Oregon's new laws call more for fine-tuning than retooling

Every new year ushers in a gusher of new laws, all across the country, from West Coast to East. It just comes with the season, as surely as pumpkins at Halloween and turkeys at Thanksgiving.

Like New Year’s resolutions, the vast majority will soon be broken by someone somewhere. But let’s hope most will be heeded more faithfully than that, at least by most of us most of the time.

Here in Oregon, the headliners include laws to curb drug use on public transit, better facilitate home repair, video enforce bus safety, cut the cost of prescription drug and health care services, disinvest in the coal industry, better protect warehouse workers and require the video recording and posting of school board proceedings.

There are no earth-shakers on the list, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

It seems that the more sweeping, innovative or groundbreaking a new idea, the more likely it is to go spectacularly wrong. You can chalk that up to a law of nature rather than humankind — the law of unintended consequences.

Take a short look back at Measure 110, which decriminalized even hard drugs like heroin and fentanyl, for a prime example. It wreaked enough havoc on our streets to trigger a swift and sure reversal.

The new measures could virtually all be challenged on grounds the problem doesn’t loom large enough to justify state intervention. And climate change critics would be quick to oppose coal disinvestment.

However, we think lawmakers here in Oregon, Democrat and Republican alike, were generally responding to demonstrated constituent concerns with the best of intentions. That doesn’t seem to ring quite as true in some states.

Next door in Idaho, new laws will, among other things, make it a felony for physicians to offer gender transition care to minors, tighten work requirements for food stamp recipients, and bar use of student identification cards to document voter registration, while continuing acceptance of concealed firearm permits.

Back in July, Idaho repealed its needle exchange program, authorized requirement of parental consent before honoring student pronoun choices, exempted landlords from having to accept subsidized housing vouchers, stiffened limitations on acceptable public library materials and joined states authorizing “Don’t Tread on Me” license plates.

That makes Oregon’s coal disinvestment push seem only mildly political by comparison, and the rest of the lot even less so. We’re on board there, as our long-held preference is for more measures addressing real-world problems and fewer making hollow — if not outright harmful — political statements.