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Oregon Lawmakers Use 'Lateral Pass' To Beat Bill Deadline

Edmund Garman
/
Flickr

Oregon lawmakers are rushing to beat a Tuesday deadline for legislation to advance. But there's an old saying around the state capitol: No bill is truly dead until the final gavel falls.

If the legislature was a football game, moving a bill to the Rules Committee would be the equivalent of a lateral pass. The Rules Committee isn't subject to most deadlines so moving a bill there keeps it alive.

That's what just the House Business and Labor Committee did with a series of measures to increase the state's minimum wage. Democratic Chair Paul Holvey told lawmakers that a vote to move the bill to the Rules Committee is not the same as voting to raise the minimum wage.

"It's not indicating that you support or oppose the bill, generally,” he said.

Republican Jim Weidner disagreed with that assessment, saying, ”Keeping it alive would actually show a little bit of support, would it not?"

In the end, the minimum wage bills stayed alive on party line votes.

Copyright 2015 Northwest News Network

Chris Lehman
Chris Lehman graduated from Temple University with a journalism degree in 1997. He landed his first job less than a month later, producing arts stories for Red River Public Radio in Shreveport, Louisiana. Three years later he headed north to DeKalb, Illinois, where he worked as a reporter and announcer for NPR–affiliate WNIJ–FM. In 2006 he headed west to become the Salem Correspondent for the Northwest News Network.