Oregon Senate GOP claims its latest walkout is really just a protest against big words

Since Wednesday, a majority of Republicans in the Oregon Senate have been ditching work—to prevent a quorum and bring all legislative action to a halt. The walkout is intended to block votes on progressive legislation related to abortion, gun control, and transgender health care, and the Oregon GOP is using a little-noticed 44-year-old law to justify its actions. Their complaint, in short? The bills those ivory tower Democrats have been writing read too much like The Economist and not enough like Kevin Sorbo’s tweets.

State Senate Republicans have seized upon the 1979 law, which requires all bill summaries to be written at an eighth or ninth grade level, to insist that new legislation focused on the above-mentioned liberal priorities isn’t eligible for consideration. How do they determine that? Easy. They send the bills to Donald Trump, and if he eats only the pages with pie charts on them, it means he had no interest in the rest of the bill—ergo, too hard for a middle schooler to read. 

I’m joking, of course. They use something called the Flesch readability test, which was developed in the 1940s to determine the readability of documents.

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