Judge tosses Republican challenge to Gov. Kate Brown’s emergency authority

A Multnomah County judge has become the latest Oregon jurist to reject a challenge to Gov. Kate Brown’s sweeping emergency powers, dismissing a lawsuit filed last year by three Republican state lawmakers and a Washington County business owner.

Multnomah County Circuit Judge Melvin Odin-Orr on Wednesday agreed with state attorneys that the plaintiffs — state Reps. Mike Nearman and E. Werner Reschke, state Sen. Dennis Linthicum and businessman Neil Ruggles — lacked standing to sue Brown and the state over the law granting those powers.

The ruling comes nearly a year after Brown first began wielding her authority to enact widespread restrictions on commerce, education and public gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s the latest in a series of decisions that have enabled Brown to maintain a grip on business activity in the state.

First filed in October, the lawsuit took aim not so much at Brown as at the state law she has used repeatedly to make emergency orders. It says that, after declaring an emergency, “the Governor has complete authority over all executive agencies of state government and the right to exercise, within the area designated in the proclamation, all police powers vested in the state…”

That statute is one of three legal provisions that deal with the governor’s emergency power in Oregon, and by far the broadest. It has enabled Brown to put forward rules closing businesses, limiting large gatherings, halting events, preventing evictions and more.