We don’t want Oregon to be the place where legislative walkouts are easy. The cost is great. The benefit is limited.

We don’t know if the February session is going to be another one that features walkouts. The threat is there.

What we know is Measure 113 did not stop walkouts. It doesn’t matter what the Oregon Supreme Court decided about when the measure’s penalty of not being able to run for re-election kicks in. The ballot measure didn’t stop walkouts.

Oregon should shift its quorum requirements. Oregon’s current requirement is that two-thirds of lawmakers must be present in a chamber for bills to pass. Change that to a simple majority. That’s what most states mandate.

Oregon doesn’t need to do it because that is what most states do. It needs to do it because the current quorum rules create an underlying democratic indecency. A small minority of legislators can shut down the government.

We don’t buy any sort of historical hallelujah that the founders of Oregon intended it to be so and so it should be.

Oregon’s quorum rules have led to a secret government within the Legislature that decides what bills will pass and what they will say — all behind closed doors. If we could count on the negotiations between the leaders of Democrats and Republicans to be out in the open, maybe it wouldn’t be as important. They close the doors.

House Speaker Dan Rayfield, a Democrat, helped us understand a little of what goes on in those meetings. For instance, Rayfield told us he would keep a 12-pack of Diet Coke in his office because he knows Senate minority leader Tim Knopp, R-Bend, likes Diet Coke. Much of what happens is trying to build trust and understanding, Rayfield explained.

“If I could have had the Republicans in my office being willing to be on a Zoom to have the kinds of conversations that we were having about bills they didn’t want to have, you better believe I would have had them in public,” Rayfield told us recently. “Because I know the populace would have been with us on some of the stuff being stripped out.”

The meetings are not as glamorous or nefarious as some people might think, he added.

We don’t doubt Rayfield, but we do think the meetings tilt toward the nefarious. The public’s business in Oregon is supposed to be conducted in public. It doesn’t take snuffling by specialists to recognize that when legislative leaders decide behind closed doors which bills move and which don’t, that is the public’s business. And in a walkout, it happens behind closed doors.