Power-sharing in tied legislative chambers is typically no picnic. But about 15 years ago in Oregon when the House faced a historic tie, things went so smoothly people from both sides of the aisle are still talking about it today.
This is Across the Aisle from the National Conference of State Legislatures. I’m Kelley Griffin.
Bipartisanship can be a tough balance to strike in any political realm. But what about those times when it’s a necessity? In the case of a tied legislative chamber, it’s either work together or nothing gets done. That dynamic has been in play this year in the Minnesota House and Senate, where election results, a court case and the death of a senator required power-sharing. A special election January 28th gave Democrats the lead in the Senate and the House is still sorting out how it will work together.
Sixty-one chambers have an even number of legislators, so ties aren’t uncommon. Sharing power is not what legislatures are built for, though, so they can struggle with forming new rules in the case of a tie.
But there’s a state that managed a split House nearly 15 years ago that went so smoothly both sides are still talking about it.
Then co-speaker Democrat Arnie Roblan.
"It was an exciting and enjoyable time for me, and it helped me understand myself better as well as a lot of people that I got to work with. So yeah, it was fun."
Well, “fun” isn’t a word typically associated with sharing power. His co-speaker, Republican Bruce Hanna, said it was productive too.
" I mean, I think we had one of the finest cycles possible.”
Their chiefs of staff, Jessica Adamson who worked for Roblan and Angela Wilhelms who worked for Hanna, had to coordinate in ways that were unimaginable in previous sessions. And they loved it.
Jessica Adamson.
Adamson: 1:03ish - It’s a very special time in Oregon’s history. And it was the professional experience of my career.
Angela Wilhelms.
"People just got it and everyone made it work and that was an extraordinary thing to watch."
These were the people who were at the center of it planning for a tied chamber, which had never happened in the Oregon house.
This is retracked in the retrack file The rules they settled on spelled sharing control at every level. They shared a single communications director to ensure messaging was unified. They even went so far as to require that on budget bills, each party brought at least 16 votes—a bare majority of its caucus—so they would share the responsibility for the spending outcomes.
Arnie Roblan.
"We would stand there with the gavel and wait for them to go figure it out. We’d say ‘’you haven’t given us your share yet, so the whips would go whip their people again and we just took the time and waited and didn’t get too uptight about it. And eventually every one worked out.
Observers say that goes further than most shared governing agreements. And it worked. They got the budget through and settled other thorny issues including redistricting, Medicaid expansion and education reform.
That degree of compromise wasn’t a given right at first. Jessica Adamson says both sides were toying with how they could gain the upper hand, to get around that 30-30 tie.
"At first there was a lot of work to figure out if you could steal somebody, right? Both the Republicans and the Democrats, we both tried to say, ‘I wonder if we could go poach representative so-and-so what if we gave so-and-so such and such and could get to 31?”
But they pretty quickly saw that the old tactics weren’t going to cut it. Representative Bruce Hanna:
"All kinds of dealmaking was going on behind the scenes. I would tell you, once Arnie and I got together, that went away pretty quickly. We just looked each other in the eye and just said ‘Hey, we got to get this done and we got to get it done in a way that Oregonians respect it."
Hanna and Roblan had to model that unity to set the tone.
They stayed in constant communication. It helped that the Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber and the Democratic Senate Majority Leader the late Peter Courtney treated them equally. The four of them met weekly and both co-speakers were included as chairs of the joint appropriations committee with Courtney. Roblan and Hanna had neighboring districts and had worked on bills together in previous sessions. Once the chamber was tied, they did events together in each other’s districts. A New York Times article of the day noted they even finished each other’s sentences.
Representative Hanna says, sure, their political views were different, but . . .
“I would say we had quite a bit in common, probably way more in common than difference.”
In the retrack file The co-leaders and their staffs worked on the rules right up until the wee hours before the session was scheduled to start. They drew on NCSL’s tracking of how chambers have managed ties, but reached a unique plan.
All members were involved in the discussions, even those who weren’t sworn in yet since, as Hanna notes, they were the ones who brought the chamber to a tie. They produced more than 30 pages of rules, and someone even came up with a unique way to commemorate the tie. They had a special gavel made with two handles —at least for ceremonial moments in the chamber.
It was especially important to make sure the committee co-leaders would be suited to this new kind of role. Bruce Hanna.
"You’re trying to find people’s not only their interest level, but also where they have a skills set and match those up. And then frankly those co-chairs matching them together so that they weren’t just oil and water. They had a chance to blend together and be good leaders together.”
Under the rules, bills wouldn’t even get to committee without approval of the co-chairs and the co-speakers. The reality sunk in for everyone. They’d have to find common ground. That would dictate what bills could even be considered, and certainly how each side crafted the bills they’d offer.
There were some hitches.
Representative Roblan.
"So many of them were frustrated and they would certainly come and let me know that the person they were working with, this wasn’t fair and I said, well, they have the equal power that you do. 50% of the people of Oregon voted for them and 50% voted for us. So that’s the way it is."
Adamson, who now works as a contract lobbyist for several organizations, says it’s not that there was no partisanship. Legislators did bring their viewpoints to the table and started from there to look for agreement. And just because both chairs agreed to hear each bill, that didn’t mean they all got voted out of committee. But a lot of hot button issues that typically come up simply couldn’t get traction since both parties had to agree.
"And so what it started to do was just pull the strife out of and the politics out of the session, there were just topics that were completely off the table, and that helped. It pulled the temperature down a lot.
Angela Wilhelms says that left room to have more thorough conversations about fewer bills, though the session did complete only slightly fewer bills than average.
"We had a general culture overall of that ///mutual respect and we were focused on less stuff, but getting that stuff better and more ready for prime time."
This is not to say the stuff they did focus on was simple.
Representative Roblan.
"We had a half a billion dollar deficit we had to figure out///We were also doing redistricting in the building, which hadn’t been done in forever. Usually they couldn’t work out anything so it went to the Secretary of state.”
And Representative Hanna notes they managed to agree on Medicaid expansion and taxes on hospitals to pay for it, something both sides had strong opinions about.
" I mean, if you think about it, during that cycle we overhauled the health care in the state of Oregon. That’s where the hospital tax came from. That’s what increased the number of people who can participate in Oregon Health plan. "
The work even included bills to upgrade the Capitol building and to go from paper time sheets to an electronic system. Adamson and Wilhelms say these are important measures that often don’t fly when only one party has the majority because they don’t want to take all the heat for spending the money. In this case everyone knew they were in it together and felt comfortable agreeing on the expenses.
After this session, voters returned a Democratic majority to the Oregon House and it has been that way since. In recent sessions Republicans have staged weeks of walk-outs to deny the Democrats quorum. Voters passed a measure to say lawmakers who have 10 unexcused absences cannot run for office again, but that hasn’t put an end to that tactic or other clashes between the parties.
Maybe then it’s no wonder people connected to the statehouse feel nostalgic about the biennium when everyone worked together.
Angela Wilhelms, who is now CEO of Oregon Business and Industry.
"Well, it’s interesting to think back to that session, especially juxtaposed against the divisive nature of politics today. I hear this from a lot of people, some who don’t even remember I was a staffer at the time, people just reflect on that biennium with a sense of fondness about how we didn’t spend a lot of time mired in the extremes."
Co-speakers Hanna and Roblan are clearly proud of what lawmakers and staff achieved when they forged a new way to work together. And they are grateful they got to team up to make it work. They agree that when compromise and collaboration are the only way forward in a split chamber, people who put the institution first and put their trust in each other are the key to success.
Arnie Roblan.
" You can do really hard things when you trust each other. "
Thanks for listening to Across the Aisle from the National Conference of State Legislatures. I’m Kelley Griffin. To share your stories of bipartisanship, email us at acrosstheaisle@ncsl.org