Your standard Democratic, Jeff Merkely (ostensibly a Senator from Oregon) absolutely hates the next Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, so he did his best to obfuscate and delay by doing the only thing he knows how to do: running his yap. He really wanted to filibuster the nomination, but unfortunately for poor little Jeffy, the big bad Republicans had already made that impossible. Democratics, always in there fighting for the little guy, love their filibusters:
The longest filibuster in history is widely considered to be the late senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who held up the Senate floor for 24 hours and 18 minutes in 1957 to delay the Civil Rights Act.
Yep, and that's why blacks tend to love themselves them Democratics, because Everybody Knows that Republicans be Rayciss. Oh, Strom? He was a Grand Wizard in the KKK and a faithful Democratic to the end of his rotten life, but at least he was never Rayciss.
Meanwhile, back here in Orygun, the Democratics who managed to generate the $22 billion unfunded mandate known as the Public Employee Retirement System (PERS) - pension costs already amount to an average of 18 percent of public payrolls, and are expected to rise to 30 percent over the next several biennia - have a whole nother problem on their hands:
Less well-known is the parallel growth in the cost of health care. As The Register-Guard’s Saul Hubbard reported on Sunday, the state pays $1.7 billion a year to provide health insurance for state employees and the personnel of local school districts — more than the current annual bill for PERS. The state pays an average of $16,992 for state employees’ health care benefits, 38 percent more than the average in Washington state and 9.6 percent more than in California. Health insurance premiums average $12,204 for Oregon public school teachers, 30 percent more than in Washington and 24 percent more than in California.
Why, our Democratics here are just amazingly generous when it comes to spending other peoples' money, even by the standards of their counterparts in Washington and California. And so it is that although the state has seen a 40% increase in revenues, they've still managed to come up $1.2 billion "short" in what they amusingly refer to as the state "budget".
Oregon's mostly eastern Democratics from places like Connecticut, Miami, and Minnesota don't have a revenue problem; they have a spending problem, and the idea of an actual budget is as foreign to them as they are to the state itself.
Their only "solution" is - you guessed it - moar munny. Once again, they want corporations to "pay their fair share" - meaning that the munny they want comes out of your wallet. Why, without moar munny, they might have to cut "services". We don't know what those "services" are, but we sure as hell know what they are not: transportation, as in improved roads. They can't even manage to fix potholes.
They do manage to take care of their core constituency - which, by the way, is not you or me:
Public employee unions view any reduction in health benefits, or any increase in the relatively low share of premium costs paid by workers, as a pay cut that would need to be balanced by salary increases.
Well, heavens to Murgatroid; we can't have that! Clearly, cuts will need to be made, so the Democratics will make them - to core services such as transportation and public safety - while retaining their multimillion-dollar "diversity and inclusion" orifices. Because hey, that stuff's important.
Here in Porkland, the situation is incredibly dire:
Portland Public Schools may give 70 teachers pink slips so that its more than 6,000 employees can get 3 percent salary increases next year.
This is simply awful! How will the chillin' ever learn to put a condom on a cucumber? Oh, and never mind that PPS has hired a law firm to sue a parent and an experienced reporter who both had the audacity to request public records from the school district. It's easy to see why PPS needs another bond measure, because well, they have expenses.
