Dem
51
GOP
49
Many readers of this site, and many Americans in general, are frustrated by the amount of power afforded to the minority party by means of parliamentary trickery. We refer here, in particular, to the Senate filibuster. Nobody doubts that the minority party should have a voice of some sort, but it's also undemocratic that just one member of the minority party can bring the upper chamber to a halt, and that just 10 members can wreck any legislation they see fit to wreck.
Do not expect satisfaction on this point very soon, at least not at the federal level. On the state level, on the other hand? Maybe so. Like in Oregon, for example. The Oregon state Senate does not have a filibuster, but it does have a quorum requirement. You can probably guess, then, how the Republican senators in the minority (10 of them, out of 30 members overall) have been torpedoing legislation. They staged a long walkout in 2019, and another in 2021, and in both cases managed to force the state's Democrats to yield and water down various bills.
The people of Oregon were none too happy with this trickery, and so they overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment that says that if a member of the legislature has more than 10 unexcused absences, they cannot run "for the term following the election after the member's current term is completed." In other words, if you break the rules (by, say, engaging in weeks-long quorum-jumping), your political career isn't over, but you have to take a term off before you can serve again.
Last year, after the passage of the amendment, state Senate Republicans staged yet another walkout, this one lasting six weeks, and blocking over a hundred bills from coming up for consideration, including several bills related to abortion access. "Can't these Republicans read?," you might be asking? Yes, they can. They believed they had identified a loophole; arguing that since terms end in January, then "the term following the election after the member's current term is completed" is actually two terms away. In other words, a senator might break the rules in summer 2024, during a term that expires in January 2025, and then wait for the next election after the expiry of their term, in November 2026, and then be disqualified as of January 2027.
Oregon's Secretary of State, LaVonne Griffin-Valade (D), declared this argument to be nonsense, and ruled that the 10 quorum-jumping senators are ineligible for reelection. The 10 senators promptly sued, and yesterday the Oregon Supreme Court found that Griffin-Valade is in the right, and that the senators are in the wrong, and that all 10 of them are ineligible to run for reelection. In other words, they gambled their political careers on a technicality and lost. Now, if only there was some way to disqualify Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) from running for reelection... (Z)