Oregon State Legislature sent this bulletin Thursday, September 26, 2019 by devadmin

At the beginning of the new year, in 1776, Thomas Paine published a Pamphlet to support the Patriot cause,  Common Sense. He wrote with clear, concise and beautifully simple word pictures that successfully rallied American colonists against the over-reaching rule of the British crown.

First, Paine set the stage by noting that the public often mistakes society with government.  This happens in our era, too. We mistake laws flowing from our state’s bureaucratic agencies as cultural or societal necessities, but they are not. Paine paints a picture where people are allowed to freely engage and work together to accomplish private tasks that improve the community, without requiring central planning or authority. He notes society and government are different, and,

“… they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.”

Oregon State Legislature sent this bulletin Thursday, May 25, 2017 by devadmin

Apparently, Oregon is tired of being a continual runner-up to California when it comes to restrictive gun control laws. The Oregon Senate recently released a lengthy 26 page bill composed of absurd and unnecessary regulations which will negatively impact the 2nd Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.

This bill (SB 1065) was thrown together in a surreal Frankgunsteinian fashion. Like Frankenstein, the only thing this bill needed was an electrifying jolt of sincere disregard for the constitutionally codified natural rights of Oregon’s citizens.

Oregon’s three leading Democrat gun grabbers, Sen. Prozanski (D-Eugene), Sen. Burdick (D- Portland), Rep. Williamson (D-Portland) introduced this villainous version of an omnibus, anti-gun bill. This bill includes legalese from several previous anti-gun bills that either died in committee or were set aside to be resurrected during the remaining weeks of this 2017 legislative session.

SB 1065 combines SB 764 and SB 797 plus portions of seven previous gun bills that never made their way forward (SB 495, SB 546, SB 549, SB 670, SB 804, SB 854 and SB 903).

Although this bill is a 26 page abomination, the metro-Democrats at least provided us with a delightful name for their legislation. The bill says, “this 2017 Act shall be known and may be cited as the Oregon Firearm Regulation Modernization Act.”

As usual, this very pleasant, forward-looking and enlightening language masks the true design of the legislation. Samuel Adams, in similar similar circumstances, noted, “It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer [our liberties] to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle; or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.”

To wit, here are a few lines of text from the 1,150 lines smashed into this debacle:

In this section, it is easy to see the gradual and evolutionary mutations that happen under the guise of improving public safety. There is no statistical evidence documenting the benefit of an additional 14 days for the background check. Additionally, there is no evidence that more time is required. After all, they are using the internet for criminal background data aggregation.

The public is led to believe that more time would allow the security experts to do their job more thoroughly. Yet, information overload bogs down most government systems.

Remember,  the FBI knew of Omar Mateen and interviewed him on two different occasions. Mateen is the man who killed 49 and injured more than 50 others at a gay nightclub in Orlando, FL. The FBI surveilled Mateen and they followed leads that he knew Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Mateen’s co-worker reported that information directly to the FBI.

According to a 2016 report published by The Intercept:

 “The bureau forces agents to close assessments because agents are pursuing thousands of assessments nationwide under a policy to pursue any and all leads, no matter how ridiculous they are. The caseload can be overwhelming for FBI offices.”

In any similar situation, how would Oregon’s State Police (OSP) wade through this overload? Will this eventually lead to funding increases for staffing, newer computer systems and evermore surveillance gear?

The complexity of the problem comes from believing that the state can protect everyone, all the time. They simply cannot. Security cannot be obtained by trading away our civil liberties. Evil can’t be stopped by disarming those who contribute most to public safety – the public.

Also, with regard to SB 1065, the restrictions apply to all firearms. Not just handguns. This includes every self-defense weapon, hunting rifle, varmint rifle, waterfowl and quail-gun.

A complete disregard for the public’s interest is inherent in SB 1065’s language. These lines of text describe that, “if the department fails to provide a unique approval number to a gun dealer,” then no transfer can legally take place.

“Fails to provide.” What does that mean? Didn’t want to; never got to it; misplaced the paperwork; computer glitch; all of these would be failures.

Firearm dealers carry a Federal Firearms License (FFL) that enables them to engage in the sale and transfer of firearms. Currently, federal law allows a licensed firearm dealer to release a firearm after three business days if they have not received any additional correspondence after being notified of  a “delay” when conducting the initial background check for a firearm transfer. This bill would increase the wait time in Oregon to 14 days.

Today, a deferral from OSP does not necessarily mean a transfer to the recipient is prohibited, but rather that a determination has not yet been made. Would the “failures” clouded in SB 1065’s language be considered out-right “denials?”

Oregon Firearms Federation made this statement, “This bill does many other bad things and has serious technical flaws, but its clear intent is to create more obstacles and impediments to lawful firearms ownership.”

SB 1065 is proof positive that bad bills, or legislative mutants, can be brought back to life by a jolt of legislative juice from the Democrat majority.

Remember, if we don’t stand for rural Oregon values and Common-sense –
No one Will.

Send an eMail Today!

Best Regards,

Dennis Linthicum
Oregon State Senate 28

Oregon State Legislature sent this bulletin Thursday, May 18, 2017 by devadmin

Common-sense seems to be slipping away from our public consciousness. With common-sense no one needs a biology expert, scientist, certificate or license. With common-sense one can understand plain self-evident truths and you don’t even need a PhD.

The government, or the statists, have layered on so many controls that more and more of our independence is falling away. Under their dominion, we rarely have the freedom to live out our own lives as we see fit. The safety of the collective is deemed more important than the freedom of the individual.

Government intervention is growing more and more burdensome. As a result, people have become complacent. Their reluctance is only natural. After all, who can fight the voluminous regulations? This in turn, causes people to forego using their own common-sense. They see common-sense as a tool that no longer works in the modern world.

In fact, it doesn’t work because the vast majority of the rules and regulations were never constructed with any sense in mind. People end up just going along to get-along. Common-sense is missing today because it is now more advantageous to suffer the idiocy while at least making ends meet. This is a dangerous place for our society.

For example, take the water shut-off at Crater Lake.

The current snow-level is still between 100 and 120 inches. Parking is difficult due to the piles of snow in the parking lots. The park received more than 570 inches of snow in 2017. Yet, people will be informed that the park is experiencing a water shortage!

Tourists and Oregonians visiting Crater Lake will struggle making sense of the scene at the rim. The lake is beautiful, blue and full, the skyline is magnificent and the air is fresh and clear. However, the Rangers will inform them of the severe water shortage. They will be told to greatly limit their water consumption. The park will instruct our visitors to use non-flush toilets, take short showers, wash camp dishes, dry-brush teeth and clean the kids – all with their own dainty-wipe. Does this make sense?

Everyone is aware that these restricted conditions are due to a Tribal water call which included Annie Creek. Annie Creek, which normally supplies the park’s water, is a tributary of the Wood River and Upper Klamath Lake watershed affected by the call.

A priority call allows a water-right holder who has a senior priority claim to secure his water first. This may require other secondary water-right holders to undergo water volume restrictions or other regulations, so that priority rights can be met. This current call simply doesn’t make logical sense, since current stream-flow volumes are off the charts and there is more water in our rivers, tributaries and reaches than in the past several decades.

Never-the-less, this call, as senseless as it is, leads Crater Lake National Park to find an alternative water source.

The park typically uses about 36,000 gallons a day in May and that use will increase as summer visitation spikes in July and August – Chiloquin to the rescue!

The City of Chiloquin has contracted to pump 2.5 million gallons of water out of their groundwater well, place it into tanker trucks, drive it 40 miles round-trip while traversing several thousand feet of elevation to fill water storage tanks at the park.

The cost of buying water from the city of Chiloquin is nearly $40,000, while the cost of hauling the water will be closer to $400,000 for May & June. The absurdity hits the fan when one realizes that the rivers are flooding, snow is piled high, an existing aquifer is being tapped, millions of acre-feet of water are flowing into the salty Pacific, and the public will probably expend over $1,000,000 to accomplish – nothing

Oregon State Legislature sent this bulletin Thursday, April 6, 2017 by devadmin
Legislatures all across the nation are now besieging their citizenry with innumerable laws, regulations and rules designed to bring full fruition to Roosevelt’s 1941 “freedom from want, and freedom from fear” congressional address.

Senate Bill 754 is known as the “Vaping and Tobacco Ban” measure. It was , and it sounds fairly simple. It increases the minimum age from 18 to 21 years for the legal purchase of tobacco, nicotine and vaping products.

I think the legislature gave it’s best shot at offering 18 to 21-year old adults an entirely new freedom – “freedom from responsibility.”

Oregon’s statists see an enormous political opportunity. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, it must tickle their fancy to dream about growing the state as they create a new, formerly unrecognized class of constituents. The new group will be a bevy of individuals who formerly were law-abiding citizens but will soon become law-breakers in need of ever-more services.

The nanny-state will squeeze another three years of control over a group which they deem in need of protection. If we read between the lines, the nanny-staters are hoping this “freedom from responsibility” will enable more state intervention for many years to come.

The claim is that this legislation is needed because these adults aren’t capable of making their own choices. Or, maybe, it is needed because evil shop-owners are “in it for the money” and should be fined for burdening future taxpayers with unsustainable healthcare costs.

The latest science purports that those with brains under 21-years old are not running at full capacity. Apparently this immature state of the human brain will be seriously harmed by exposure to nicotine and therefore the state needs to jump in to protect these defenseless creatures.

The questions are, 1) can these adults make decisions for themselves? or, 2) can we relieve them from responsibility and assign blame elsewhere?

Socialism demands that less than 21-year-olds aren’t capable of good decision-making, they therefore need state-intervention. Socialism also demands that businessmen and businesswomen be held accountable as greedy capitalists.

Even in this legislation, the only legislated answer takes place in penalizing  businesses. The small business will be forced to wear a crown of thorns made up of various fines, penalties, enhanced regulatory efforts and more stringent control over their enterprise for daring to fill a market demand for tobacco products.

The bill imposes a $50 fine on the poor clerk who makes a mistake of selling this new contraband to a minor. Then, there is a simultaneous fine of $250 for the manager on his clerks’s first flub. The manager’s fine goes up to $500 on the next mistaken sale. The clerk will continually get knocked about with the $50 fine for each and every occurrence. Additionally, the store owner, will get a $500 fine for the clerk’s first mistake along with the manager’s $250 fine and then the fine jumps to $1,000 for the owner, while the manager is fined his $500 and the clerk is fined $50 again.

Clearly, shop owners are smart enough to ensure this won’t happen. At least not in any traceable amounts. Why not? because, if caught, the fines are so stiff. Perfect right?

No!

There are somewhere between 16,000 – 18,000 Oregonians that are currently between the ages of 12 and 21 who have self identified as smokers. Two questions, 1) Where are the 12 -18 year olds currently getting their illicit smokes? 2) How does raising the legal smoking age to 21 change the reality that 12-18 year olds can currently acquire cigarettes while being “underage”?

We all know the answer. They will simply buy them from their 21 year old contraband dealer rather than their former 18 year old supplier.

I’m all in favor of drawing a line but the line ought to be a red-line and it ought to meet consistency requirements for soliciting universal acceptance of what adulthood means. The people targeted by this legislation can vote, go to war, bear children, abort children and go through sex-change operations all while under the age of twenty-one. I’m not advocating for any of these things but these highlight the inconsistencies that the legislature has created.

Additionally, I would argue that the long-term medical costs and consequences from each of the above named activities is every bit as serious as the long-term cost of care associated with tobacco usage.

It is hard to imagine how Oregon’s youth will ever mature into responsible adulthood when the legislature is continually stripping them of key facets of their autonomy. After all, when does an adult exercise good judgment? Does it really happen the day following their twenty-first birthday?

I believe the real issue is one of human dignity.

• What does it mean to be free?
• What does it mean to guide one’s own future, to be responsible for one’s own choices and actions?
• Will these new-found criminal offenses make Oregon a healthier, happier, more prosperous place for raising our families? 

Every time the nanny-state intrudes into the middle of our families, then our individual liberty and personal responsibility is diminished. The gradual accumulation of small, seemingly insignificant legislated tyrannies will destroy the very foundation upon which our free republic was built.

This is not new. The history of the world is rich with similar circumstances spanning all periods of human history. In fact, here in America John Adams warned the colonialists about the potential danger arising from seemingly legitimate Parliamentary actions. He wrote, “Be not intimidated… nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.”

Best Regards,

Dennis Linthicum
Oregon State Senate 28

Oregon State Legislature sent this bulletin Friday, April 5, 2019 by devadmin

When a calf dies at birth, a rancher might decide to “graft” a substitute calf so that the mother cow can provide nurture to the substitute. The most reliable form of grafting happens when the hide of the dead calf is put onto the substitute calf. The cow knows the smell of her own calf (even if it was dead at birth) and this substitution can trick the cow into accepting the substitute as her own.

In the Oregon legislature, when a bill dies, something else can get grafted into its hide. Around the capital this is known as a “gut and stuff.” You might think of it like putting a wolf into the sheep’s clothing.

Last week an extremely disturbing water bill was dropped into a Senate Judiciary Committee placeholder bill with a “relating to courts” clause. This water bill fits neatly into this category because parties affected by a final order during a regulatory water action can appeal to the circuit court, or the Court of Appeals. The court has the authority to affirm, reverse, or modify the original order.

The Bill (977-1), would eliminate an irrigator’s ability to secure a “stay,” or pause, in the action ordered by the regulating agency as prescribed in ORS 536.075 (5). The opportunity for a “stay” provides water user protection and due process while being a safety valve against frivolous, invalid, futile, or erroneous final orders. The rules, in place since the mid-80’s, recognize that orders may have been secured with poorly-developed evidentiary findings, inconsistent applicability, or for nefarious purposes.

The sub-section that would be stripped from a right holder’s toolbox is:

ORS 536.075 (5) The filing of a petition in either the circuit court or the Court of Appeals shall stay enforcement of the order of the commission or the department unless the commission or the department determines that substantial public harm will result if the order is stayed. If the commission or the department denies the stay, the denial shall be in writing and shall specifically state the substantial public harm that will result from allowing the stay.

Destroying this part of procedural due process would be devastating to water right holders who are under a curtailment action during or mid-way through an irrigation season.

For background, Oregon water rights are regulated in accordance with the doctrine of prior appropriation. This means that in times of water shortages, senior water right holders are entitled to have their rights fully satisfied before junior users are entitled to their water rights. Please note, both senior and secondary water rights are vested property rights that cannot be altered without due process of law.

When a secondary user is curtailed, due process consists of, first, a written notice, and, second, a meaningful opportunity to be heard before a neutral body prior to being deprived of that vested property interest.

The existing statute ensures that in situations where there is significant uncertainty as to whether a junior user is being erroneously curtailed, Oregon Water Resource Department (OWRD) shut-off orders are stayed until such time as the junior user has the opportunity to be heard in court. The stay action is extremely important because it allows irrigators to continue their agricultural business operations while awaiting more thorough research.

Many times, curtailment orders across the state are inappropriately issued because of bad science, misinformation or stratagems approaching malfeasance. Last season, nearly 140 groundwater wells were curtailed due to OWRD’s faulty modeling and unjustified regulation. In turn, nearly a dozen of these agricultural operations filed appeals and were granted the stay. OWRD eventually agreed to settle and pay irrigators’ attorney fees and court costs and the irrigators were allowed to continue their operations.

In these due process cases, and many others, the automatic stay granted under ORS 536.075 (5) was justified because the agency took arbitrary positions that were contrary to either the facts, or the law, or both.

This happens again and again, all over the state.

The importance of the statute is that it ensures irrigators’ rights are preserved before their water use is needlessly curtailed and their property right unjustly taken.

Statewide, as in the examples cited, impertinent arguments could stop any agricultural enterprise dead in its tracks. This action would be economically devastating to the junior water right holder, harm private property rights, the local community and public good, while tipping the balance of unmitigated power. The needless removal of this statute would enhance the opportunity for future bureaucratic or process corruption while weakening the overall rule of law.

Our nation’s founders were familiar with the subject of corruption. They took for granted that the dominant motive of human behavior was self-interest, and that this drive found its “most extreme political expression in an insatiable lust for power.” In recognizing this they devised a system of checks, balances and procedural due processes that could successfully thwart “the predominant thirst of dominion which has invariably and uniformly prompted rulers to abuse their power.”

Please write to your legislators today! (Click here to submit testimony)

Oppose SB 977-1 because it would allow the default taking of a citizen’s property right while stripping away the property holder’s access to effectual redress by creating a lop-sided legal process.

The hearing is scheduled for Monday, April 8, 2019, at 8:00AM.

If you are in the Salem area or are nearby, please consider coming in to testify.

Remember, “If you are negligent or inattentive, the ambitious and despotic will entrap you in their toils, and bind you with the cord of power from which you, and your posterity, may never be freed.”   – Cato I, New York Journal, September 27, 1787

If we don’t stand for rural Oregon values and common sense – No one will!

Dennis Linthicum
Oregon State Senate 28