Oregon’s Democratic leaders say they’ll protect Oregon values but don’t want to respond to everything President-elect Donald Trump says or does. (Amanda Loman/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
Days before President-elect Donald Trump was set to take office, Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield announced that he joined other Democratic states in court filings to preserve federal gun control rules.
Rayfield and other attorneys general also intervened to protect the ability for some undocumented immigrants to enroll in health care plans through the Affordable Care Act and weeks after the new attorney general convened a group of advisers and named a top Justice Department lawyer to lead federal litigation.
All of those actions, as well as Gov. Tina Kotek’s announcement in November that the state added to its stockpile of the abortion drug mifepristone, are among Oregon’s preparations for a new Donald Trump presidency.
Oregon’s five Democratic statewide elected officials — Kotek, Rayfield, Secretary of State Tobias Read, Treasurer Elizabeth Steiner and Labor Commissioner Christina Stephenson — as well as House Speaker Julie Fahey and Senate President Rob Wagner and their staffs, began regular meetings last year to discuss what to expect from the incoming administration and how to react. In individual interviews and in public speeches since the election, those officials and other top Democrats in Oregon have stressed that they’re trying to identify specific threats and not waste time planning how to respond to vague statements.
Fahey, D-Eugene, was elected to the House in 2016, the same as Trump. She’s now among a small cohort of lawmakers who served during the first Trump administration, and in the days immediately following the election, she told the Capital Chronicle, she spent a lot of time talking to newer colleagues about everything Oregon legislators did to respond to his first term.
In 2017, they passed the Reproductive Health Equity Act, which codified the right to an abortion in Oregon and required that abortion and other reproductive health services be provided at no cost to patients.
They passed the Oregon Environmental Protection Act in 2019, codifying the decades-old federal protections of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act in state law.
They strengthened state laws around hate crimes and the right to organize in labor unions. But they couldn’t spend those four years focused on the federal government, Fahey said. The Legislature also worked on instituting paid family leave, investing $1 billion in schools through the Student Success Act and expanding access to pre-school during Trump’s first term.
“We were responsive to what was happening out of the federal level to try and insulate Oregonians from the most harmful things, but at the same time, it was really important that we continue to govern the state,” Fahey said.
Strategic responses
House Majority Leader Ben Bowman, D-Tigard, agreed with Fahey during a recent meeting of the Willamette Women Democrats.
“We are not going to be responding to every ridiculous thing the president says,” Bowman said.
That means, he explained, that Oregon’s Democratic legislators won’t spend time writing statements about how they disagree with the idea of using military force to take over Greenland, but they will work on legislation and funding.
“Just because you’re not seeing press releases and tweets from us does not mean that we are not working really hard behind the scenes to pass the policy infrastructure, to pass the budgets, through our Department of Justice with our new attorney general, Dan Rayfield, to make sure we have the tools and resources in place to stand up and fight back when we need to,” Bowman said. “This isn’t about having a platform and getting into a big fight. It’s about doing what needs to be done for Oregonians.”
Other Democratic lawmakers have said they’re focused on defending Oregonian’s rights and values from potential threats, though they have yet to share specific proposals. Senate Majority Leader Kayse Jama, D-Portland, said Thursday protecting Oregonians from “chaos and confusion” in Washington, D.C., is among four top priorities for Senate Democrats, though he did not have details to share about what they could do that they haven’t already done.
“We really don’t know what is in the pipeline,” Jama said Thursday. “I think we have some ideas (of) what the administration said that they plan to do about immigration, about health care issues. I think the question for us would be, how do we prepare for that and make sure that our attorney general is taking the lead in terms of that protection, and make sure Oregonians are feeling that their rights have been protected.”
Few of the nearly 2,300 bills lawmakers have introduced include details. Jama’s Senate Bill 149, a placeholder bill that now just directs the Oregon Department of Human Services to study immigration, is a likely vehicle for legislation addressing any loopholes in Oregon’s sanctuary laws that prohibit public resources from being used to help enforce federal immigration law.
Republican plans
Legislative Republicans have been more explicit about their plans. For instance, GOP lawmakers introduced several bills, including Senate Bill 11, Senate Bill 486, Senate Bill 491, House Bill 2191 and House Bill 2192, to repeal the state’s prohibition on state and local governments cooperating with federal immigration authorities or require local law enforcement to ask about citizenship and inform immigration authorities each time someone is arrested on certain crimes.
And House Bill 2303, introduced by Reps. Kevin Mannix, R-Salem, and Ed Diehl, R-Stayton, would go further by directing courts to declare any state agency rule invalid if it conflicts with federal law or regulations.
None of those Republican proposals are expected to progress in the Legislature, where Democrats hold a supermajority in both the House and the Senate.
Republicans have also dismissed Democratic politicians’ stated concerns as political posturing. Senate Minority Leader Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles, recalled seeing a press release from Fahey, then the House majority leader, shortly after the Supreme Court overturned the national right to an abortion, reassuring Oregonians that their legislators had protected abortion rights in state statute and they didn’t need to fear. But a few months later, as the 2022 election heated up, campaign ads warned that electing Republicans would result in losing those rights and Oregonians should fear.
“We’ve codified in Oregon the things that Oregonians expect us to have in law and the threat from the federal government is a little bit of just — I don’t believe there’s a ‘there’ there,” Bonham said.
Bonham has just two years left in the Senate because he and nine other Republicans lost their chance to run for reelection by participating in a six-week walkout in 2023, spurred in large part by their opposition to a bill that sought to expand and protect access to reproductive and gender-affirming care. He’ll attend Trump’s inauguration on Monday.
“To pretend like somehow the boogeyman of Donald Trump is coming for us, I’m just not sold,” Bonham said.
Kotek’s $39.3 billion budget proposal, which lawmakers will start parsing when they begin their legislative work Tuesday, includes millions of dollars for reproductive health, climate change and federal lawsuits. She wants the legislators to give Rayfield an extra $2 million during the next two years to defend state laws on reproductive health care, immigrant protections and environmental standards and another $2 million to grow the Department of Justice’s Bias Response Hotline.
She also asked for $7 million to help immigrants living in Oregon navigate the immigration system and find legal representation. A group of Democratic legislators, as well as Rep. Greg Smith, a Heppner Republican whose eastern Oregon district includes a large share of immigrants with and without proof of legal status, introduced Senate Bill 703 to provide $6 million in grants to help noncitizens become citizens or permanent residents.
Kotek’s budget proposal also included $2.5 million in grants to expand access to reproductive health services and another $2.5 million to backfill any decline in federal funding for reproductive health care.
Fahey, the House speaker who started during Trump’s first term, said Oregonians who are scared about the incoming administration should feel confident in their state leadership.
“There are rational people with a steady hand at the wheel in charge in Oregon,” Fahey said. “We are ready to respond to anything that might come out of the federal level, as we did in his first administration, and we’re ready to keep governing and to keep addressing challenges, and that’s I think that’s true in state legislatures around the country.”
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