Overdose of Elections

Here we go again. If you haven’t already received it, you’ll soon find in your mailbox another ballot. On it are two more issues that should have been decided in the Oregon Legislature. Yet, because our lawmakers are — I’m at a loss for a word that adequately describes my feelings — we voters have to decide the issues.

One measure is a rewrite of a land-use initiative that passed twice before and should have been decided in the Legislature 30 years ago.  The other is a cigarette tax — and constitutional amendment.

Uff da. That’s a Norwegian saying that I learned when we lived in Minnesota. Roughly translated, it means, “Good grief.”

Uff da describes exactly the way I feel about Oregon’s moribund political system, in which legislators don’t legislate and the constitution is bushel basket filled with half-baked ballot initiatives.

No matter how you feel about land use, this daisy chain of initiatives is more than a little bizarre.

Why, oh, why, can’t the folks we elected to go to Salem and write decent laws that reflect what’s best for the greatest number of people keep shoving issues back into our laps?

Some say ballot measures are the ultimate in democracy. In one sense, they are. But in another sense, they represent the avoidance of the Legislature’s responsibility: to take ideas, have hearings and craft legislation that works. Tossing a hot potato like land use into the public’s lap is in no sense responsible or effective.

If Measure 49 passes, it will have to be fixed. Just like Measure 37 before it had to be fixed. And any other ballot measure you can think of. It’s a namby-pamby, wimpy way to run a state government.

It’s like the old television commercial, in which a couple of kids get their little brother to test a new breakfast cereal.

“Let Mikey taste it,” they say. In Oregon, the voting public is Mikey, and we’re stuck voting on incomplete, flawed and one-sided ballot measures that may or may not actually do what proponents say they will.

And stand by for the unintended consequences. Who knows what they will be?

Furthermore, this business about amending the constitution for a cigarette tax, as Measure 50 does, is ludicrous. Again, this issue should have been decided in the Legislature.

Some folks say they don’t like the legislative process because of all those nasty lobbyists that call the shots. That’s bunk. If we elected folks with backbone, integrity and who could get the job done that they were elected to do, a battalion of lobbyists couldn’t make a difference.

I know what folks are thinking. I’m a Pollyanna and don’t know that real politics about bare-knuckled partisanship.

That, precisely, is the problem. When partisanship gets in the way of statesmanship, we end up with standoffs that get tossed to voters, who then must do the work legislators avoided doing and hope whoever wrote the ballot measure didn’t screw up or sneak any time bombs into it.

When it comes to all that, I’ve just got one thing to say.

Uff da.