The Bitchtucci Voter Guide: PDX November 2k18

midterm season: this is where we’re at, y’all

Think about being powerless. You’ve experienced it before. Think. Maybe it was a small powerlessness, a choice removed from you about something you cared about. A work decision out of your hands. A breakup you weren’t ready for. Someone misunderstanding you and defaming you. Silently you railed against it, feeling that unmistakable hot-necked frustration — the thing that causes children to have tantrums in the middle of the supermarket. It’s unfair, you want to wail. What can I do?

Maybe it was a large powerlessness. Maybe you’re feeling it right now, even. Of all the zillions of bummers, I’ve been thinking of this particular bummer lately: That time I watched my mother be evicted the day after Christmas. A sheriff came, and the landlord, and his shrill wife. I had just made a pot of soup that would have fed us for three or four more days. I circled the house, the landlord guiltily avoiding my gaze. His wife talked loudly about the state of the carpet as if we were not there. The sheriff stood impassably in the doorway. I wore pajamas and felt extremely young and small and ugly. At last, I knew I had to pour the soup down the sink. We could not take it with us wherever we were going next. (After driving around the city, we would end up all in one room at the Motel 6 by the freeway. We were lucky.) I could not bear to think of it rotting on the stove or being thrown away by anyone else. I stood alone in the kitchen for the last time, tipped the pot at a harsh angle, feeling paper-thin and weak. It’s unfair, I wanted to wail. What can I do?

Maybe this is the point at which you might expect a bracing battle cry for the power of voting. This is a voter guide, after all. But voting is not a magical antidote to powerlessness. Distrust anyone who extols the virtues of voting as some sacred snake oil to save our souls, and save our country. You’ve seen the inspirational thinkpieces, the political campaign ads, the cheeky comedy videos goading millennials into upping their woefully low turnout rate. Just anoint yourself with an “I voted” sticker, post on Instagram about how civically engaged you are, and you are reborn a Good Person who Makes a Difference!!!!!

Messages about the impact of voting are unclear. Statisticians run study after study to remind us that our individual vote almost certainly will not be the one to tip the scales for one political decision or another. Other movements zero in narrowly-won accomplishments, crediting the power of Every Vote — a three point margin of defeat on a 2012 bill in Florida that would have allowed certain employers to weasel out of paying for their employees’ healthcare. Indeed, here in Oregon, the 2016 Gresham Barlow School District Bond called upon to fix buildings that were literally falling the fuck apart passed by a razor-thin two point margin of only 1,461 votes. At my cajoling, one of those votes came from my mother.

Back in 2016, I used this graphic to describe my political preoccupations as an angry socialist bitch, from the Leftist Case for Hillary Clinton:

I described myself as the black stick figure — very far left of either presidential candidate, but willing to fling a vote at the blue candidate plodding along to drag the country in a direction I might be happier with.

Two years later, I can see that I was wrong. We do not vote from far away on high like that. We vote with our hands wrapped around the same ropes that these problematic candidates hold with white gloves. And for many of us, a tenuous hold on these ropes literally decides life or death: access to safe abortions, gender-affirming treatment, lifesaving emergency medical care, relative protection from deportation to dangerous countries. Our hands chafe and bloody engaging in this tug-of-war. We feel the impacts of slipping toward a more fascist state inch by painful inch: pathological rapist liars as Supreme Court judges, children in internment camps, lines about protecting gender identity vanishing from Title IX rights guarantees, assholes being more emboldened than before to harass and kill us in plain sight.

We do not vote because we think our singular ballots will win justice and liberation for our people. We are not incompetent. We have been around awhile, honey, and we have seen what our mamas and aunties and ancestors and friends have been up against since forever. We have read The Ballot or the Bullet by Malcolm X.

We vote to dig our heels in a little deeper in this tug-of-war. We do it with the intent to clench our teeth and wrap our fingers around the rope a little harder. We know people are pulling from all sides, and where we find conviction and meaning and harm reduction in any small form, we are taking it. We are here to be a fucking nuisance to the ugly machines that don’t give a shit about our trans kids, our abuelitas, our sexual assault survivor babes, our public educators, our people.

Here is something to rest your head upon for sure: I believe you are not powerless.

I love you. In life, we are here to do smart grassroots work all the fucking livelong day. And on Election Day, we are here to hold our ground. If another inch is to be yielded, another centimeter of ground lost, let it not be from me. Nor from you.

Let’s get to work.

Some housekeeping, my sweet little brioche loaves:

• Election day is Tuesday, November 6th. Ballots can be turned into drop boxes without postage until 8pm. Swing by your local library, drop that phat envelope off, and say what’s up to the saints who work there. Pick up the historical romance novel you’re too embarrassed to buy and use the self check-out system to conceal your shame. I support you!!!
• You should have received your ballot already. If you haven’t received her yet, call the Multnomah County Elections Office at (503)988–3720 or order it to be picked up. You can go into an elections office to get a new ballot right up until 8pm on Election Day. It is basically never too late until it’s too late.
• Track your ballot down with this puppy. This will tell you the date it was mailed, and once you drop it off, it’ll let you know when it is received. It will also tell you your history of turning in ballots in Oregon, and you can rest smugly on your laurels like moi cuz you’re, like, so civically engaged. Or maybe you don’t have much of a voting history yet. I’m so fucking happy to have you voting now. Imagine me smiling gently at you. Welcome.
• If you are a voter with disabilities, please know how much I value you. We need you. You have rights like differently formatted ballots, a ballot drop off and pick up so you don’t need to leave your home, and so on. GET THOSE RIGHTS, BABY. I LOVE YOU.
• Disability Rights Oregon has got ya covered with ASL interpreted/closed captioning videos, large type, audio recordings, and simple explanations.
• Here is the State Voter Pamphlet for an overview of all candidates and measures.
• Vote411 lets you plug your address in and peep only the candidates and measures pertaining to your location. I have used it for years. Who started Vote411? Can I buy you a drink? DM me.
• I consulted:

The APANO Voter Guide, with translations in Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish, Tagalog, Korean, and Russian.

The League of Women Voters, with a Spanish translation + hella videos.

The Coalition of Communities of Color Voter Guide, with a Spanish translation.

The Street Roots endorsements.

The Oregonian’s database of legislators’ voting history.

• There are a lotta incumbents and a lotta judge appointments running unopposed. I researched everyone and if something was worth noting, I made a note of it. But you’ll notice that there isn’t an explanation for every scrub on the ballot.
• Some ballot jams for your ears: “Me & My Dog” by Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, Lacy Dacus, and boygenius makes me weep. So does “The Bug Collector” by Haley Heynderickx. So does “Two Slow Dancers” by Mitski.
• Drink a glass of water, will ya? The revolution will be hydrated.

Candidates

• US Representative, District 1: Suzanne Bonamici
  As fun as it is for there to be a candidate who is somehow both Libertarian and Pacific Green (one of those classic “Small government so I can smoke pot” libertarians? The dude, Drew Layda, does say in the state voter pamphlet that he wants to “end the war on cannabis”), let’s go for tried and true Bonamici here. I don’t need to exhaust you with a pragmatic explanation of why it’s not a bad idea to be electing Democrats with clout on party-affiliation alone: uh, majority votes matter! Bonamici’s voting record to date is encouraging for the long slog ahead: She’s out here voting Yea on monitoring and combating anti-semitism (HR 1911), voting against creepy increases in biometric tracking of migration under the guise of counterterrorism (HR 6439) in a time when privacy is going to be a huge issue, voting for protecting salmon eyyyy (HR 2083), and so on.
• US Representative, District 3: Earl Blumenauer
  Sweet Earl in his bowtie, reliably Dem since the beginning of time, is a fantastic example of a legislator who is pushed further and further left by popular opinion, social media, and the ability to stand in stark relief to a conservative regime. Those of you who engage with his politics by sharing news articles and interacting with his accounts should feel proud of a new kind of political influence from the everyday citizen.
  He’s incumbent as fuck, of course, and we need his clout. We like his background on the Social Security and Health Congressional Committees, as these will be areas under serious contention for the foreseeable future. On shitty immigration policy, there’s Earl in Congress, reliably using his vote as dissent on the bullshit “build a wall” legislation (HR 4760), the bullshit anti abortion legislation (HR 36), the bullshit witch hunt for immigrants with criminal records (HR 3004), the bullshit withholding of federal funds for Sanctuary states, totally undermining properties of state’s rights and federalism that used to be what conservatives were all about (HR 3003), and so on.
  Keep Earl and his bowtie in office to be a thorn in the side of a red-dominated House of Reps. Nice try to Republican challenger Tom Harrison for doing the absolute most boring thing and quoting the preamble of the Constitution while he squawks about securing our borders (they’re already violently secured to the point of absurdity) and strengthening ICE (they’re strong) (unfortunately).
• US Representative, District 5: Kurt Schrader
  We like Schrader’s special attention to veteran’s services. He sponsored a bill that would allow students to refinance their college debt but we wish he’d go full Bernie Bro and disavow student debt altogether. Maybe we can prod him on this once he’s reelected. Callahan, bemoaning partisanship while he takes the extremely partisan position of eliminating sanctuary cities for people he calls “illegal aliens” à la year 2000, is a serious contender. Yikes. Bye!
• Governor: Kate Brown
  Kate Brown is consistent. Her hairstyle, practical and a little retro, is consistent. Her legislative priorities are consistent. Conservatives are salivating at the prospect of shooing her out and electing the first Republican Governor in Oregon since 1984. If you’re not voting for any other reason, please vote in this election to throw a wrench in that plan. When we talk about the material conditions of survival for marginalized people in Oregon — y’know, basic civil rights, healthcare, and housing — we affirm the need to retain a Democratic Governor. And it’s not just any Democratic Governor. Brown is effective as fuck.
  Over in New York’s District 14, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won the Democratic primary right under the nose of a white dude incumbent saying essentially that when you have a reliably Democratic base, it behooves you to push past moderate politics and go for some really progressive shit. Who you being moderate for? GO 4 IT!!!! UNLEASH THE HOUNDS OF HELL!!!
  Who can say if Brown’s thinking is similar in her political decisions, but this is the practice I observe: a great will of the people here in Oregon wishes for us to remain a sanctuary state, for us to enact meaningful gun reform, for us to affirm transgender and nonbinary identities in schools and workplaces and government records. Unfettered by assuaging a powerful conservative majority forcing her to moderate baby-steps, Brown saw yet another awful shooting happen at Parkland and immediately pushed for closing the “boyfriend loophole” in Oregon gun ownership law, making Brown responsible for the first gun control legislation taken by a state in Parkland’s aftermath. When He Who Must Not Be Named won the 2016 election, I said hyperbolically to my friends about reproductive rights, “At least we have Kate Brown. She would rather die than let free birth control get taken away.” And I basically believe that’s true.
  She’s a Democrat, right? Not a revolutionary. Still, this is a story I tell over and over: A few years ago, she sat down to meet LGBTQ youth organizers at a roundtable. My most beloved baby, the Oregon Queer Youth Summit, sent representatives. Everyone went around introducing themselves by name and pronoun, and Brown said, “My name is Kate. I use she/her pronouns.” Then she hesitated, and said, “But honestly, if I were growing up now with the information you have, I might identify as they/them.” Identity politics are not necessarily going to save the world, but Brown is the first queer Governor in America, and I trust her to keep pushing for queer shit here in Oregon. Her campaign has done a thorough job reminding you of her particular merits and visions.
  On the flipside, we have challenger Knute Buehler, Republican orthopedic surgeon and OR House Rep from Bend, OR. I have spent hours on his website looking for anything fresh and insightful. It’s, uh, not great. His team has spun some surface-level narratives about woes in the status quo. Their angle here is providing voters with information to make them unhappy. They wager that all they need to do is convince you that their plans might marginally be better than the status quo; they don’t really need to have a plan that will solve much. As a newcomer, Buehler gets to act like information-gathering alone is an act of great change. About homelessness, his team says a key part of their plan is this: “Bring together diverse stakeholders to share ideas.” About education, his team says a key part of their plan is this: “He will combine the best Republican, Independent and Democrat ideas.”
  Wow. I’m dazzled.
  And, look, it’s not like the status quo is fabulous. But when Buehler waltzes into his new Lake Oswego offices from Bend talkin’ crazy about how he’s going to take Oregon from performing 34th in the nation in education to top 5 through his extremely innovative plan of “combining the best Republican, Independence, and Democrat ideas,” he is hoping you have no concept of progress over time. Forget about what it means that Kate Brown inherited shitty rankings from years of yikes education policy in Oregon and that students’ graduation rates are up 5% in the past 3 years, and up 7% among students with marginalized identities.
  And 5% and 7% are nothing to sneer about. I work in education as a school counselor. I am over the MOON if we can track improved outcomes for our most impacted students by 1%…2%. This kind of improvement is huge. We cannot change most of the life circumstances for our students that produce low attendance or graduation rates, so progress is slow and hard to track. I believe public education is still our best shot at ensuring equitable outcomes and beautiful, transformative life experiences for our kids. But obsessing about moving up rankings without a comprehensive plan to, like, dismantle predatory housing policies, abuse, peer aggression, attendance barriers, poverty, racism, violence, the healthcare system, offer ways for educators to build relationships with students and families, etc ad nauseam, is LAUGHABLE. When shit is going wrong in a kid’s life outside of school, interventions at school can have a tremendous positive impact on a kid’s self-regard, resiliency, and hope. But these do not cleanly translate into improved attendance or graduation rates.
  SO IT’S YA GIRL, INSPECTING BUEHLER’S PLAN FOR ANYTHING THAT ACKNOWLEDGES: 1) Materially speaking, how hard educators already work, 2) How much beauty and power there is among students, families, and educators RIGHT FUCKIN’ NOW, 3) Systemic barriers, 4) Relationship-building, 5) Really anything that honors the simultaneous importance of the dignity and trauma of students, families, and educators.
  Instead we have a really waffley plan about increasing funding for schools by 15% (from where, Knute? You don’t wanna raise taxes on corporations, you don’t wanna raise taxes on citizens. Where is this money coming from?), lengthening the school year (how? Paying whomst?), and cutting teacher prep days (ok???? A longer school year, no specific language to pay teachers more for working a longer school year, no language acknowledging that teachers, like, need time to…prep and grade???).
  A huge part of Buehler’s education plan is that he wants to make it easier for non-teachers to drop into schools to teach from their field. For instance, he says, he’d “make it easier for an automobile body shop worker to teach a body shop class, or a D. mathematician in the tech industry to teach high-level math [without quitting their day jobs].” Where is the will for this from experts in the field? How can we pay these experts to make it worth their while to teach a class long enough and consistently enough to actually build trust, relationships, and buy-in with their students?
  LISTEN HERE, BUDDY. Not. Just. Anyone. Can. Teach. I am down with community involvement, but I cannot deal with politicians who do not fucking understand how hard it is to be a teacher. What do you know about equitable assessment practices? Differentiation to meet the needs of all learners? Classroom management that doesn’t reproduce bias and push kids into the School to Prison Pipeline? Being a mandatory reporter? Ethical boundaries with students and families? RELATIONSHIP-BUILDING OVER TIME?
  Buehler has voted to protect landlords’ ability to issue no-cause evictions, but is out here mailing out misleading, badly-worded flyers about how he’s going to solve homelessness where Kate Brown has failed through TOUGH LOVE. WOW. TOUGH LOVE!!! GROUNDBREAKING BOOTSTRAPS RHETORIC. Meanwhile. In another dismissal of actual organizations addressing homelessness, Buehler is the first major candidate to decline to acknowledge to Street Roots’ election questionnaire. Buehler acknowledges some roots of homeless (mental health, addiction, expensive housing), and proposes building more shelters without seeming to understand that shelters by definition do not provide long-term housing. And you wanna prioritize women and children shelters, sure, but where is your acknowledgment that our homeless population is actually not mostly women and children? What’s your plan for shelters designed for our community’s homeless men? Where will you find money to train the mental health experts and shelter program teams that will address how unsafe and unsustainable shelters are in Oregon? What about the shelters that have been built and then shut down the same year because there was no plan to address those human needs? Beds ain’t enough.

And this flyer, you guys:

This flyer has stayed in my backpack for a week. It angered me in that child having a tantrum in the supermarket way. This flyer thinks you’re totally without logical faculties. HOW YOU GONNA SAY THAT FINGER POINTING HASN’T HELPED AND THEN LITERALLY POINT THE FINGER AT KATE BROWN? HOW ARE YOU GOING TO CONDEMN A RHETORICAL PRACTICE AND THEN EMPLOY THAT SAME PRACTICE IN THE NEXT BREATH? HOW MUCH MONEY DID YOU SPEND MAILING THIS FLYER OUT? WHY DID YOU DO THIS? DO YOU THINK SO LITTLE OF THE VOTERS THAT YOU JUST DON’T CARE ABOUT BASIC LOGIC ANYMORE?

The Democratic Party of Oregon have furnished the extremely melodramatic website Lies From Knute. Take the rhetoric with a grain of salt: some stuff is simplified a bit to paint a more dichotomous picture, but I understand the indignance of Dems. Buehler’s entire campaign is predicated on his attempt to rebrand himself as a moderate, an intellectual, a sensible pro-choice dude who just cares about fiscal efficiency. This is an outlandish mischaracterization. Check out his voting record for yourself. Buehler and supporters contend that he only voted anti-choice on HBs 2758 and 3391 because there were other flaws with those bills (the usual vague gripes of funding issues and scope), but when we consider harm reduction and the immediacy of threats to reproductive rights, I am categorically uninterested in a gubernatorial candidate who attempts to paint himself as a high-roader when state funding to make abortions accessible is threatened.
This race is close and I wish it wasn’t. If there’s any reason to pester your auntie in Klamath to vote in this election, it’s so she’ll vote for Brown over Buehler.
It’s worth checking out the other gubernatorial candidates for some good reading. Aaron Auer of the Constitution party is so out of touch and confusing — he talks about the Jason Lee statue with the Bible in hand on the Capitol building, saying that we’ll lose our rich heritage and “the blessing of our LORD” if we lose sight of “preserving the Native American’s quest for the Book of Heaven.” Um. What??? Have you talked to an indigenous person about how they feel about evangelism lately? And Libertarian Nick Chen is basically blogging introspectively when he talks about his rationale to run: “I would love to tell you I am someone special. It probably takes a slight egomaniac to even consider writing their name down on a form to run as governor. I am not going to lie and say that I am incapable of such petty thoughts.” This would be a great opener for a 5,000 word Xanga post fer suuuure.

me @ Kate Brown

• Judge of the Circuit Court, 4th District, Position 30: Benjamin N Souede
  Let’s talk about scope first. Circuit Courts are middle-tier courts — if you make it past your county Magistrate, you’ll land in the Circuit Court, and from there it can move to the state Court of Appeals and then the state Supreme Court. Oregon’s Circuit Courts hear both criminal and civil cases.
  It’s always tricky to try to suss out what we are looking for in nonpartisan candidates, particularly for judgeship. At first blush, incumbent Benjamin Souede and challenger Bob Callahan seem like two sides of the same coin: brainy white dudes who can only really say that they’re fair and impartial. And that’s good. We don’t really want judges who brag that they’re particularly sympathetic to one political leaning or another. What we’re looking for is a judge who is smart about the law.
  Unsurprisingly, I’m not a legal purist. And I am certainly not a Constitutional purist. All the conventional social justice warrior critiques apply, and also the inherent property of amendability: the Constitution is a living document, and I like judges who look at law with freshness and flexibility — not overreaching, but not stodgy or unwilling to change. I lean toward Souede for a proven record of this kind of analysis: he’s displayed a deft legal hand as the Governor Brown’s general counsel. Brown, herself a brilliant lawyer with a more liberal interpretation of law, knows what she likes from a legal scholar. Using a JSTOR login that doesn’t belong to me, I dug up some of his writing, including from his time on the Harvard Law Review. Souede is clear and thoughtful, with the ability to draw from even very obscure legal precedent. I love that shit!
  Callahan is pissed that Souede was appointed by Kate Brown after his predecessor retired mid-term, and Souede is like, “What? That’s the way it works. The governor appoints when a retirement happens mid-term.” I am inclined to side with him about that; neither he nor Brown invented that clause in the Oregon Constitution, and nothing sketchy was afoot.
  Jo Ann Hardesty’s endorsement of Callahan means a little something to me, on the other hand. Not enough for me to get over some other gripes, especially because I couldn’t find any statements from Hardesty on the subject. Callahan’s claim that his extensive jury trial experience inherently makes him better suited to judgeship is reductive af. Many testimonials on Callahan’s website are from regular shmegular folks who were once his clients, which could have been alright except that their praise is often eyebrow-raisingly generic, like, “Bob will make a great judge because he’s a good listener and he knows the law.” O…k…?
• Multnomah County, Auditor: Jennifer McGuirk
  You may recall that I endorsed McGuirk back in the May 2018 primaries, citing her commitment to auditing disability services (!!!!!) and jail audits (!!!!!!!!!!!!). She possesses a clear and specific vision, and a history of building relationships in Multnomah County, giving her the edge over her competitor, Scott Learn, whose background as a local journalist and auditor does impress me, but who still circles around the relationship between fiscal transparency and racial justice.
  This was one of the toughest calls I had to make this election season. I take the role of County Auditor extremely seriously; the person we elect will make decisions that quickly and directly affect our daily lives, and the lives of our community’s most marginalized, a great deal more than many of the candidates we are presented with in this election. In the end, I believe both McGuirk and Learn would do a fine job. Learn is very sharp and willing to look deeply to see the root of problems. I return to McGuirk’s emphasis on relationships: she explicitly calls herself “people-centered.” This principle is undervalued in politics yet the core of all meaningful change.
• City of Portland, Commissioner, Position 3: Jo Ann Hardesty
  This is a weird race: these are two smart, qualified black women vying for one role, and at times, the campaign has been awkward and weird (and coverage of this matter has been gross, including a clumsily-worded headline from Willamette Week. We know full well that “spat” has all kinds of belittling sexist connotations and that black women in complex conflict are so often reduced to being seen as dramatic and combative). I endorsed Hardesty in May, and I haven’t changed my mind. I’ll remind you that competitor Loretta Smith has received censure from people who have worked with her in the past, notably subordinates, and notably other women of color. Believe conventional wisdom that tells us criticism from subordinates tells us stuff of great value and import. Among other things, critics talk about Smith’s mismanagement of funds.
  Hardesty earns my vote because she has been working her ass off for justice in this city since before I was born. She has retained a hard line with police reform and I relish the idea of her future conversations with the Portland Police Bureau. She knows housing considerations for marginalized communities from so many angles that it honestly boggles the mind.
• Multnomah East Soil and Water, Director, Zone 1: Write in Rachelle Dixon
  Never heard of this before? Neither had I until, in the grassiest rootiest manner of all time, a post popped up in a Facebook group for people of color in Portland. Dixon was in the process of getting land ownership requirements settled and so couldn’t officially file in time (can we talk about how fucked up that is as a prerequisite for this position???). Soil and Water spearheads conservation and education projects, has its hand in distributing grants for land stewardship, running a farm incubator project to support new farms, and generally looking at ways to keep water and soil healthy. This 300+ page document gives you a really vivid understanding of the history and scope of this unit of local government. Like, damn! I’m moved!
  Dixon is the vice-chair of of the Multnomah County chapter of the Democratic Party of Oregon, so an understanding of local politics is her thing. I hope to see her in this position because it seems to represent passion and legacy for Dixon, an urban farmer and black woman who says she is the first generation in her family off the farm and the second generation off the reservation. Dixon says that the Water and Soil Conservation District’s farm incubator program could be improved by explicitly including black and indigenous people. She says, “Most people of color don’t have the land resources to meet the multiple years of farming experience required to apply to the program. This means not only are we losing the opportunity to create a new generation of farmers, we are losing important voices in the conversation.” YOU’RE RIGHT!!!!
  This position is entirely up in the air, with no candidates filed. A black woman has never held this office before. Please write in Dixon and tell all your friends to do the same.

Ballot Measures

• Measure 102: Yes
  Amends Constitution: Allows local bonds for financing affordable housing with nongovernmental entities. Requires voter approval, annual audits.
  This measure amends the Oregon Constitution to allow local bonds for financing affordable housing with nongovernmental entities. In the measure title, to ease financially hesitant skeptics, sponsors included the provision that proposed bonds will require voter approval and annual audits. So no money has been promised anywhere yet; this merely allows for localities to put local bonds to a vote with the understanding that it will be beneficial in the future for governments, non-profit organizations, and private sector organizations to cooperate where they see fit. There are so many dope dope dope nonprofits trying to enact meaningful changes in affordable housing across the state and I am thrilled to see what bonds will be proposed in a state that still effing won’t touch rent control. We can always strike down shitty affordable housing bonds in future elections if we feel they are too creepy or for-profit-y. But to deny the chance for government/nonprofit/private partnerships doesn’t make SENSE when we’re in a HOUSING CRISIS. This is a very popular ballot measure with supporters in rural and urban Oregon and across the political ideology spectrum. The only argument in opposition in the ol’ Oregon Voter Guide, furnished by Republican Senator Alan Olsen, is that we shouldn’t amend the Constitution unless we can be very sure what will happen. This is a very silly argument. We can never be sure what will happen when we make a change of any kind. Like, uh, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans, Alan. Voters will always have the final say in passing local bonds.
• Measure 103: No
  Amends Constitution: Prohibits taxes/fees based on transactions for “groceries” (defined) enacted or amended after September 2017
  All the ads against Measure 103 correctly lean hard into how the definitions of “groceries” and “sales or distribution” can be manipulated by corporate goons to basically ensure evasive tax loopholes for those same corporate goons, namely trucking, tobacco, and fast food companies. Oregon doesn’t have a tax on groceries so we don’t need to approach the platform of the Constitution to prohibit an imaginary future tax. Creepy corporate goon proponents are hoping for panicky, reductive readings of this ballot measure: “We are simpletons! We don’t want our bananas taxed! EVER!!!!!!!” Don’t be fooled, my babes. Your bananas have been safe for a hot minute and they will likely continue to be safe.
  The harms of cementing changes into the Constitution in this case are clear. The owner of North Portland’s itty bitty Cherry Sprout Produce explains that this measure “would permanently freeze many taxes and fees that small businesses like mine pay, meaning they could never be raised or lowered…[preventing] small businesses from ever being able to get tax relief on a wide variety of taxes and fees.” So restructuring funding sources wouldn’t ever reflect in grocery business taxes, nor would future inflation ever be taken into account. Teachers, famers, econ professors, the American Cancer Association — hella people are identifying how this negatively affects future education and veteran funding sources, worsens the flexibility needed to flourish in a rapidly changing economy, all while somehow defining e-cigarettes as a “grocery” item. Thank u, next.
• Measure 104: No
  Amends Constitution: Expands (beyond taxes) application of requirement that three-fifths legislative majority approve bills raising revenue
  In other words: let’s disagree FOREVER! Let’s never get anything done EVER! Let’s spin our wheels to the point of careening our ephemeral bodies into space by harnessing into existential rage all of the force we exert running NOWHERE FOREVER!
  Measure 104 wants to make define “raising revenue” as any tax or fee increase, including changes to tax exemptions, deductions or credit. So to pass ~*just about fucking anything*~ this bill wants to require a ⅗ vote. It is already so difficult for a simple majority to be found in a time of extraordinary partisanship. Let’s make it harder! Let’s make it nearly impossible! Let’s never raise taxes again, education be damned, social services be damned, fixing roads be damned!
  THREE FIFTHS. It’s insulting. This is even more than a Congressional or parliamentary supermajority, which is a ⅔ vote, and which, because it virtually guarantees gridlock, we reserve only for the most serious of cases, like impeaching a president or amending the Constitution. So we wanna make it harder to raise taxes in Oregon than it is to impeach a United States president? FAREWELL.
• Measure 105: FUCK NO
  Repeals law limiting use of state/local law enforcement resources to enforce federal immigration laws
  Oregon has been a sanctuary state since 1977, so when He Who Must Not Be Named started brewing some wild anti-immigration shit at the federal level, we crossed our arms and squinted. Clauses of the sanctuary law have been flouted and ignored by rogues all along, after all, and police-ICE partnerships are a tale as old as ICE. So ICE is still out here being sketchy af and detaining, like, whoever they want, even US citizens, but in theory, the sanctuary law draws a funding boundary between state funds and federal immigration and customs stuff.
  Oregon is still a dangerous place for undocumented immigrants. Just ask my students, who at the ages of five and six weep with fear that their parents or best friends will be deported. I have lost track of how many of my kids and their families here in the Portland Metro area have been directly affected by detainment and deportation. I recently had a conversation with a mother whose husband, a documented immigrant, was detained and deported. Prior to this, she’d stayed at home as the caretaker of her children and elders, some as young as two and as old as eighty. Now she will have to work as the sole breadwinner to keep their housing. As a school counselor, I scrambled to find resources that felt so pathetic and insufficient. Reduced-cost daycare so her kids could be supervised. Temporary energy and rental assistance to stymie the bleeding. Names of legal aid organizations to contact for help. On the phone, she faltered. That’s all? What was she gonna do now? How were they gonna live? What about her US-born kid just starting the Talented and Gifted program? If they had to go back to their unsafe country of origin, where would they find resources to nurture those strengths in math and reading?
  Voting down Measure 105 doesn’t solve any of her problems. But it’s a damn good place to dig our heels in and refuse to give more ground.
• Measure 106: No, and can y’all calm down and cut this SHIT OUT?Amends Constitution: Prohibits spending “public funds” (defined) directly/indirectly for “abortion” (defined); exceptions; reduces abortion access
  Oh my god stop this at once. Within the context of this measure, low income people on state-assisted healthcare like the Oregon Health Plan will be excluded from abortion coverage. When we take away the choice for free, safe, early, affordable abortions, people die. They just do. They have to scramble to find a few thousand dollars and are forced into riskier late-term abortions, or worse, under-the-counter abortions that are often botched. The Mercury says that 300,000 women in the state of Oregon who receive healthcare through OHP would have the right to safe abortions covered by their insurance taken away. I couldn’t find great information about how many trans and nonbinary people with uteruses would also be affected as well, but with elevated risks of poverty and being excluded from healthcare coverage already, I feel quite grim about the mouth. The arguments in favor in the state voter pamphlet feature the classic unoriginal rhetoric of the Anti-Choice movement: “I had an abortion and I regret it!” and “Stop taking away my rights by making me pay for abortion!” and “If my birth mother had aborted me, I wouldn’t have the opportunity to write this extremely reductive argument in favor for the November 2018 election!!!!!”
  Meanwhile, virtually every sensible person and organization and agency and hospital and Catholics for Choice and the Oregon Nurse Association and the Oregon State Fire Fighters Council and Children First for Oregon and the Oregon Latino Health Association and APANO and the ACLU and the Oregon School Employees Association and hopefully you know that making abortion access more costly and inaccessible is just fuckin’ horseshit.
• Portland Measure 26–200: Yes
  Amends Charter: Limits candidate contributions, expenditures; campaign communications identify funders.
  This local measure would limit campaign contributions to $500 and limits a candidate or campaign’s ability to spend money for election to $5,000 per candidate or $10,000 per political committee. I think this’ll be tight: we may start to see smarter campaign tactics that don’t rely on spamming voters with ads at sheer volume. We’ll have smaller candidates have a real shot, I hope. In the past, we’ve seen as much as $60,000 come from a single donor here in Portland, including from sketch companies who want to support candidates who won’t be too tough on pollution, for instance.
  Arguments in opposition include the following: because of preexisting publicity and the comforts of their offices, incumbents will have free advantages over newcomers; money is speech so this is unconstitutional censorship LOL; and even some satire furnished by Dan Meek that’s worth a gander on page M-48 of the Multnomah County voter pamphlet. I didn’t know that the word “ass” could be published. That’s hella good to know!
• Portland Measure 26–201: Yuh
  Imposes surcharge on certain retailers; funds clean energy, job training.
  This measure will impose a 1% surcharge on businesses with over $1 billion in annual revenue overall, of which at least $500,000 is earned in Portland for clean energy projects like investing in alternative fuel sources, energy-efficient building updates, a tree canopy (YAY!!!), and energy-efficient building design. Additionally, underrepresented groups are named specifically in this measure to be wooed for clean energy jobs training. I am happy to see that women and people of color are on this list, and OVERJOYED to see people with disabilities and chronically underemployed folks named as well.
  People are always leery of a tax, but don’t believe the moans of billion-dollar companies saying that this 1% surcharge will be so debilitating that they will have no choice but to fire workers or raise prices. Those threats are evil, but at least competition and public slander and accountability in this town is such that these businesses might think twice about that for fear of alienating consumers.
  Um, y’all, scientists say we are rapidly running out of time to save our actual lives in the face of global climate change. We have already fucked so much shit up beyond repair. We need to be making bold moves, and this move is not even very bold. Consider it a bare-minimum sidestep in the right direction.
• Portland Measure 26–199: HELL yes!
  Bonds to fund affordable housing in Washington, Clackamas, Multnomah counties.
  Ah, yes! Another small but necessary drop in the bucket to create affordable housing for our communities in crisis! In PDX, we have a lot of plates in the air attempting to make our network of homeless shelters more viable, but our efforts toward building affordable housing have been slow-going — a bond here or there to create, say, 2,000 units. I think people want to believe we can eliminate poverty through education or other bootstrapsy means, but c’mon. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a conspiracy theorist to grasp that late-stage capitalism depends on keeping an entire class of people in poverty.
  All told, $652.8 million could be allocated to build low-income housing, rehabilitate and preserve the low-income status of pre-existing buildings, to help prevent displacement, and to buy land upon which to build more housing. The measure’s sponsors estimate that the average homeowner will end up paying about five bucks a month.
  The Mercury’s writeup on this measure is v good, y’all. About how this measure is unique in its support of the most marginalized tenants, they summarize:

“While the metro region currently offers a decent number of rental options for people who are “moderately” low-income, and make 60 to 80 percent of the region’s median annual income (between $49,000 and $65,000 for a family of four or between $34,000 and $45,000 for an individual), it’s facing a severe shortfall of around 48,000 rental units for those making less. Up to 50 percent of the bond’s funds will go toward housing for people making no more than 30 percent of the region’s median annual income (around $25,000 for a family of four or $17,000 for a single individual), a population that is disproportionately represented by communities of color.”

They also highlight the double-whammy potential of this measure if Measure 102 passes at the state level: instead of 2,400 home for 7,500 people, we could see double the affordable homes for double the vulnerable tenants. This is still really not enough. Consider that homelessness in Portland increased by 10% in January of last year for a total of at least 4,177 folks on the street a night. This doesn’t even begin to touch the hard-to-calculate numbers of people struggling to pay their rent, living on their friends’ couches, leaving their schools and communities to seek affordable places.
All the tenants rights legislation in the world (like the renter relocation law and limiting rent increases to no more than 5% within a 12 month period) are still insufficient. I have witnessed landlords blatantly increase rent anyway, knowing that their low-income tenants are not able to hire lawyers to fight, families who are working multiple jobs still unable to pay for their increased rent, traumatized kids coming into my counseling office in a daze, saying, “Hey, Miss B, we were kicked out of our apartment last night and I had to leave my English binder in my bedroom. Can you ask my teacher if she’ll give me an extension on our book report?”
We got an extension on the book report.
Let’s get an affordable home too.

Hey, u made it! This midterm election year, alllllll of those cush 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs, and 38 state governorships are being contested as well. What fresh hell is ahead of us? Who knows! Please be magnanimous with your friends and let your dogs sniff whatever they want on their walks. Listen to Chanda. Stretch from time to time.

I am just a scrub in this world, but if there’s anything redeeming about me, it’s because my mother raised me to be this extra. If you can, consider showing some love to her ongoing needs for housing and medical assistance.

Xoxo,
Bitchtucci