End the legislative neglect – by Jeff Eager

Oregon has been governed in significant measure by press conference for nearly two years. Early in the pandemic, Kate Brown, the state s term-limited democratic governor, would appear weekly, flanked by public health officials, to let Oregonians know whether they d be allowed to gather with friends and family, attend school and worship services, travel, dine in restaurants, get surgery or open their small businesses. It was during one such press conference that Oregonians learned whether the governor deemed their work of sufficient import that they would be allowed to continue to do it outside their homes.

These days, with Brown the least popular governor in the country and increasingly ceding the political foreground to a battle royal among the large number of people who want to replace her come January 2023, she rarely partakes in the press conferences. Instead, she spends time traveling to climate change conferences, brainstorming the role of food waste in said change, and collecting awards, unmasked, at DC galas. Oregon, home of the Ducks, has as its governor the lamest of ducks.

Yet the government by press conference continues apace in Brown s absence because she continues reliably to provide that regime s predicate, of which she is singularly legally capable: serial declarations of a Covid public health emergency. She issued the most recent such order on December 21, 2021; it does not expire until June 30, 2022. If the order is not earlier rescinded or extended again, Oregonians will at its termination have lived under 844 days of emergency governance, of government by press conference.

via oregonroundup.substack.com

Oregon seems to be violating the Guarantee Clause, that reputedly obsolete provision of the US Constitution which guarantees to each state “a republican form of government.” Query whether California, with its one-party bureaucracy state, is as well.