HOUSE BILL 2101
A CONSOLIDATION OF GOVERNMENT POWER

HB 2101 would merge several existing departments or parts of departments into a new Oregon Homeland Security Department .It’s goal is to streamline and improve Oregon’s ability to respond to the ongoing threat of terrorism, or an actual attack. It may or may not do that. What it will do is further empower government, creating a new agency that centralizes various government powers and authorities within itself.

America was constructed upon a great debate about the central powers of the government. It is a debate that the centralizers - the Federalists - won, yet the Federalist victory was built upon a perhaps even more profound victory for those who feared government power. It is this mix that has defined American national government, and has defined the governments of the states, as well. The Founding Fathers created a separate Executive, Legislature and Judiciary, and set them against each other; they retained great power and authority in the states; and they allowed the states to devolve power further back, closer to the people, by the chartering of cities and counties. They separated church from state. They built a system of checks and balances, precisely to reign in governmental power. They wrote a Bill of Rights that limited the powers of the federal government, and the states, against the individual citizen. The states, following the same practical and philosophical imperatives, did the same. This created a structure that has survived 200 years, a structure that sacrifices some amount of probable efficiency to better insure liberty. HB 2101 will not end that structure. But the entirety of that structure warns against HB 2101. 

HB 2101 ends the Oregon Office of Emergency Management and transfers its powers to the new Oregon Homeland Security Department, including the power to bring proceedings against any local emergency agency. It abolishes the Interagency Hazard Communication Council and transfers its powers, including those over the non-emergency management and clean-up of such wastes, to the new Department. It makes the Fire Marshall’s office a branch of the new Department. It takes the search and rescue functions from both the Emergency Management Department and the Oregon Department of Aviation, and brings them, too, into this new Department. 

And it takes the State Police office that administers federal grants for fighting drug use and violent crime and puts that power in this new Department, too, making the new Department the arbiter of the financial survival of every police, fire and emergency services agency of every county and city in Oregon. Every city and county should fear this bill. 

So, too, should all who understand that liberty is threatened from within as often as from without, and that this bill, by consolidating so many powers under one hand, is a threat more immediate and more likely, even if less explosive, than that of the terrorists. We in Oregon probably will not suffer an attack by the Jihadists; but we will suffer an erosion of our liberty if we create this new department through our fear of the terrorists. 

Ed Johnston 541-336-1233