Senators sit at their desks during a session at the Oregon State Capitol in Salem, Ore., Thursday, May 4, 2023. Four Republican senators and one Independent senator had unexcused absences, preventing a quorum for the second day. Republicans blocking votes on bills about abortion, gun control and gender-affirming healthcare in Oregon this week have based their boycott on an obscure, 44-year-old state law that requires bill summaries to be written at the reading level of an 8th- or 9th-grader.
“This is about abortion, guns and transgender rights,” said Senate Majority Leader Kate Lieber. “The timing of this is such that they’re walking out on important legislation that Oregonians sent us here to do.” Designed in the 1940s to measure how easy it is to read and understand a text, the Flesch readability test factors word and sentence length to determine the grade level of a text. Scores range from 1 to 100, with 100 being the easiest to read and 1 being the most difficult. A score between 60 and 70 indicates an eighth- or ninth-grade reading level.
Gary Wilhelms, the Oregon house minority leader in 1979, was one of 31 bipartisan votes to pass the readability bill. On Monday, the 85-year-old Republican addressed the resurfacing of the law decades after it's passage in a statement released by the GOP senators.
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