Rep. Anna Scharf, R-Amity, participates in a committee meeting in December 2022. (Connor Radnovich/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
An Oregon Republican is pushing to tighten the state’s anti-revolving-door law, saying the law unfairly discriminates between former lawmakers who lobby for private industries and those who score state jobs after leaving the Legislature.
Oregon, like most states, makes former lawmakers wait before they can become lobbyists who ask their former colleagues to support bills. In Oregon, lawmakers can’t take a paid lobbying gig until they’ve been out of office for at least a year.
The goal is to prevent lawmakers and lobbyists from engaging in unethical quid-pro-quo acts, such as a lawmaker voting for a bill that would benefit the timber industry and then getting a job offer from a lobbying firm that represents the industry.
But Rep. Anna Scharf, R-Amity, believes current law, while well intentioned, doesn’t prevent lawmakers from lobbying on behalf of state agencies before their year is up. She introduced House Bill 2727 to explicitly ban lawmakers not just from paid lobbying but from “advocating” on behalf of any public or private entity for “changes in policy or funding.”
“I don’t think that we should preclude anybody from having employment wherever they choose after their career here is over,” Scharf told the House Rules Committee on Monday. “I just think it’s extremely awkward to have a former member of this body coming before this body, within less than a year of leaving this body, lobbying for funding, lobbying for programming.”
State law doesn’t explicitly exempt public employees who engage in some lobbying from the one-year waiting period, legislative counsel Dexter Johnson said. Instead, that understanding is the result of a years-old opinion from the Oregon Government Ethics Commission.
“If there’s a Government Ethics Commission opinion that one relies on, one can be held harmless, regardless of the legalities of it,” Johnson said. “That has had the effect of creating an exception that I’m not sure is there in terms of the text of the existing law, but certainly could be overruled by the Legislature by changes that were a little bit more targeted.”
That 2017 opinion, which Johnson said the commission “had to go through some significant gymnastics” to reach, cleared a former state representative from Ashland to serve as a budget adviser for then-Gov. Kate Brown, who hired him two months after he ended his work in the state House. The commission determined that the lobbying waiting period couldn’t apply to public officials, as that could restrict the governor’s ability to lobby for recommended legislation.
Scharf said she was open to changing the bill so it applied only to state agencies lobbying the Legislature, and not to local governments. That would mean, for instance, that a lawmaker who left the Legislature and became their hometown’s mayor could still lobby for funding for their city.
Scharf also questioned the constitutionality of Oregon’s waiting period, citing a recent Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling over Missouri’s two-year waiting period for legislators or legislative staff to engage in lobbying. That case, Miller v. Ziegler, doesn’t apply in Oregon because Oregon is in the Ninth Circuit, Johnson wrote in a letter to Scharf included with the bill record.
In that letter, Johnson also warned that Scharf’s bill could be unconstitutional if she didn’t narrow its scope to apply to lobbying the Legislature.
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