You are viewing an archived issue of the Eugene Weekly. To return to our current issue, please click here.

		The Veteran and the Rookie BY TONY CORCORAN Author's note: This is risky business — I'm writing about two guys with desks next to mine on the Senate floor, John Minnis and Frank Morse. But, at the risk of ruining their reputation with their Republican colleagues, I actually like these guys and respect them. They've made a commitment to serve; and they take their jobs seriously, for the most part. THE VETERAN John Minnis and I have our differences: He's an evangelical Republican cop with tenuous relationships to the Right, I'm an agnostic Democratic labor goon with tenuous relationships to the Left. On law enforcement issues we're not that far apart, to the extent that you can ever see the world through the eyes of this Dick Tracy/Charlton Heston hybrid. This is a guy who has one of the toughest jobs in the state when we're not in session; John is a Portland police detective — he formerly worked in homicide — who currently investigates sexual assault crimes. He has a street-tempered attitude toward crime and criminals and I don't blame him a bit. John is an experienced committee chair, having chaired Ways and Means in the House and Judiciary in the Senate. He is my vice-chair on our Senate General Government Committee, and has been a great help as the committee meanders its way through the PERS discussion and weightier issues like collective bargaining and professional wrestling. Watching him go off the other day in committee on an unfriendly, anti-government, egotistical lawyer made my heart swell with pride; we both left the hearing grinning ear to ear. Despite our differences, we have a lot in common — physically tall, lean but muscular, without a gray hair to be seen. (In my case, without any hair to be seen.) We're both amicable, calm, deliberative, consensus-building, transparent, reasonable, forgiving, relatively honorable (did I mention "calm"?), shy wallflowers and statesmen. John does think he's smarter than me, but we're both Irish, so I know better. John's been catching a lot of flack lately for his SB742, which creates a crime of terrorism and then makes every protest and every concerted activity, even legal actions such as a union strike, punishable by a life sentence. I could see myself after some future protest, during the sentencing phase, begging: "No, no, John, I didn't mean the part about your mother wearing combat boots, only the part about the buckteeth! Let me plea bargain down to 30 years in prison." John claims everyone is overeacting to some bad editing by our drafters in Legislative Counsel; he really intended it to be an "anti-tourism" bill aimed at imprisoning unsuspecting city councilors who tried to pass a local lodging tax that could be punishable by capital punishment, i.e., if it's not pre-empted by the state. THE ROOKIE Frank Morse is a good guy — an earnest, smart, successful businessman with a faint sense of humor buried under an OSU degree in engineering. His previous company, Morse Bros. of Corvallis, one of the largest aggregate and road building companies in Oregon, was deeply respected in environmental circles for its mitigation work on habitat. After he retired from there, Frank took up making a better piece of artillery for the U.S. Navy. He partnered up with Remington and produced weaponry using a heavy birdshsot he developed. He serves on the board of Northwest Christian College, he's on a hospital board, and he showed up in support of an AIDS/HIV group that visited the capitol; he's so normal and seemingly liberal that the Democratic Party once recruited him to run for the legislature. Unfortunately, he's an R! Fascinating guy, but, alas, still a rookie. He recently sponsored a Senate Joint Resolution to the federal government asking the feds to forego their requirement that Oregon provide matching state funds in exchange for federal dollars. Hello! Frank doesn't want the state to pay its share of mental health, public health, food stamp, and Medicaid costs. But he wants the feds to continue to send the matching funds as if we were actually supporting these services. Hmmm? We can't raise sufficient funds for Oregon's mental health programs — which have already seen human casualties — so the solution is a Senate Joint Resolution? Next thing you know, he'll bring in one of those "turnaround" experts from the private sector, and then the very next thing you know the welfare department will start makin' a profit! Gollee! Sen. Tony Corcoran of Cottage Grove represents portions of Lane and Douglas counties in Senate District 4, which includes the UO area. He can be reached at sen.tonycorcoran@state.or.us
		Table of Contents | News | Views | Calendar| Film | Music | Culture | Classifieds | Personals | Contact | EW Archive