VIEWPOINTS
Saturday, April 30, 2022
East Oregonian
A5
ROBERT
HILLENBRAND
OTHER VIEWS
What is
going on
at BMCC?
B
lue Mountain Community
College has announced the layoff
of 10 full-time faculty. Do they
expect to actually get rid of all 10?
No.
The aim is to throw a whole bunch
of challenges up knowing full well
that half of it is pure nonsense, but
which will serve to distract and
deflect from the real issues, while
using up finite resources of attention
and efforts to resist. Laying off Linc
Debunce (who teaches anthropology
and geography) in the name of finan-
cial necessity is pure nonsense.
Linc’s classes have the fewest empty
seats and the lowest overhead cost.
His classes yield the highest budget
surplus and support the very high-cost
career-technical courses the adminis-
tration claims are the “real” purpose
of a community college. They have
slated him for removal so the leader-
ship of the faculty union must contend
with his case and thus can devote less
time and energy to saving the jobs
of others not as financially viable.
What is the purpose of
BMCC? Should it be primar-
ily a tech school? Has it been?
For all its talk about serving
students, the aims of the new admin-
istration at the college run counter
to what students have demanded and
signed up for over the past 10 years.
Sure, there have been issues with
enrollment during the pandemic.
What feature of our society hasn’t
been disrupted? Will our anxiety
about sickness never abate? Will the
smooth flow of commodities and prod-
ucts never return? Of course, it will.
And so will enrollments at BMCC.
So long as there are no radical changes
to the offerings, it will return to some-
thing that approximates what they were
three years ago. If the administration
tries to turn BMCC into a trade school,
they will really have financial prob-
lems. Few of the tech programs are
self-supporting. Certainly, none yield
a budget surplus like Linc Debunce’s
classes. The last thing the BMCC
administration should be doing is stir-
ring up an already unstable mess.
What has contributed to low enroll-
ments? One answer: the college
administrative information system,
the system that handles registra-
tions, finance, student records,
data processing, everything. Five
years ago, the college knew it had
to move to a new AIS. It has been
four years of nothing but delays
and malfunction from the get-go.
For two years I have heard nothing
but frustration from students trying to
register and faculty members trying to
get any information out of the system.
Was everyone invited to have a role
in choosing the new system? No.
In particular, the computer science
faculty members were dismissed when
they raised concerns about the process
whereby the new computer system
was chosen and implemented. The
very same faculty members who now,
out of desperation, the administra-
tion has turned to in order to salvage
a working registration system from
the completely catastrophic mess they
ended up with. So, it’s faculty’s fault
that enrollments are down? Hardly.
The college administration claims
it needs layoffs because faculty sala-
ries are “top heavy” compared to other
community colleges. Almost all BMCC
faculty members have been here a long
time and so are at the top of the salary
step schedule since raises for faculty
are scheduled by years of service.
However, the average faculty salary
at BMCC is lower than the statewide
average, and the percentage of general
fund dollars BMCC devotes to full-
time faculty salaries is among the
lowest in the state. If the college gets
rid of 10 on-campus faculty members,
Clatsop Community College, a college
with two-thirds the number of students,
will have more full-time faculty
members with a general fund that is a
third less than BMCC’s. How do they
manage? Not like BMCC apparently.
It is time the college realizes that the
wealth of experience in the full-time
faculty is an asset, not a liability. Expe-
rience counts for something in every
profession, especially in education. The
college administration needs to aban-
don its planned radical changes and
focus on the real issue: putting together
an efficient and effective administra-
tion that can provide our community
with the college it wants and needs.
———
Robert Hillenbrand taught math at Blue
Mountain Community College, in Pendle-
ton, for 22 years.
The curious case of crypto as a player in Oregon politics
RANDY
STAPILUS
OTHER VIEWS
W
inners for election to the U.S.
House in Oregon, who are mostly
incumbents, typically raise
campaign treasuries for the whole of an
election cycle of up to about $2 million.
Sometimes they raise more (as in the 4th
Congressional District race in 2020), but
that’s unusual.
What’s happening this year in the 6th
Congressional District, a new district
with no incumbent and not even a clear
front-running candidate, is beyond unusual.
This new activity is in the Democratic
primary long before we’ve gotten to the
general election phase, though not among
the candidates who have been active
and successful in Oregon politics. They
include state Rep. Andrea Salinas, D-Lake
Oswego, (who has many of the highest-pro-
file endorsements and has looked like a
front runner), Rep. Teresa Alonso León,
D-Woodburn, and former Multnomah
County Commissioner Loretta Smith.
They and others have raised significant but
normal-level funds.
The outside-the-norm here seems to be
driven by, of all things that would never
occur to most Oregonians, cryptocurrency.
First, there’s the treasury of candidate
Cody Reynolds, who has reported lending
himself $2 million for the campaign. As
Steven Reynolds, he ran for federal offices
four times up to 2018, including a 2016
effort as an independent for the U.S. Senate,
receiving only a smattering of votes.
Whence this new infusion? Presumably,
from the world of cryptocurrency; he has
had an extensive and sometimes compli-
cated background with a number of crypto
firms during the last decade.
Phantom candidate
$5 million spend
Reynolds isn’t leading when it comes to
crypto (so far) in this primary.
Carrick Flynn is an Oregon native who
spent most of his working life in the Wash-
ington area, returning during the pandemic
to work from Oregon, now at McMinn-
ville, but never actively involved in Oregon
politics. Rivals have called him a “phantom
candidate,” and note he has voted just twice
in Oregon since 2000.
He would qualify as a complete
unknown with almost no chance of
winning but for this: A gusher of TV ads
backing his candidacy amounting to $5
million from a political action committee
called Protect Our Future. The commit-
tee is run by 30-year-old billionaire Sam
Bankman-Fried, of Phoenix, Arizona,
whose money seems to come from crypto-
currency.
The ads have overwhelmed TV polit-
ical advertising in the 6th. He has been
described as “the world’s richest crypto
billionaire.”
What’s an Arizona billionaire doing in
this Oregon race? Wikipedia describes him
as a high-end securities trader who became
heavily involved in cryptocurrency about
five years ago.
“In January 2018, Bankman-Fried
organized an arbitrage trade, moving up
to $25M per day, to take advantage of the
higher price of bitcoin in Japan compared
to in America. After attending a late 2018
cryptocurrency conference in Macau, and
while also inspired by the concurrent fork
(split) of Bitcoin Cash, he moved to Hong
Kong. He founded FTX, a cryptocurrency
derivatives exchange, in April 2019, and
it then launched the following month. On
December 8, 2021, Bankman-Fried, along
with other industry executives, testified
before the Committee on Financial Services
in relation to regulating the cryptocurrency
industry,” according to the Wikipedia entry.
That last connects directly with interest
in races for the U.S. House.
Flynn has said he has no background in,
or policy interest in cryptocurrency, that
his link to Protect Our Future concerned
pandemic policy. But, especially at this
stage of the pandemic, that seems a thin
reason for spending $5 million.
That PAC infusion soon was followed
by another big assist from the Demo-
cratic House Majority PAC, “the only PAC
focused exclusively on electing Democrats
to the U.S. House of Representatives,” of
about $1 million. Usually it reserves dona-
tions for general election campaigns rather
than a primary, especially where no incum-
bents are involved.
This got a lot of attention. U.S. Jeff
Merkley, D-Oregon, complained via Twit-
ter: “I haven’t endorsed in this race, but
it’s flat out wrong for House Majority PAC
to be weighing in when we have multiple
strong candidates vying for the nomina-
tion.”
Most of the rest of the Democratic field,
including Salinas, Leon, Smith, physician
Kathleen Harder of Salem, engineer Matt
West and even Reynolds signed an unusual
letter of protest.
“House Majority PAC — House Demo-
cratic leadership’s super PAC, allegedly
tasked with holding Republicans account-
able and electing Democrats to Congress
— should not be spending resources to
divide Democrats,” they wrote. “With so
much needed to defend the House, how can
they afford involvement in a primary? Why
is this happening? Where is this money
coming from? And what does its source
want in exchange?”
Those questions, which sound valid, are
only a few that come to mind. They might
be obviated — for now — by the results of
the primary. Or not.
———
Randy Stapilus has researched and writ-
ten about Northwest politics and issues
since 1976 for a long list of newspapers and
other publications.
Congress has one more thing to fix this year: succession
JONATHAN
BERNSTEIN
COMMENTARY
O
ne important thing Congress
should do before the likely return
of divided government next year?
Finally fix the order of presidential succes
sion.
Remember, the only thing the Constitu-
tion says about this process is that the vice
president should become president if there’s
a vacancy. Even that wasn’t entirely clear
until the 25th Amendment was ratified in
1967 and not only cleaned up that bit of
ambiguity but also provided for a way to
replace a vacancy in the vice presidency.
The rest of the process has been established
by acts of Congress, and the rules have
changed several times over the years.
The current version of the Presidential
Succession Act, which places the speaker
of the House and the president pro tempore
of the Senate in the line of succession after
the vice president, initially dates to 1947.
Before that, at least from 1886, members of
Congress weren’t included in the process at
all. Changing that was a mistake. Lawmak-
ers should never have been placed in the
line of succession, and they should now be
removed.
To begin with, the whole idea is contrary
to the logic of the constitutional system
of separated institutions sharing powers.
The electorate (well, the Electoral College,
but the same principle applies) chose the
president and the vice president. If those
positions should become vacant, then they
should be filled by officials who would steer
the nation in more or less the same direc-
tion. That would’ve been true even if politi-
cal parties had never emerged, but it’s very
obvious now, given the partisan presidency.
Simply put, if the nation chose a Democrat,
then a Democrat should be president; if a
Republican, then it should be a Republi-
can. Regardless of the outcome of the most
recent congressional elections.
Moreover, the party of the presidency
should never be up for grabs in a national
emergency, whether it’s a resignation,
impeachment or death. It’s asking too much
of any Congress to put aside party inter-
est when the stakes are so high. The U.S.
system expects that politicians will follow
healthy incentives. Sure, we’d also like
them to care about the national interest,
but the framers of the Constitution knew
that when strong self-interest is at stake,
politicians are unlikely to put it aside and
do what’s best for the nation. The pres-
ident pro tem of the Senate is a largely
ceremonial position usually occupied by
the senior-most member of the majority
party — which means it’s often someone
quite elderly, and rarely anyone chosen as
a leader for that chamber, let alone for the
presidency. Speakers are better; at least
they’re chosen for their political abilities.
But few speakers have had the communi-
cations skills that the modern presidency
demands, especially during a crisis. And
surely any situation in which the line of
succession came into play would call for
such skills.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, a commis-
sion on continuity in government looked at
all this and recommended serious changes.
Not only should members of Congress be
excluded from the line of succession, but
so should most of the cabinet. (Under the
current system, the two top congressional
leaders are followed by cabinet secretaries
in the order of the establishment of their
departments.) The commission recom-
mended that only four cabinet secretar-
ies, from the most important departments,
follow the vice president. After that, the
president should designate four other
potential replacements (most likely notable
retired officials from the president’s party,
all of whom would be reasonably well
known and credible leaders in the unlikely
event one of them should have to serve).
Not only would this avoid a “designated
survivor” scenario, in which some third-
rate official who happened to have filled
out the cabinet suddenly became president,
but it also would mean the line of succes-
sion likely would include people scattered
across the nation — a wise precaution
should some national calamity in Washing-
ton force the issue.
I argued in 2018 that Republican major-
ities in Congress should act quickly —
before the midterm elections that year and
the likely resumption of divided govern-
ment — to change the law to prevent House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi from being two
steps away from the presidency. We’re in
the same situation now, with the parties
reversed, and it still makes sense to act.
Maybe Democrats will be more responsible
now than Republicans were then.
———
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg
columnist covering politics and policy.