So thanks to its Progressive Era western state heritage, Oregon has particularly strict and toothsome balanced budget requirements.

Oregon also has a decade-old Democratic legislative lock, teetering on supermajority. But Oregon also has a two-thirds state Senate quorum requirement, which means that a coordinated mere third of the body can go truant and render the body null – not quite an exploding Diet (the case there was a failed vote voided the entire legislative session, including matters already passed), but close.

And the Republicans have so coordinated; they may lack leverage under regular order, but thus they have established that Oregon can legislate – and budget – on terms acceptable to the Republican Party or not at all.

There’s those toothsome requirements though, it seems state operations would not continue even to the degree federal ones do under “shutdown”, the state might be closer to a federal post-“fiscal cliff”; the reference point I think of is when in the 90s the Portland school district ran out of money one year and the school year just ended a few months early