Extra Innings
M110 Reform, Mutually Assured Destruction in the Debt Deal, and a Busted Session
Rather than wait until next week, I thought I’d send out a brief update on a few hot topics.
Homelessness and Measure 110 Reform
Recent polls suggested that voters identify unsheltered homelessness and reform of the drug decriminalization Measure 110 as priorities. They most assuredly are, but it’s an oversimplification to conflate them. Unsheltered homelessness is driven by a variety of factors, including strong contributions from the cost of housing and the dearth of easily available mental health services. Put another way, while drug abuse certainly doesn’t help, re-criminalizing the possession of small amounts of drugs won’t miraculously get people off the streets. Our jails and prisons remain largely overfull and, even if we cold-heartedly embraced mass incarceration as the answer to drug abuse, there’s simply no room in the jails and prisons, nor would it take a large number of people off the streets if there was room.
It’s certainly fair to increase the incentives for people addicted to drugs to engage in treatment. We certainly should make some changes to incentivize rehab, but the law actually has civil mechanisms for this. A thoughtful solution would look at increasing the availability of rehab and using non-criminal means to incentivize compliance. At the end of the day, even these will solve much less than half of the unsheltered homelessness problem. There’s just no substitute for affordable housing to reduce unsheltered homelessness.
Mutually Assured Destruction and Regular Order in the Debt Deal
Buried in the federal debt limit deal is a provision that makes 1% cuts to non-defense discretionary, defense, and veterans affairs budgets if Congress fails to pass ALL of its 12 spending bills by the end of the calendar year. In recent decades, Congress has regularly failed to pass these bills in a timely manner, relying on continuing resolutions (CRs) to keep the government open. CRs are simply the continuation of a pro rata amount of the previous year’s budget for the period of the CR. As you might expect, the Executive Branch hates them because they don’t reflect necessary changes to the budget to meet the needs of the public.
In effect, the 1% provision is a sort of mutually-assured destruction pact between House Democrats and Republicans that forces them to work together to get the budgets done on time through “regular order” or face mutually assured destruction in the form of cuts to programs they each like. I’m not wild about it as a mechanism, but politics just might be so broken as to need this sort of drastic measure. Let’s hope it works.
Double Overtime
It looks like the 2023 Legislative Session is going to be a bust. Both sides are dug in and it appears that negotiations have stopped. Let’s hope that our political leaders keep talking. If you’re as tired of this as I am, please support the “big three” reforms that might get our legislature working again - campaign finance reform, open primaries, and non-partisan redistricting. Let’s get Salem working for Oregon again.
