The Oregon Supreme Court approved the Secretary of State's official description of Bill Sizemore's Measure 59 as prohibiting the inclusion in the Oregon Voter's Pamphlet of political arguments for and against measures and candidates. Since this finding, Sizemore and his Oregon Taxpayers United organization and supporters have grown increasingly desparate in their promotion of the measure. They no longer attempt to hide the fact that their central purpose is a partisan effort on behalf of Republicans to prevent the public employees unions from using member dues for political campaigning for Democrats. Like many of Sizemore's flawed ballot measures, M-59 has untended consequences, among them the crippling of the Oregon Voters Pamphlet.
The practice of public agencies deducting union dues from paychecks is the same as that used by the private sector. Payroll deductions are a contracted employee benefit. Public agencies routinely deduct from employee pay for investments, health care and life insurance premiums, charitible contributions, union dues, and numerous other expenses. The use to which the money is put is irrelevant. Indeed, the law proposed by Measure 59, censoring the unions from spending their members' funds for political speech, may be in violation of the employees' freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
If restrictions on payroll deductions are allowed, there may next be a measure proposed to make it illegal for public employee payroll deductions for health care plans which pay for abortions.
M-59 supporters have yet to answer the charge that 59 will censor public political debate in two ways:
1) it will trash the Oregon Voters Pamphlet - which has provided Oregon voters with election information since 1902!
2) Public employees unions will lose much of their ability to publicize their members' opinions.
Obviously the conclusion to be drawn is that Oregon Taxpayers United and its right wing supporters believe full discussion of public policy issues is against their special interests and should be suppressed.
The public expenditure required to deduct union dues for political use from paychecks is so slight as to make this pro-59 argument laughable. It probably amounts to the cost of the ink to print the numbers - and surely no more than deducting the union dues for non-political purposes. If M-59 supporters think so much of the argument that deducting political contributions costs the public extra, they should get busy & research & document the cost.