CHL Confidentiality Confusion
As many of you know, the fertilizer has hit the ventilator in the matter of HB 4045, the CHL privacy bill.
Floyd Prozanski has drafted amendments that gut and stuff the original simple bill and complicate it considerably. The bill was NOT assigned to his committee but instead sent to the Senate Rules Committee.
There is a lot of speculation about why the bill was sent there. Many assume Senate President Peter Courtney sent it there to be killed. Based on comments Courtney has made lately about not wanting to deal with gun bills, this is certainly a possibility. The Chair of the Rules Committee, Diane Rosenbaum, makes the final decision about whether or not to hear the bill, although if Courtney told her he wanted it dead, that’s the most likely outcome.
Since Prozanski has sent out a blast email (using the legislative email address and not his own) many are wondering what to make of the amendments he attached. Since the NRA has now stated they will acquiesce to the amendments and have asked people to support the amended, gut and stuffed bill, there is a lot of confusion.
As we have said over and over, HB 4045 was simple, straight forward and easy to understand. The gut and stuffed version is anything but. Prozanski’s last amendments mark the 33rd time this bill has been amended.
Kim Thatcher, the sponsor of the original bill, has signaled that she will go along with the changes. We continue to support her original bill which did not require an army of lawyers to understand.
Oregon’s current statutes are so confusing that some DA’s do not understand them. (True story.) In the past we have spent weeks trying to get legislators to figure out that some of our gun laws literally make no sense. (Why for example could a person with a felony conviction petition to have his rights restored to BUY a gun and still not be allowed to OWN it?) That is why we feel so strongly about the unamended bill.
It’s no secret that HB 4045 was drafted with the specific intent of keeping the privacy protections OUT of the “public records” statutes because of their weak and limited protections. Prozanski’s changes put them right back in there.
We believe that the original bill got the job done in the simplest way. Whatever protections the amended bill claims to provide, it remains complex and confusing for no particular reason other than to stroke the egos of politicians who want to control the process.
We refer you to yesterday’s alert.