Oregon State Legislature sent this bulletin sunday, november 22, 2023, by devadmin
The 82nd Oregon Legislative Assembly has reached the halfway mark. The same party is still in control and there are still many bad bills that could very well become law. Most of these bills seem to target traditional norms and family values. They want to employ government as a moral force in place of religion, free individual agency, and the free enterprise values that have helped Oregon prosper.
My goal is to keep the information cycle alive by focusing on the principles that are at stake. Often, newsletters get tangled up in Bad Bills and Good Bills. This helps generate a lot of attention and calls for action, yet underneath it all, the majority is bankrupting the public.
There were more than 4,500 bills submitted for this session. This is too many bills to process. Legislators cannot make truly prudent decisions regarding some of these enormous policy issues with any reasonable degree of propriety or understanding. My floor speech against SB 704, the bill that seeks to set up the universal health care measure that passed last election, is an example of this. Watch my floor speech here.
I believe SB 704 sets up dominoes for a tragic chain of events that will happen in Oregon’s future because it promotes medical science data miners, which may be legitimate, but by opening those avenues for data mining, it also allows others to navigate through those data systems and create fraudulent entries. I haven’t seen anything to indicate Oregon will take care of the private health care data in its charge.
Oregon does not have a stellar track record when it comes to protecting data. For example, the Oregon Employment Department was audited three separate times, each with the recommendation to update its out-of-touch computer systems, and despite being awarded millions of dollars from the federal government to do so, the OED did not take steps to protect Oregonians’ sensitive information, making it possible for thieves to steal countless unemployment checks from hard-working Oregonians in 2020-21.
As people who care about right/wrong, good/evil, and the deliberative political process that comes with our federally constituted republic, our society needs to swiftly develop a reliance on over-arching principles that can guide our decision making, rather than allowing government to do as it pleases. We cannot afford to get trapped by our own subjective preferences. We must be willing to stand on constitutional values and principles, such as limited government, free markets, and federalism.
For example, I gave a remonstrance on the Senate floor about the corruption and lack of transparency in Oregon’s education system. Watch here.
Oregon has plenty of room for improvement in all areas of transparency and accountability, especially in education. Kids in Oregon schools are not performing well. A recent article noted Oregon school achievement scores have been “dropping at every grade and subject tested — some as much as 10 percentage points.”
The report continues, “According to the latest data, which reflects the 2021-22 school year, fewer than 44% of Oregon students tested were proficient in English language arts. About 30% were considered proficient in math and 29.5% in science. By comparison, in 2019, about 53% of Oregon students tested proficient in English, 39% in math and 37% in science.”
It’s statistics like these that shed light on why school districts don’t want to share the hard data about how their schools are performing, and it isn’t because “domestic terrorists” (or parents who care about their children’s education) will flush them out. No, they would rather hide than share the truth.
Our schools have violated their sacred duty of shaping young minds by focusing on activism instead. The government has abandoned our children on the altar of mediocrity and bureaucratic ineptitude. Changing the current education paradigm must remain a top priority and your neighborhood school is a great place to start.
One item that would have provided education freedom to students and their families is my bill, SB 706. It would allow Oregon students to attend any school in the state, opening school choice opportunities across both rural and metro areas. The bill would improve academic prospects for schoolchildren and incentivize creative ideas for innovation in educational services.
Stay tuned, as we stay in the fight and stand strong for common sense solutions for Oregonians.
If we don’t stand for rural Oregon Values and common-sense… No one will!
Regards,
Dennis Linthicum
Oregon State Senate – District 28