHughesisms@Gmail.com, Facebook.com/Hughesisms, YouTube.com/DickHughes or Twitter.com/DickHughes.