Page 4A
East Oregonian
Thursday, November 1, 2018
CHRISTOPHER RUSH
Publisher
KATHRYN B. BROWN
Owner
DANIEL WATTENBURGER
Managing Editor
WYATT HAUPT JR.
News Editor
Founded October 16, 1875
OUR VIEW
Democracy isn’t meant
to be easy for officials
A
few words about government
transparency: It makes
democracy messy for
government officials; it makes
democracy inconvenient for those who
hold power; it makes democracy work.
The Kate Brown administration got
a quick comeuppance last week and a
partial lesson in transparency.
The Oregon Department of
Education quietly decided it was not
releasing the annual school district
report cards, as had been scheduled
for last week, and instead would delay
them until Nov. 15.
The public was outraged.
Gubernatorial candidate Knute Buehler
seized on this — rightly so — as an
example of Gov. Brown’s lack of
transparency. At Brown’s direction,
the DOE hastily reversed course and
released the data, more or less.
The public now can use the DOE
website to look up report cards on the
performance of each school district
and individual schools but cannot run
comparisons. State schools chief Colt
Gill said programming required more
time, which was one reason for the
Nov. 15 release date.
The Oregonian newspaper proved
him wrong. Overnight, its newsroom
data team converted material into
a useable, searchable format. The
newspaper also deserves credit for
breaking the original story about the
delay, showing once again why a
democracy needs a free press to serve
as watchdogs.
It was not lost on anyone — except
perhaps Gill, who said the outcry
caught him off-guard — that Nov. 15
is after the gubernatorial election in
which education could be a deciding
issue for voters.
This episode either was tone-deaf
management by Gill or, as Buehler
claimed, deliberate deception by
Brown or her staff. In the end, as Gill
said was the case, the data showed
little new about Oregon schools. What
Oregonians will remember, however, is
that Brown’s administration intended
to delay the data release, regardless of
why.
Brown got a reprieve on another
debacle. The Oregon Court of
Appeals temporarily blocked a lower
court ruling that would have forced
disclosure of potential legislation being
considered by her administration.
Those legislative concepts —
more than 260 of them — might
have revealed whether Brown was
AP file photo
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, right, meets with media representatives in Salem on Jan. 26, 2017.
considering tax increases and other
controversial measures for the 2019
Legislature. After ending the 2017
session by saying tax reform was a
high priority for 2019, Brown has
not followed through — at least not
publicly.
Legislative concepts submitted by
state agencies have been considered
public record in the past, although little
attention was paid to them. Now the
Brown administration is making the
dubious claim that they are protected
by attorney-client privilege. Even then,
Brown could choose to make them
public.
It appears that political opponents
wanted access to those legislative
concepts, probably to use against
Brown in the election. That is one
of the risks a public official takes.
Incumbency has a great advantage
over challengers, but incumbency
should never shield a politician from
transparency.
Brown supporters will argue that
Buehler is not being transparent,
because he has not released his
complete income tax returns, unlike
Brown. They are right; however, there
is a difference between public records
and an unelected person’s private tax
returns.
Candidates promote transparency
when running for office, whether for
city councils and school boards or the
presidency and governorships. Once
in office, they prefer the darkness of
closed government to the sunlight of
full disclosure. That shift might be
understandable, but it is inexcusable.
Full transparency must be the
constant standard by which Oregon
government operates.
OTHER VIEWS
End of birthright citizenship
would hurt more than help
The (Charleston) Post and Courier
resident Trump’s assertion on
Tuesday that he could end birthright
citizenship via an executive order
likely is another attempt to stir up
immigration as a campaign issue ahead of
next week’s midterm election.
It’s a bad and almost certainly
unconstitutional idea, and had the matter
stopped there, it would hardly merit
serious discussion.
Then, a few hours later in a series of
tweets, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.,
said he would introduce legislation “along
the same lines” as Mr. Trump’s proposed
executive order. It’s not the first time Mr.
Graham, long an advocate of immigration
reform, has suggested such a change. But
he now has a president open to the idea.
Executive orders have been used
inappropriately in the past to implement
sweeping changes in immigration
policy, and presidents from both parties
have used the tactic in other sometimes
dubious ways. But birthright citizenship
comes straight out of the Constitution,
and allowing the president to alter that
document unilaterally would be a serious
assault on democracy.
The 14th Amendment states that “All
persons born or naturalized in the United
States and subject to the jurisdiction
thereof, are citizens of the United States
and of the state wherein they reside.”
There’s some room for debate about
whether or not that applies to people
living illegally in the United States. But
presuming that the rest of the Constitution
applies to all people on U.S. soil —
legally present or not, citizen or foreigner
— it’s clear enough that birthright
citizenship would as well.
Mr. Graham is on firmer legal ground
than Mr. Trump by calling for legislation,
presumably to amend the Constitution.
But unless Republicans pick up
significantly larger majorities in both the
House and Senate next Tuesday, getting
two-thirds of both chambers to vote for
an end to birthright citizenship seems
P
The Bend Bulletin
he Oregon Health Authority
is proposing whopping
tax increases as a way to
balance its Medicaid budget.
The Oregon Health Plan,
which covers Medicaid patients in
Oregon, faces a budget deficit of
some $830 million in the coming
biennium. The agency hopes to fill
the gap, in part, by raising taxes
on wine, beer, cider and cigarettes.
The increases — 150 percent
on a pack of cigarettes plus 10
percent increases in alcohol taxes
— no doubt will be sold as health
measures that just happen to raise
oodles of boodle along the way.
Sin taxes are popular because
so many of us use the “sinful”
products not at all or not terribly
regularly. They are taxes on things
acknowledged to have negative
repercussions on society.
There are good reasons to
tax them, but the taxes can be
regressive. People who make less
money tend to spend more of their
money on alcohol and cigarettes.
Any health impact of
increased sin taxes may indeed be
progressive, but what’s really the
likely outcome? People will just
be paying more to get what they
want.
The affordability of booze
and cigarettes doesn’t transform
people into health nuts. It’s
cheaper to drink water, not wine.
It’s cheaper to be a nonsmoker
than a smoker.
It’s not like jacking up prices
on sinful products over the
decades have turned smoking and
drinking into rarefied habits of the
wealthy. A sin tax increase can be
an effort to do good that does bad
for the poor.
Oregonians would be better
served by a broader, general tax
that is not so regressive.
T
exceedingly unlikely.
That’s probably for the best. On the
whole, birthright citizenship is a boon for
the United States rather than a burden. We
need young Americans to grow up into our
future leaders, to drive economic growth,
to invent and create and innovate.
It’s perfectly reasonable to be wary of
pregnant women traveling to the United
States just to have a baby here, but there
are less draconian ways to prevent that,
like tightening border security.
It’s also true that illegal immigrants
commonly have children who are granted
U.S. citizenship. Over the past several
years, anywhere between 5 and 10 percent
of all births in the United States have been
to undocumented parents, according to the
Pew Research Center.
But denying citizenship to those
children probably wouldn’t encourage
their parents to leave. Instead, it would
create a permanent underclass of
effectively nation-less people who grow
up in the United States but face higher
barriers to living a productive, prosperous
life — all through no fault of their own.
Generally, the goal of immigration
reform is to bring illegal immigrants out
of the shadows and put them on a path
toward legality, not to drive them further
underground.
Illegal immigrant families do impose
costs on taxpayers, particularly when
their kids are citizens who are eligible
for a broader range of social and safety
net programs. But they also put billions
of dollars into the economy each year,
providing a significant net benefit by most
measures.
Sen. Graham and President Trump are
right that the United States desperately
needs to reform its immigration laws and
border security policies to protect national
security and a lawful society. There is no
question about that. But undoing birthright
citizenship could actually undermine those
efforts.
Besides, most meaningful immigration
reforms wouldn’t require changing the
Constitution. We’d be much better off
starting with those.
Birthright citizenship comes straight out of the Constitution
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the
East Oregonian editorial board. Other
columns, letters and cartoons on this page
express the opinions of the authors and
not necessarily that of the East Oregonian.
The sin
in sin
taxes
The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the
newspaper and on our website. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold letters that address concerns about individual
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