As you read this, the Oregon Legislature has convened for its 2025 session, and lawmakers already face a heavy load: The best estimate is that some 2,300 bills, memorials and resolutions were filed even before the first gavel fell.

That’s actually par for the course: During the entire 2023 session, some 2,976 measures were filed.

How many of those do you suppose passed?

The number is higher than you might think: some 653 passed, about 22%. That’s a lower percentage than the 2021 long session, in which about 29% of the measures passed and the 2019 session, when about 25% passed. It’s possible that the Republican walkout from the state Senate during the 2023 session resulted in a lower percentage of bills passing. (And in case you’re wondering: The 160-day legislative sessions held in odd-numbered years, such as 2025, generate many more bills than the 35-day sessions held in even-numbered years.)

In any event, a legislator who files 10 bills and gets three of them passed actually is running ahead of the curve. 

That illuminates something we tend to forget about the legislative process: It’s hard to get a piece of legislation through the Legislature. That’s because one of the most important functions the Legislature serves is to kill bills.

Readers of a certain age might recall “I’m Just a Bill,” that great old tune from the 1970s animated series “Schoolhouse Rock!” The process outlined by the “Schoolhouse Rock!” video is, shall we say, a little more genteel than actuality, but it does get some of the details right: At the start, the bill appears to be abandoned on the steps of the Capitol and is calling itself “a sad little scrap of paper.”

Of course, the actual legislative process is less an animated cartoon and more of a horror movie, in that it offers numerous ways for a bill to die.

The reasons are varied. Sometimes a worthy bill is buried by measures deemed more pressing by legislators. Sometimes a bill requires more than one session to get traction in the Legislature. Sometimes a bill gets killed as part of a deal involving other legislation.

And sometimes a proposed piece of legislation is just a bad idea. The legislative gantlet, with its opportunities for public testimony and vigorous debate, can be helpful in revealing flaws and weaknesses in proposed legislation. (The public input piece of this is vital, and that’s one reason we’ve been happy to see the Capitol open again to the public in the wake of the pandemic and as the renovating project on the building itself enters its final laps. The online sessions necessitated by the pandemic remain important ways to involve members of the public who can’t drop everything and head to Salem for a committee hearing.)

The first days of any legislative session tend to be sunny, with plenty of well-meaning words about finding bipartisan solutions to Oregon’s pressing problems. And the truth is that much of the work lawmakers tackle is handled in a bipartisan way.

But it’s inevitable that tensions will rise as deadlines draw closer and the spotlight increasingly falls on the most difficult challenges that lawmakers face — which likely this session will include finding money to pay for the state’s transportation needs. By that point, it will be a good thing that most of the nearly 3,000 measures filed this session will be, in the words of our lonely animated bill, nothing more than sad little scraps of paper.