Graham Parks

The SCC—on which I have been honored to serve, on the floor and on its Rules Committee, since 2017—acts as the board of directors for Oregon’s ruling party. At least that’s what the statute says (ORS 248.004), which designates the DPO as a defacto nonprofit, and which makes SCC members answerable for failures to adequately supervise the DPO’s employees in the same way directors of any other nonprofit would be.

Yet lately our staff has come to “supervise” its “board,” leading us ever further into a politically unbecoming atmosphere of darkness—where we now aren’t allowed by policy to be told the names of our fellow delegates or how to contact them, where whole meetings are canceled if they attract protester or two and where state investigations into $500,000 donations are not worth briefing us on till they’re over. We must bring the DPO’s management back into the light.

As we plunge into a fraught new era of “Trump, redux,” a Democratic Oregon can give Americans a window into the alternative future that could have been, and may yet still be, when the time comes to clear Trumpism’s rubble away. But if our party is to lay an unambiguously credible claim to the moral right to govern when the smoke clears, “good enough transparency” cannot be good enough for our internal affairs.

For more information, see this article.