A POINT OF PERSONAL PRIVILEGE: May, November, and the Fine Art of Pretending

By State Representative Cyrus Javadi

The 2026 session is done. The votes are cast. The speeches have been given. The talking points are already out there wandering around the internet like feral cats.

I want to go back through a few of the bigger fights from session. Not every bill. Nobody needs that. Least of all me.

Some of these pieces will be about policy. Some about incentives. Some about that old political custom of calling your own strategy principle and the other side’s principle a trick.

The Politics of the Gas Tax Referendum

Which brings me to one of the spiciest bills of the session—SB 1599, aka the fight over the gas tax referendum.

I can already hear some of you groaning. Fair enough. “Are we really still talking about the gas tax?”

Yes. We are. And unless somebody invents a road system that runs on good intentions and Facebook comments, we probably will be for a while.

At first glance, this does not look like the kind of thing a normal person would choose to read for pleasure. It has a gas tax referendum, a court opinion, election timing, constitutional language, and a procedural fight. In other words, all the ingredients of a very powerful sleep aid.

But it matters. More than it seems.

Because under the legal paperwork and the partisan fog machine, SB 1599 is really about something people understand immediately. What do you do when both sides are obviously playing politics, both sides know they are playing politics, and the public is left trying to sort out whether anybody is still leveling with them?

What the bill did

Strip away the throat-clearing and SB 1599 did two main things.

First, it moved the vote on Referendum Petition 2026-302 from November 3, 2026 to May 19, 2026.

Second, it tightened the timeline around a bunch of related election steps, including the ballot title, explanatory statement, financial estimate, and voters’ pamphlet arguments.

That’s not spin. That’s the plumbing.

Now, nobody walked into the 2026 session surprised by any of this.

The session opened on February 2, and by then everybody in the building, their staff, and probably a few of their long-lost uncles already knew the Legislature was going to take up the question of moving the gas tax referendum to May.

Republicans dug in early.

If necessary, they were prepared to walk out and bring the place to a halt. And they did, more than once. There was bartering, threatening, pleading, stalling, and the usual late-session hope that if you can’t win the argument, maybe you can just run enough time off the clock.

That clock mattered. Why? Because there was a soft deadline of February 25 that would have given the Secretary of State plenty of time to get everything ready for the May ballot. Instead, after all the drama, an agreement was reached to bring the bill to the House floor on March 2. The Secretary of State ultimately said it still could make the May ballot after February 25, but the margin for error was getting pretty thin. And on March 2, the House passed it.

And, Republicans, unhappy with the bill, sued almost immediately.

Their basic claim was that once the referendum qualified, the date and the process were effectively locked in. The Legislature, they argued, could not come back afterward and rearrange the schedule.

Judge David Leith disagreed. He said the plaintiffs were unlikely to win because the Oregon Constitution itself says referendum elections are held at the regular general election unless the Legislative Assembly says otherwise.

That settled the legal question for the moment.

But, the political argument, naturally, kept right on breathing.

Why anybody should care

I know. This all sounds a little inside baseball.

Not even the fun kind. Not October baseball. More like a damp Tuesday in April where the game’s been delayed for an hour and two guys in windbreakers are still arguing about how well the tarp was laid down on the infield.

But it matters, and not just to people who read court opinions for sport. You see, most Oregonians are not walking around thinking about Article IV of the state constitution.

Surprising, I know.

Instead, they’re trying to get to work. They’re paying too much for groceries. They’re filling up the tank and doing the little mental math everybody does now at the pump.

Still, people know when something feels off.

They may not know the statutory language. They may not care about the filing deadline for voters’ pamphlet arguments. But they understand the basic idea that if the rules around a public vote change in the middle of a political fight, it’s worth asking why.

That doesn’t automatically make it crooked. Sometimes a rule change is just a rule change. But process matters because process shapes outcomes.

It affects turnout. It affects momentum. It affects how much attention a measure gets, who shows up, what kind of campaign gets built around it, and whether voters feel like they’re being asked to decide an issue or being drafted into somebody else’s larger political plan.

And in this case, nobody should pretend timing is neutral. It isn’t.

A May election is not the same thing as a November election. Different turnout. Different level of attention. Different political weather. Everyone in politics knows that, including the ones currently acting surprised by it.

So no, the question isn’t whether timing matters.

Of course it matters.

The question is whether this was a legitimate effort to keep a policy fight from turning into a partisan turnout machine, or just one partisan move answering another.

The Part Both Sides Would Rather Blur

Oregon has a transportation funding problem. A real one. Not a fake crisis designed to scare people into swallowing a tax hike. An actual problem.

By September of 2025, the Legislature had done what legislatures do, or are at least supposed to do. It argued, bargained, annoyed everybody, and eventually produced a transportation package. That package included a six-cent gas tax increase, higher DMV fees, and a payroll transit tax. People can disagree with that package. Plenty did. That part is normal.

What was also true, though, is that Republicans had decided very early on that no gas tax increase was acceptable.

None. Under any circumstance.

And, honestly, that is their right. But let’s not confuse it with some grand act of neutral spreadsheet reasoning. It was a political position.

Then came the slogan: Oregon doesn’t have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem.

Like most good slogans, it worked because it wasn’t entirely false.

Costs really were up. Projects really did get more expensive after COVID. Agency leadership had lost the confidence of a lot of lawmakers. And it was true that the 2017 transportation package sent only a small share of its new money to maintenance while a good deal went elsewhere. Those are real criticisms. They shouldn’t be waved away.

But that slogan also did what slogans do. It trimmed off the awkward parts.

It left out the slow erosion of gas-tax buying power. It left out the fact that cars are getting more fuel efficient, which is great for families and less great for a tax system built around gallons sold. It left out inflation in asphalt, steel, concrete, labor, equipment, and all the other cheerful ingredients required to keep roads from turning into a patchwork audition for the moon. It left out the fact that older systems cost more to maintain.

They just do.

Anybody who owns an aging pickup, a hundred-year-old house, or knees over the age of forty already understands the principle.

And it definitely left out the part where “the money is already there” only works if you are willing to raid or delay other things. Major road repairs. Transit. Safety projects. Long-planned work that didn’t appear out of thin air one Tuesday afternoon.

That’s when politics starts doing what it always does.

One side sands a complicated problem down until it fits on a mailer. The other side answers with a different simplification. And the person at home, who is just trying to figure out whether the roads will get fixed without getting played for a fool, gets handed two cartoon versions of the same problem.

So what was SB 1599 really about?

That depends on how cynical you are, and maybe how honest.

The legal question was straightforward enough: could the Legislature move the election date? The court said yes.

The political question is murkier.

Was moving the vote to May an attempt to deny one side a turnout advantage in November? Probably that was part of it. Anyone saying otherwise should be forced to take a polygraph…and then maybe a nap.

But was the referendum itself also being used as a broader turnout tool, not just a policy challenge? Also probably yes.

This is the part where partisan people usually pick a side and start chanting. I’m less interested in that.

The more useful thing, I think, is to admit what was happening. The referendum was about the gas tax, yes. But, it was also about larger electoral incentives.

What Does This All Mean?

The important thing now is that the voters will get to decide.

The voters will get their say. All of them. Every single one, regardless of party, in May.

So for all the procedural trench warfare we saw over the last six months: all the walkouts, all the high-minded statements and conveniently timed outrage, this inning of the ballgame will end with the public weighing in.

My guess? In this environment, I don’t think voters are likely to vote for a gas tax increase. People are stretched thin. They are suspicious of government. And, they are in no mood to hear that one more tax hike will fix everything this time, scout’s honor.

Fair enough.

But they are also going to want roads that are open, safe, and maintained. They are still going to expect bridges to hold, potholes to get filled, landslides to get cleared, and highways not to crumble into a series of expensive apologies.

They can want both. But they cannot have both without tradeoffs.

And that is why this fight is not really ending in May. If the voters say no, the transportation problem does not politely disappear. It comes right back. Which means the Legislature will almost certainly be talking about it again in 2027, because reality is stubborn that way.

Choices have tradeoffs. Tradeoffs have consequences. And consequences, unlike press releases, eventually reach real people.