Bipartisanship can be a tough balance to strike in any political realm. But what about those times when it’s a necessity because of a tied legislative chamber?
They’ve been facing that in Minnesota this term, where the session began with ties in both chambers. Sharing power is not what legislatures are built for, though, so it can be challenging to form a new approach.
But lawmakers in at least one state have fond memories of the time they were tied. The Oregon House managed a split nearly 15 years ago that went so smoothly, both sides are still talking about it. And they ran it with strict rules about sharing power.
“It was an exciting and enjoyable time for me, and it helped me understand myself better as well as a lot of people that I got to work with,” Democrat Arnie Roblan, then-co-speaker of the House, says. “It was fun.”
“It was an exciting and enjoyable time for me, and it helped me understand myself better as well as a lot of people that I got to work with.”
—Arnie Roblan, former co-speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives
His co-speaker, Republican Bruce Hanna, considered it productive, too. “I think we had one of the finest cycles possible,” he says.
Their chiefs of staff had to coordinate in ways that were unimaginable in previous sessions. And they loved it.
“It’s a very special time in Oregon’s history,” says Jessica Adamson, who was Roblan’s chief of staff and now is a contract lobbyist. “And it was the top professional experience of my career.”
Hanna’s then-chief of staff, Angela Wilhelms, is now CEO of Oregon Business and Industry.
“People just got it, and everyone made it work,” she says. “And that was an extraordinary thing to watch.”
Ties Not Uncommon
Natalie Wood, NCSL’s vice president of state policy and research, says ties aren’t uncommon, what with 61 chambers that have an even number of seats. NCSL tracks how tied chambers decide to govern themselves, and she says leaders often reach out to learn how other states approached it. Not necessarily to copy what others have done, though.
“They might look back to the past as a precedent, but they also might do something different based on lessons learned,” Wood says. “From those tied-chamber experiences, legislatures are always iterating.”
That’s what happened in Oregon, when the 2010 election evened up the House chamber—for the first time ever—ending a Democratic supermajority.
The rules they settled on spelled out sharing control at every level. They even went so far as to require that on budget bills, each party brought at least 16 votes—a bare majority of its caucus—so they would share the responsibility for the spending outcomes.
“We would stand there with the gavel and wait for them to go figure it out,” Roblan says. “We’d say, ‘You haven’t given us your share yet.’ So the whips would go whip their people again. And we just took the time and waited and didn’t get too uptight about it. And eventually, everyone worked out.”
Observers say that requirement goes further than most shared governing agreements. And it worked. They got the budget through and settled other thorny issues including redistricting, Medicaid expansion and education reform.
That degree of compromise wasn’t a given at first. Adamson says both sides initially were toying with how they could get around that 30-30 tie.
“At first there was a lot of work to figure out if you could steal somebody, right? Both the Republicans and the Democrats, we both tried to say, ‘I wonder if we could go poach representative so-and-so, what if we gave so-and-so such and such and could get to 31?,” Adamson recalls.
But they soon saw that the old tactics weren’t going to cut it, Hanna says.
“All kinds of dealmaking was going on behind the scenes,” he says. “Once Arnie and I got together, that went away pretty quickly. We looked each other in the eye and just said, ‘Hey, we got to get this done, and we got to get it done in a way that Oregonians respect it.”
Hanna and Roblan had to model that unity to set the tone. They stayed in constant communication. It helped that then-Gov. John Kitzhaber (D) and the Senate majority leader, the late Peter Courtney (D), treated them equally. The four of them met at least weekly, and both co-speakers were included as chairs of the joint appropriations committee with Courtney.
Roblan and Hanna had neighboring districts and had worked on bills together in previous sessions. Once the chamber was tied, they did events together in each other’s districts. A New York Times article of the day noted they even finished each other’s sentences.
Putting Differences Aside
Hanna says they didn’t let their political differences win the day.
“I would say we had quite a bit in common, probably way more in common than difference,” says Hanna, who left the Legislature after that session—and after a 10-year stint in which he led the party to claim the six seats that tied the chamber.
The co-leaders and their staffs worked on the rules right up until the wee hours before the session was scheduled to start.
All members were involved in the discussions, even those who weren’t sworn in yet since, as Hanna notes, they were the ones who brought the chamber to a tie. They produced more than 30 pages of rules, and someone even came up with a unique way to commemorate the tie: a special gavel with two handles.
Hanna says they took extra care to make sure committee co-chairs were suited to sharing power.
“You’re trying to find not only their interest level, but also where they have a skills set and match those up, and then frankly matching them together so that they weren’t just oil and water,” Hanna says. “They had a chance to blend together and be good leaders together.”
Under the rules, bills wouldn’t even get to committee without approval of the co-chairs and the co-speakers. They’d have to find common ground. That would dictate what bills could be considered, and certainly how each side crafted the bills they’d offer.
Everyone recalls there were some hitches, especially early on.
“So many of them were frustrated,” Roblan says. “And I said, ‘Well, they have the equal power that you do. Fifty percent of the people of Oregon voted for them, and 50% voted for us. So that’s the way it is.’”
Adamson, who now works as a contract lobbyist for several organizations, says it’s not that there was no partisanship. Legislators brought their viewpoints to the table and started from there to look for agreement. And just because both chairs agreed to hear each bill didn’t mean they made it out of committee. But a lot of hot-button issues that typically come up simply couldn’t get traction since both parties had to agree.
“And so, what it started to do was just pull the strife and the politics out of the session,” Adamson says. “There were just topics that were completely off the table, and that pulled the temperature down a lot.”
Wilhelms says that left room to have more thorough conversations about fewer bills, though the session did complete only slightly fewer bills than average.
“We had a general culture overall of mutual respect, and we were focused on less stuff but getting that stuff better and more ready for prime time,” she says.
This is not to say the stuff they did focus on was simple, the co-speakers say.
“We had a half a billion-dollar deficit we had to figure out, we were also doing redistricting in the building, which hadn’t been done in forever,” Roblan says. “Usually, they couldn’t work out anything, so it went to the secretary of state.”
And Hanna notes they managed to agree on Medicaid expansion and taxes on hospitals to pay for it, something both sides had strong opinions about.
“I mean, if you think about it, during that cycle we overhauled the health care in the state of Oregon,” he says. “That’s where the hospital tax came from. That’s what increased the number of people who can participate in the Oregon health plan.”
The work even included bills to upgrade the Capitol building and to go from paper time sheets to an electronic system. Adamson and Wilhelms say these are important measures that often don’t fly when only one party has the majority because they don’t want to take all the heat for spending the money. In this case everyone knew they were in it together and felt comfortable agreeing on the expenses.
Longing for More Agreeable Times
After the 2011 session, voters returned a Democratic majority to the Oregon House, and it has been that way since. Sessions have been contentious, marked by clashes over quorum, with the minority party staging walkouts to block the passage of bills and the majority party seeking to force those legislators to return.
It’s no wonder people feel nostalgic about that power-sharing session.
“I hear this from a lot of people,” Wilhelms says. “People just reflect on that biennium with a sense of fondness about how we didn’t spend a lot of time mired in the extremes.”
Former co-speakers Hanna and Roblan are clearly proud of what lawmakers and staff achieved when they forged a new way to work together. And they are grateful they got to team up to make it work. As they look back, they agree that compromise and collaboration are the only way forward in a split chamber.
“You can do really hard things when you trust each other,” Roblan says.
Listen to the “Across the Aisle” podcast about the Oregon House chamber's tied session of 2011.
Kelley Griffin is a senior editor in NCSL’s Communications Division and the host of the “Across the Aisle” podcast.