SALEM — The first walkout of the 2020 legislative session has arrived.

Criticizing a session she believes is moving too quickly, House Republican Leader Christine Drazan announced Tuesday that members of her caucus will refuse to attend a floor session scheduled for 7 p.m.

If at least 21 of the chamber’s 22 Republicans follow through, the tactic would deny Democrats the two-thirds quorum needed to conduct business — stymieing progress as the chamber works to meet legislative deadlines.

“Tonight is really about pacing of the session and pacing of floor movement and allowing our members to have a little bit more time in between,” Drazan said Tuesday. “The schedule is a little bit grueling for the level of issues that are coming before us in committees right now.”

The specter of a potential Republican walkout has long loomed over the 2020 session, as GOP members have vowed to do anything they can to stop a bill aimed at curbing global warming that they believe will damage Oregon’s economy.

But Drazan’s announcement on Tuesday puts forward a strategy few considered: That Republicans might selectively refuse to show up based on how they’re feeling about the schedule Democratic leadership has set for a given day.

Drazan made clear her members would be in the building Wednesday morning, “with a smile on our face and ready to get back to work.” But she said her caucus would continue to assess whether the pacing of floor sessions meets its approval.

“We’ll have this conversation again tomorrow,” Drazan said. “What does the floor look like on that day?”

Republicans have already taken one unorthodox step to slow the movement of legislation through the House. The caucus has declined to waive rules mandating that bills be read in full before final passage — a concession that until recently was granted by the minority party with few exceptions.

The refusal to waive rules has ensured meetings of the full House drag on far longer than they would typically. At the floor session scheduled for Tuesday night, for instance, reading was scheduled to continue on a 53-page bill a clerk had started in on earlier in the day.

In a meeting with reporters, Drazan said Republicans are intent on slowing the rapid pace of bills moving through the building. She suggested that, beyond a few budgetary tweaks, there is no legislation that must pass during this 35-day session.

“Why would we waive rules?” she said “There are some budget glitches that we really do need to fix and we have ample opportunity to do that … There’s really no cause to expedite the process inside this building.”

House Speaker Tina Kotek, a Portland Democrat, responded to Drazan’s announcement by calling on her to reconsider, and explaining the rationale for calling an evening floor session.

“To this point, I have respected the House Republicans’ desire to read bills in full,” Kotek said in a statement “Doing so requires more floor time in order to meet the session’s deadlines and move bills over to the Senate. Our deadlines require that we move bills that have passed out of policy committees off the House floor by Thursday.”

In past walkouts — including one of the two carried out by Senate Republicans last year — Democrats asked the governor to send Oregon State Police after lawmakers to force them to come to work. It was unclear Tuesday what steps Kotek might take to address a potential no-show.