Earlier this month, we noted that the mayor of Portland, Oregon (the incomparably incompetent Ted Wheeler) threatened to have the city council vote to boycott Texas.
The move was in response to the Texas heartbeat law.
The vote did not go quite as planned by Wheeler.
Portland, Ore., abandoned plans this week to ban city business with Texas over the Lone Star State’s controversial new abortion law amid worries it would hurt the Texans most affected by it.The City Council voted 4-1 on Wednesday to instead set aside $200,000 for organizations that provide reproductive care.The sole “no” vote was by Commissioner Mingus Mapps, who said he was “mystified” by the allocation of funds.”Our city is overwhelmed by multiple crises. This council should focus on solving those,” he said. “We have a gun violence crisis. We have a homelessness crisis. We have a trash crisis. And we have a pandemic.”
The problem with the proposed boycott is that Texas has goods and services Portland needs...millions of dollars worth.
The announcement of a possible ban by Portland on doing business with Texas appeared to have come long before the actual policy making, as officials scrambled to nail down how such a boycott would work or could impact Oregon’s largest city.Spokesperson Heather Hafer said the city had purchased slightly less than $35 million in goods and services from Texas in the past five years.During Labor Day, city officials met with reproductive health care providers and advocates to discuss the boycott. Wheeler said advocates “disagreed with some elements of” of the ban and suggested alternatives.
But the embarrassment was covered over by the uber-progressive council. The boycott would have hurt ‘the little people’.
….City officials scrambled the last two weeks to nail down how such a boycott would work in practice, while pro-choice advocates raised concerns that the boycott would have a trickle-down effect that would ultimately punish the people most impacted, as Willamette Week reported. The editorial board of the Oregonian/OregonLive lambasted the city for “pointless preening,” focusing resources on a problem 2,000 miles away instead of the multitude of crises the city faces.
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