Oregon Republicans say Dems delaying vote on wildfire map repeal to get votes for wildfire funding
A wildfire outside Ukiah in Umatilla County in 2024, part of the Battle Mountain Complex of fires that burned more than 183,000 acres. Gov. Tina Kotek has asked the Oregon Legislature for more than a year to find more, stable funding to fight wildfires in the state. (Courtesy of Northwest Interagency Coordination Center)
A bill to repeal the state's unpopular Wildfire Hazard Map passed the Oregon Senate unanimously in April, signaling it would be one of the least controversial and most bipartisan bills to pass this session.
But that momentum hit unexpected headwinds May 22, when the bill — Senate Bill 83 — landed in the Oregon House's Committee on Climate, Energy, and Environment, where Democrats opted to send it to the House Rules Committee, rather than to the House floor for a final vote.
The decision to delay a vote on Senate Bill 83 came as a surprise to Republicans on the Committee, who later accused Democrats, House Speaker Julie Fahey, D-Eugene, and Gov. Tina Kotek of using it as a bargaining chip in negotiations over a wildfire funding proposal that would redirect $1 billion from the state's 'kicker' tax return. That proposal would require a two-thirds supermajority vote in each chamber, meaning at least two Senate Republicans and four House Republicans would need to approve along with all legislative Democrats.
'The speaker has been consistent that we cannot responsibly repeal the wildfire risk maps without also having a clear, workable plan for how we manage wildfire risk in the future, including how we fund that work,' Jill Bakken, Fahey's spokesperson, said in an email.
Anca Matica, a Kotek spokesperson, said in an email that 'the legislative branch is the custodian of information regarding bills moving through the legislative process, not the Governor's Office.'
Oregon Republicans have long insisted that the kicker — returned to Oregon taxpayers when personal income taxes collected by the state end up at least 2% higher than budgeted — is not to be spent by the Legislature.
In a news release May 22, Ashley Kuenzi, communications director for the Oregon Senate Republicans, said the 'spirit of collaboration has seemingly vanished' between Democrats and Republicans on Senate Bill 83. State Sen. David Brock Smith, R-Port Orford, who supported its passage in the Senate, said in the release it was a 'stunning reversal' and 'clear betrayal.'
'Holding rural Oregonians hostage over votes for future wildfire funding is not only obscene, but disgraceful. Put the damn bill on the floor for a vote!' he said.
If passed, Senate Bill 83 would repeal the map produced under a multi-year effort by scientists at state agencies and Oregon State University that show where the highest risk of wildfires are throughout the state. The map provoked backlash from homeowners in some high-risk areas worried about wildfire insurance rates and coverage and potentially having to comply with new building requirements.
State Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, who carried Senate Bill 83 in the Senate, has been outspoken that the map should be repealed because of unintended consequences, including widespread misinformation about how the map was intended to be used, creating distrust between some property owners and state agencies.
In a text, Golden said House Democrats' decision not to move the bill straight to the House floor for a vote is making the repeal of the maps 'more complicated than it needed to be.'
'To me, the smartest path from the start was to unite around map repeal and get it to the Governor's desk to show folks we all put protecting the state ahead of politics,' he said. 'That's what we did in the Senate. Looks like the thinking in the House was different but nobody's told me what it is.'
Golden is also behind the proposal just now gaining steam to use $1 billion of the state's anticipated $1.64 billion kicker to fund much needed wildfire prevention and response work throughout the state. Golden proposed the idea months ago to little fanfare, but Gov. Tina Kotek recently signaled her support for the idea in the absence of other options, telling reporters at a news conference May 20 it would be 'a beneficial approach.'
Kotek has asked the Legislature for more than a year to come up with a reliable and consistent funding mechanism to support statewide wildfire work and has so far not received any proposals that come close to meeting her desired target of an additional $150 million per year. Putting $1 billion of the kicker into an account that accrues 5% interest each year could provide the state with at least $50 million of that.
'That would be very helpful for the state,' Kotek told reporters.
CORRECTION: Kuenzi is communications director for the Oregon Senate Republicans, not House Republicans, as previously reported.
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Newsweek
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Atlantic
an hour ago
- Atlantic
The Red State Where Republicans Aren't Afraid of Trump
Donald Trump's least favorite House Republican, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, likes to do an exaggerated impression of the president. As he recounted a long-ago phone call from Trump before a crowd of supporters in his district, Massie dropped the register of his voice to an octave resembling Yogi Bear's. 'It started out with: I'm more libertarian than you are,' Massie said. 'And it ended with: Well, you're going to get a primary if you vote for this.' The eruption that followed created a scene that you're unlikely to see anywhere else in America these days: a roomful of Republicans laughing at Trump's expense. The 54-year-old has been frustrating Trump since the beginning of the president's first term. The two are now fighting over the extent of Trump's war powers—Massie called the air strikes on Iran unconstitutional—and the president's 'big, beautiful bill,' which the seventh-term lawmaker opposed, one of just two House Republicans to do so. 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And if he is unopposed, I just wouldn't vote,' he told me after a local GOP meeting. The clashes between Trump and the Kentucky trio are a sensitive topic among state GOP officials, many of whom are hesitant to take sides against either the popular president or their influential local leaders. 'I'm MAGA all the way, and I'm Massie all the way,' Ken Moellman Sr., a retiree and one of Massie's constituents in northern Kentucky, told me. He compared the Trump-Massie relationship to a marriage. 'Sometimes you disagree, but when you disagree, that doesn't mean you get divorced.' The twice-divorced president seems to be pining for a breakup, however. He has repeatedly called for Massie's defeat in a primary—'GET THIS 'BUM' OUT OF OFFICE, ASAP!!!' Trump posted on Monday—and two of his top allies have formed a Kentucky political action committee to recruit a GOP challenger in Massie's district. The group began running a 30-second ad last week urging voters to 'fire Thomas Massie.' Although Massie has aggressively raised money off the president's attacks, he professes to not care about the threat to his seat. Trump, Massie likes to boast, earned fewer votes in Kentucky's Fourth Congressional District than he did. 'I'm not worried about losing,' he told me last month in the Capitol. To outsiders, Kentucky's politics can be hard to grasp. In some respects, the state is no different than any other Republican stronghold. Outside of the urban centers of Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky is largely rural and conservative. The state has not backed a Democrat for president or for the U.S. Senate since the 1990s. All but one of Kentucky's six House members are Republican, as are the majorities in both chambers of its legislature. But even as the state has gone decisively for Trump the past three elections, it has twice elected a Democratic governor, Andy Beshear. And the pair of Republicans that voters have sent to the Senate, McConnell and Paul, are as different from one another as any two senators from the same party in the country. McConnell is the institutionalist: a Reaganite and a Kentucky power broker who is now one of the last members of the GOP's old guard still serving in Congress. Paul arrived in Washington as part of the Tea Party wave of 2010, having upset a McConnell-backed front-runner in the primary by campaigning as a spending hawk. Massie won election to the House two years later on the Tea Party banner. 'We've always been a bit all over the place in the candidates that we support,' Rick VanMeter, a strategist from Kentucky who has worked for several Republicans in the state, told me. Although McConnell and Paul vote with Trump more often than they cross him, the president lacks a loyalist in the state's most powerful offices. That will probably change after next year's election to fill McConnell's seat, which Republicans will be heavily favored to win. The two leading candidates, Representative Andy Barr and Kentucky's former attorney general Daniel Cameron, are each stressing their support for Trump's agenda. Another contender, Nate Morris—who has ties to Vice President J. D. Vance and Donald Trump Jr.—joined the race this week. None of them is likely to highlight their connection to McConnell, whose popularity among Kentucky Republicans has plummeted in the years since he steered Trump's tax cuts and the president's three Supreme Court nominees through the Senate. (In fact, McConnell has been America's least popular senator for more than four years, according to one metric.) McConnell blamed Trump for the Capitol riot on January 6 (although he voted to acquit him in the Senate's impeachment trial), and he endorsed Trump only reluctantly last year. Multiple falls and freezing spells have slowed the 83-year-old, contributing to his decision not to seek an eighth Senate term in 2026. As I traveled around Kentucky last week, a few Republicans hailed McConnell's past leadership and the billions in funding that he's secured for the state. But hardly anyone I spoke with was sad to see him go. 'I can't stand him. He's a traitor,' Don Reilly, a Trump backer and former president of the Boone County Business Association in northern Kentucky, told me. The conflict among Republicans has put Kentucky Democrats in the awkward position of rooting for Paul, Massie, and McConnell to hold the line against Trump, with the hope that their opposition could force him to retreat on tariffs or sink the president's megabill. Last week I found a group of Democrats demonstrating outside of McConnell's office, urging him to reject the GOP legislation that would slash Medicaid while extending Trump's first-term tax cuts and boosting spending on immigration enforcement and the Pentagon. They were unimpressed by McConnell's more recent criticism of Trump. 'He gets credit for that, but it's too little, too late,' Leah Netherland, a 69-year-old retiree, told me. 'He is in large part responsible for Trump.' Beshear, whose success in a deep-red state has attracted national notice, seems to be watching the GOP infighting with some bemusement. 'If Senator Paul, Senator McConnell, and I all say that tariffs are a bad idea, it's because they're a really bad idea,' the governor told me after a Juneteenth event in Lexington. Yet Beshear can only cheer them on so much. None of the Republicans battling Trump are centrists; Paul and Massie are opposing the president's bill because it doesn't cut spending deeply enough. 'The bill needs to die, but not for the reasons they're talking about,' Beshear said. The louder voices of discontent in Kentucky, however, are coming from Trump's base, which is heeding the president's call to ramp up pressure on his Republican critics. With McConnell retiring and Paul not up for reelection until 2028, the immediate target is Massie. Trump's backers in Washington and Kentucky are casting about for a serious challenger in Massie's district, and a few state legislators are considering the race, Republicans in the state told me. (One conservative, Niki Lee Ethington, a nurse and former parole officer, has launched a campaign, but she is not well known throughout the district.) Massie's base in northern Kentucky has a large libertarian contingent, and since his first reelection in 2014, he's never won fewer than 75 percent of votes in a primary. But a well-funded, Trump-backed campaign, should one emerge, would be something else entirely. In addition to motivating the president's frustrated base, a challenger could activate local Republicans who believe Massie's refusal to fight for the district's share of federal spending has hurt its bid for needed infrastructure projects. 'They're kind of over Massie's schtick,' VanMeter, the GOP strategist, told me. Gallatin County, which sits along the Ohio River about an hour's drive south of Cincinnati, is the second-smallest of Kentucky's 120 counties. It's one of 21 counties in Massie's congressional district, which stretches nearly 200 miles from the outskirts of Louisville to the state's eastern border. Last week, the quarterly meeting of Gallatin's Republican Party drew just eight attendees, who sat around folding tables at the public library in Warsaw, the county seat. The main order of business was a vote on whether to spend some of the roughly $1,800 that the committee had in its campaign account—a number nearly equivalent to Warsaw's population—on new signage for the party to display at festivals, county fairs, and other events. The bickering between Trump and Kentucky's GOP rebels did not come up, and perhaps that was for the best. Like many party organizations in the district, Gallatin's Republicans are divided over the Trump-Massie feud. The committee's vice chair, Wayne Rassman, told me he had grown frustrated with Massie's opposition to the president. 'He's not listening to the people in his district,' Rassman told me. 'I don't know what made him go off the deep end.' The party treasurer, Donna Terry, said that she used to be for Massie but no longer is. 'I'm a little fed up,' she told me. Both of them said they would probably back a primary challenger next year. The chair of Gallatin's GOP is Jim Kinman, a 51-year-old delivery specialist. He accepted the post reluctantly, explaining to me that the state party had told the county committee that it would be disbanded if it didn't elect a slate of officers. When I caught up with Kinman after the meeting, he lowered his voice before wading into the Trump-Massie fracas. He said that he had never gotten into the 'cultish' dynamic surrounding Trump, whom he did not support in 2016. 'Generally, he's done a good job,' Kinman said of the president. But, he added, 'when the rubber meets the road, I'm going to be with Thomas.' Kinman told me that his loyalty to Massie has caused consternation among his fellow Republicans in the area, but he wasn't budging. 'Thomas legitimately is the only person I trust more than myself,' Kinman said. Whereas many Kentucky Republicans want their representatives to back Trump unconditionally, Kinman said he admired Massie's adherence to his longtime principles. He compared him favorably to Paul, who is often aligned with Massie but has been a bit more open to compromise during the Trump era. (Kinman had nothing nice to say about McConnell, referring to him both as 'a snake' and 'the turtle.') 'We got plenty of people that are for rent,' Kinman said of politicians who too easily trade away their values. 'I'm glad that Thomas is not.' Massie was about to go bowling last weekend when Trump bombed Iran. With the House on recess, he was back in his district for an event with the Northern Kentucky Young Republicans, a group filled with his acolytes. The gathering was a relaxed affair—Massie nursed a Michelob Ultra and wore an untucked turquoise polo shirt—and represented a small show of force for his standing in the area. The organization has hosted other prominent Kentucky Republicans, including each of the major potential GOP contenders to replace McConnell in the Senate. But its president, T. J. Roberts, told me that Massie's event was the best attended. At 27, Roberts is the second-youngest state legislator in Kentucky history and one of several conservatives known as 'Massie's Nasties' for their loyalty to the seven-term representative—and for their occasional hardball campaign tactics. Like many at the bowling alley on Saturday night, Roberts said that he admires Massie and Trump with equal fervor. He told me that he didn't take the president's demand for a primary challenge seriously. 'President Trump is using this as a pressure technique against other members who may sway,' Roberts told me. 'It's a smart move. If I were in his shoes, I'd do the same thing.' As for Massie, Roberts said: 'He's inoculated from primaries.' Yet without impugning Trump, Roberts made sure to remind the crowd of around 80 people of Massie's MAGA credentials. 'There is no one who represents MAGA in Congress better than Thomas Massie,' Roberts said. 'He was MAGA before MAGA was a thing.' Massie began his speech by reminding the crowd of his overall support for Trump, but he tackled their disagreements head on, starting with the impending confrontation with Iran. Touting the resolution that he had introduced to block the president from ordering a unilateral military attack, Massie said, 'I have his respect, and he has mine, but he cannot engage us in a war without a vote of Congress.' The crowd applauded his stance. But unbeknownst to Massie, his argument was all but moot: Soon after he left the stage, Trump announced that U.S. warplanes had already struck Iran's nuclear sites. Like Trump, Massie is a storyteller who revels in sharing behind-the-scenes anecdotes that many politicians prefer either to keep private or to divulge without their names attached. Sass is a core part of his image, both in person and on social media, where he frequently uses the tagline #sassywithmassie. (Earlier this week when Vance wondered whether other vice presidents experienced 'as much excitement' as he has, Massie responded on X: 'Ask Mike Pence about his last month,' referring to January 6.) Read: Republicans still can't say no to Trump During his speech, Massie argued that Trump respected him 'because he knows I'm not a yes man' while also slyly mocking the president in ways that few Republicans dare to do in public. Massie described a House Republican conference meeting last month during which Trump droned on about him for so long that he had assumed the president was talking about someone else. At one point, Trump compared Massie with Paul. 'They're both from Kentucky, you can never get them to vote for anything, and they basically have the same hair,' Trump explained, according to Massie. 'Actually,' the president quickly added, 'I like Massie's hair better.' As the crowd at the bowling alley laughed, Massie quipped, 'Take the wins where you can get them!' Despite Massie's outward confidence about the prospect of a Trump-backed primary challenge, he has made some small moves that suggest a desire to declare a truce. He agreed to withdraw his war-powers resolution after Trump announced a cease-fire between Israel and Iran, at least temporarily abandoning the Democrats who planned to push it forward anyway. And although Massie voted against Trump's megabill when it passed the House last month, he insisted that he was open to supporting its final passage if the Senate makes changes to his liking. 'I'm a gettable vote!' he told me after his speech. (He explained his thinking this way to his supporters: 'I'll vote for a crap sandwich. I just want a pickle and two slices of bread.') I posed to Massie the question that had brought me to Kentucky in the first place: Why does a state that voted so strongly for Trump have such a disproportionate share of the president's GOP critics in high office? He replied by invoking Kentucky's divided status in the Civil War. 'We were a border state,' Massie said. 'We are independent in Kentucky, and I don't think you can take our vote for granted, whether it's representatives or constituents.' The coming months will test if that long-ago legacy still applies. Kentucky has clearly picked a side in the modern political wars, and its Republican voters must decide whether to force their remaining elected holdouts to join them.
