Coronavirus and candy were in the mix this week as the Legislature worked fast and furious to digest an enormous agenda in just 35 days.

Make that 27 days as of Wednesday.

Pick your metaphor. A videotape skidding along on fast forward — the content is there, it’s just hard to make it out. Or for older folks, playing a 33 RPM record at 45 RPM so that even the Rolling Stones sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Items from the blur:

Hello, goodbye: The session started Feb. 1 and the culling of the over 260 pieces of legislation started Monday. With a few exceptions, bills in policy committees (health, education, environment, etc.) not scheduled for a committee vote will die in droves this week.

House honeymoon: Bitter acrimony in the House, with charges of parliamentary manipulation and counter-charges of deceitful double-crosses is so 2021. The commanders of the combatants — House Speaker Tina Kotek, D-Portland and House Minority Leader Christine Drazan, R-Canby — have left the Capitol, at least temporarily, to mount campaigns for governor. Rep. Barbara Smith Warner, D-Portland, stepped out of a leadership role, with Rep. Julie Fahey, D-Eugene now leading the caucus.

New House Speaker Dan Rayfield, D-Corvallis, said Monday he is working to build more bipartisan trust, even if the supermajority Democrats have the numbers to bulldoze legislation through the chamber. New House Minority Leader Vikki Breese-Iverson, R-Prineville, raised the specter of another slow-down like Drazan engineered last year, requiring all bills be read in full on final passage.

Rayfield said Monday that even if he didn’t like it, he respected the right of the minority party to protest legislation and use constitutional means to frustrate the the sprinting speed needed to get legislation done in a short session.

Breese-Iverson didn’t have a public comment on the lower level of tension (for now) in the House. But there have been no moves, and fewer mentions, of slow down. And none of a walkout that ended the 2020 session after just three bills were passed.

Both parties are hoping that COVID-19, currently at near the peak of the omicron variant wave, won’t upend the chamber as it sometimes did in 2021.

Zika jumps GOP ship: One of the more intriguing moments so far for the Legislature was the usually pro-forma vote for House speaker hit a speed bump when a conservative Republican to nominated a liberal Democrat for speaker.

At the beginning of sessions, the two parties choose a candidate from within their caucus, who is then publicly put forward as the nominee. The majority party’s nominee wins and the chamber has its chief officer.

Democrats chose Rayfield, a veteran of budget battles. Republicans nominated Breese-Iverson, now their top House leader.

Rep. Janelle Bynum, D-Happy Valley, had sought to replace Kotek as speaker in 2021 and said she wanted the job this year. The caucus opted for Rayfield.

During the speaker vote, Rep. Jack Zika, R-Redmond, was recognized by Speaker Pro Tempore Paul Holvey, D-Eugene, who held the gavel in the interim between Kotek and Rayfield.

Zika stood and nominated Bynum, who wasn’t surprised.

“She is strong in her conviction, she has always been very honest with me and my other colleagues,” Zika said. “She is a business owner. She is in tune with her community. She is at the forefront of all our social and racial justice issues.”

A solid conservative who voted with the caucus, though not in lock-step like others, Zika was first elected in 2018. He has announced he won’t seek re-election to House District 53, which he said had been gerrymandered by Democrats to make it more friendly to their party. Democrats argue the huge growth in Deschutes County over the past 10 years, and its political swing from red to blue voting patterns made the change inevitable. 

“I’ve worked with Janelle, I think she is qualified and would make a good speaker,” Zika said during a call Tuesday. “I wanted to call out the hypocrisy of the Democrats for not choosing her.”

The party lines held when it was time to vote. Rayfield won 32 votes, Breese-Iverson’s count was 18 votes. 

Bynum received four votes – from herself, newly appointed Rep. Travis Nelson, D-Portland, who became the chamber’s second Black member, Rep. Teresa Alonso Leon, D-Woodburn, and Zika.

What happened near the end of the short day’s business was absent from all coverage of the session start, with the exception of a portion in a story by reporter Julia Shumway on the Oregon Capital Chronicle website.

Bynum, one of two Black members in the 60-member House, rose to give a short speech.

“She compared her loss, and the expectation that all Democrats would support Rayfield, to centuries of oppression faced by Black people, including slavery,” the Chronicle wrote. “‘I told myself, “At least I won’t be standing on an auction block wondering or knowing if they’d sell my children away from me. At least I have my children”‘  she said. ‘I had to go back to an unthinkable time in America’s history and tell myself my pain wasn’t as great as those who had come before me.'”

GOP deja vu: Three Republican nominees for governor — in 1998, 2002 and 2016 — have all filed to run for office in 2022. Two are taking another run at the top job. Bud Pierce, the Salem oncologist who lost to Gov. Kate Brown in the 2016 special election, announced last year that he was going for a do-over in 2022.

The retro Republican candidates continued with Kevin Mannix, the Democrat-turned-Republican-turned ballot measure maker who was the GOP’s choice in 2002, losing a squeaker 49%-46% to Democrat Ted Kulongoski. Mannix is running for a Salem area House seat, looking to go back to the chamber where he started in 1989 as a Democrat.

You have to go back to the last century for Bill Sizemore’s top race for a place at Mahonia Hall (the governor’s mansion). Sizemore was the self-described sacrificial lamb in 1998 who stepped up for Republicans to take on popular Gov. John Kitzhaber in his first bid for re-election. Kitzhaber won 64%-30%. Like Mannix, Sizemore would try for other offices while making his biggest impact as the driving force behind conservative issues on the ballot.

Sizemore, who runs a painting business in Redmond, told Willamette Week that he decided to run for governor again in 2022 after GOP top-tier candidate Stan Pulliam confirmed he and his wife had been involved in a sex-swapping group.

Changing of the candy bowl: One of the hallmarks of the tenure of Kotek’s tenure as House speaker was a large bowl of York Peppermint Patties on a large office table where meetings were held. Kotek is from York, Pennsylvania, and went through likely thousands of her hometown’s namesake round dark chocolate and peppermint confection.

When asked what candy he would put in the bowl, Rayfield thought for a moment. “Skittles are my thing if I am being honest,” Rayfield said. “My wife finds them absolutely gross and disgusting.” The future place of prominence for multicolored fruit-flavored button-shaped candies is another “to be determined” bit of protocol for the new speaker.