A Crowded Sprint
Last week, Oregon lawmakers convened at the state Capitol for their final round of committee activity before their 35-day session begins on Monday, February 2. One of the enduring tropes in Oregon politics is that if the long, five-month session is a marathon, the short session is a sprint. This year, however, lawmakers appear poised to test whether a sprint can carry the weight of a full marathon agenda.
Like their counterparts in other blue-led states, Oregon Democrats are staking much of their agenda on responding to federal policy and actions, particularly around immigration enforcement. That posture was on display last week, when Democratic lawmakers unveiled a slate of bills aimed at restricting federal activity in Oregon, ranging from withholding payments to the federal government to authorizing lawsuits against federal agents and imposing advance notice requirements on federal law enforcement. Until relatively recently, Oregon politics operated largely on its own terms, distinct from the rhythms and conflicts of national politics. Increasingly, however, federal enforcement actions, including the deployment of the National Guard into the state’s largest city, are becoming central drivers of the short session agenda.
The legislature is also heading toward a fraught debate over the state’s connection to federal tax law following Congress’s passage of President Trump’s tax and spending bill last summer. While the federal law largely extended the 2017 Trump tax cuts, it also created new deductions for tip and overtime income and accelerated cost recovery for business investment. Conventional wisdom in Oregon politics holds that Democrats typically avoid tax increases during the short session because it overlaps with an election year. Taking up the question of tax conformity in a short session forces lawmakers to weigh complex, long-term fiscal choices against severely limited time and attention constraints.
As lawmakers grapple with federal immigrant enforcement and tax conformity issues, they are also introducing a broad slate of new policy initiatives. These proposals range from regulating artificial intelligence chatbots and restoring liability waivers for outdoor recreation businesses to rewriting the state’s school funding formula and exploring a sales tax. (It should be noted that sales taxes have been rejected nearly a dozen times by voters over the last century and none of the proposals received more than 30 percent of the vote.)
Perhaps the most notable local issue of the session is the continuing saga of transportation funding. In December, Republicans successfully gathered enough signatures to refer a controversial transportation funding package to voters. Earlier this month, Gov. Tina Kotek (D) called on lawmakers to repeal the entire package and find alternative ways to sustain services until a new proposal is developed in 2027.
A few days later, the Oregon Journalism Project resurfaced a 1935 Attorney General opinion holding the legislature cannot repeal a law once it has qualified for the ballot through the referendum process. Initially, state lawyers and political leaders seemed to dismiss the opinion, suggesting it was outdated and that the legislature had the authority to nix the package. In a stunning pivot this week, however, the legislature’s presiding officers announced they would pursue a measure to expedite the referendum to the May primary ballot instead of the November general election.
While Article IV, Section 1 of Oregon’s Constitution clearly grants the legislature the authority to specify the dates for initiative and referendum measures, logistical roadblocks make rescheduling the referendum difficult. In particular, the campaigns for and against the referendum will have a drastically shorter span of time to prepare their statements for the voters' pamphlet. If the referendum were held during the November General Election, as is currently planned, these groups would have until September 3 to submit their statements. If the election is expedited, however, the deadline will be merely a week after lawmakers adjourn their session.
Stepping back from individual policy debates, the nature of the short session has long been a source of friction between the parties and that tension may soon come to the forefront in ways that truly test the legislature as an institution. Since voters authorized annual sessions in 2010, Republicans have argued these sessions were intended to rebalance the budget, address corrective actions from long-session policies, and tend to urgent or emergency matters. In practice, however, the definition of an “emergency” often depends on perspective, blurring the line between targeted fixes and broader policymaking.
If history is any guide, lawmakers have a seemingly unlimited capacity to generate ideas for the short session but only a finite amount of time to consider them. The compressed timelines place a premium on speed, often at the expense of careful policymaking and the resolution of crucial policy details. As the number of high-profile issues grows, so does the temperature in the building and the likelihood that the minority party will turn to procedural tactics to stall activity and exert leverage over the session’s trajectory.
In some ways, the lead-up to the 2026 session bears some resemblance to 2020, when the legislature ultimately enacted only three bills before Republicans staged a session-ending walkout over a cap-and-trade proposal. However, the upcoming session has even higher stakes, with not one but many defining controversies, leaving lawmakers to manage multiple high-stakes issues simultaneously within a compressed timeline. The challenge of the short session is not ambition, but precision. With little time to correct course, errors compound quickly and incentives shift toward leverage rather than resolution. In a crowded sprint, the difference between progress and paralysis often comes down to whether the institution can absorb mistakes without letting them harden into dysfunction.
