Oregon Students Furious Over Governor Doing Her Job

Townhall Media/Beth Baumann

The job of an elected official is to pass laws and make sure the government is running efficiently.

Well, their purpose is to do stupid things to justify their positions and get in the way of people trying to exercise their God-given rights, but the first definition is far more likely to appear in a textbook somewhere.

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In Oregon, Governor Kate Brown had to make a decision. Republicans were refusing to show up, thus refusing to allow there to be a quorum for any legislation to pass. Their reason? A gun control bill needed to die.

So, Brown tossed the bill to bring the GOP back to the table. In other words, she did her job and recognized that the law wasn’t going to happen.

Now, students who pushed for the bill in the first place are furious.

These student leaders from around the state spoke out after a sweeping Senate gun control bill was dropped by Brown and Senate Democrats in an apparent effort to attract needed votes to an education funding bill.

According to students, Gov. Kate Brown recently traded away with SB 978 to get Republicans back to work. They said the measure was a comprehensive gun safety bill and lawmakers used their bill as a bargaining chip instead of taking their safety into consideration.

Sadie, a 13-year-old from a middle school in Northeast Portland, said she campaigned with Brown on Senate Bill 978 — and pointed to a Brown tweet about those efforts. The unexpected shelving of the gun bill feels like a broken promise to her.

Student leaders said our political system may be failinig[sic] them, but they will not go away and will never stop fighting until their classrooms feel safe again.

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And they wonder why we look at their efforts and mock them.

Look, the legislative process is ugly. It requires wheeling and dealing, and it’s something that no one likes to acknowledge. They want their guys to be uncompromising and steadfast while demanding the other side give ground.

That’s not how it works, especially in a case like this.

The Oregon GOP was ready to stay gone for as long as it took to kill the gun control bill. It was not going to pass. Brown recognized that and shifted gears onto something she felt could pass and wasn’t nearly as controversial.

Frankly, I respect the hell out of Brown for doing it.

Now, I’m not defending the school funding bill or anything. I haven’t paid much attention to it because I don’t live in Oregon and I don’t cover school funding issues, so I’ve had no reason to pay attention to it.

What I am doing is pointing out that while most anti-gun lawmakers demand the pro-gun side “compromise” while almost never giving up anything in return, Brown did. She compromised by tossing a bill the other side hated to pass something else.

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Unfortunately, these children–and I’m using that term because of their behavior on this, not their age–want to throw a tantrum because Brown did her job. Her office doesn’t revolve around gun control. Its focus is to keep the state government functioning. That means things like paying teachers.

If they don’t grasp that, then they needed that funding bill passed far worse than any anti-gun measure.

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