Peter Courtney's Blarney

Dissecting a political obit and Oregon's 'Cuckoo Nest'

Now that he’s dead, how soon before Peter Courtney is declared St. Peter?

Many Oregonians probably don’t know who Courtney is. When he died this week, the media reminded people that he was both the longest-serving lawmaker and the longest-serving president of the state Senate in Oregon history.

The Salem Democrat retired in 2022, and died at age 81 of complications from cancer.

On the day he died there was a ceremony to rename the Oregon State Hospital’s Salem campus, the “Peter Courtney Salem Campus of the Oregon State Hospital” as a tribute for his work as a legislator and a champion of mental health.

It’s a dubious achievement, given the mess that mental health care has become in Oregon. Courtney might very well have said so himself. He could be blunt in a profession that often rewards phoniness.

How much of his bluntness was an act? Long before Donald Trump was elected president, politics was turning into a variation on show business.

Courtney had a flair for the theatrical, linked to his Irish-Boston roots.

As a young Salem City Councilman in 1977, the Capital Journal newspaper in Salem ran a profile on this up-and-comer named Peter Courtney.

“He is a self-proclaimed loner,” the Capital Journal’s Chuck Bennett wrote, then added: “Courtney is a loner with blarney.”

The Capital Journal compared Courtney to East Coast, Irish loners who crowd into bars on St. Patrick’s Day to sing songs like “Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder?”

Reporter Bennett offered up this quote from the man who would go on to become Senate president: “ ‘I still like to go to bars. I sip a few and then lie and lie and lie,’ Courtney said in a moment of unique confession for a politician.”

By comparison, the news obituaries on Courtney carried predictably gushing quotes. A few from The Oregonian:

“Peter Courtney will go down in history as one of the most influential and important leaders in legislative history,” Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, a Portland Democrat and budget co-chair, said in 2022.

“As a Catholic, what drove him was that sense of social justice that we were brought up with in the church,” U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle (D-Eugene) said. “He was a very strong voice for those who didn’t have it.”

“Aside from being a fabulous legislator, he was just a wonderful human being who cared about people,” said former state Sen. Ginny Burdick (D-Portland).

Overall, The Oregonian summed up: “Courtney was known for using his disarmingly colorful personality and carefully cultivated relationships with other lawmakers to push through major legislation, including a 2017 transportation funding plan and a new business tax for education that boosted K-12 funding by roughly $1 billion a year starting in 2020.”

Yet a couple of days after Courtney died, Gov. Tina Kotek was announcing how to acquire another $515 million for the State School Fund during the 2025-27 school years.

In 2019, Courtney arm-twisted moderate Democrats to vote yes on the Corporate Activity Tax, saddling business with another tax, this one for schools. In exchange, he promised to address problems in the growing, unfunded Public Employment Retirement System (PERS) plagued by mediocre returns and inflating payrolls.

Once Courtney got the Corporate Activity Tax, he lost interest in pursuing the PERS problem.

As for that 2017 transportation funding plan? It was a big and costly deal — $5.3 billion worth of taxes and fees to reduce congestion in the Portland area (particularly the Rose Quarter) and make highway, bridge and transit improvements around the state. Among the results: The transportation bottleneck in the Rose Quarter has stalled into a social/racial justice cause.

This summer — seven years later — legislators are once again holding public hearings across the state asking Oregonians what they want in transportation.

As legislative remembrances piled up on behalf of Courtney, one issue stood out: the mentally ill, particularly those sorry souls whose cremains were found in a shed at Oregon State Hospital in Salem.

This facility’s greatest claim to fame was where Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” starring Jack Nicholson, was filmed in 1975. The hospital’s superintendent Dr. Dean Brooks, played Dr. Spivey.

Twenty years ago, Courtney and then-House Speaker Karen Minnis, (R-Wood Village) were on tour of the facility and wandered into a shed containing about 3,500 copper urns, bearing the names of people who died there but whose cremains had never been claimed. They also encountered frightened patients in the halls of the hospital.

According to Pamplin media, Courtney and Minnis met again afterwards, and he said “(W)e’ve got to have a new state hospital, she said I was right — and we didn’t care how much it cost.” 

“We didn’t care how much it cost.”

That was in 2004. Two decades later safety issues plague the hospital, and for good reason.

The “mentally ill” now include everyone from criminal offenders to drug addicts pleading mental illness to catch a break. Legislators have sat back while organizations like Disability Rights Oregon have expanded the freedoms available to “the disabled,” who now include the mentally ill, criminal offenders and drug addicts. Even if the state could provide stable housing, three meals a day and continuous mental health treatment in a secure facility, it could be difficult to force the mentally ill to accept it.

Courtney also said hospital beds needed to work along side community providers of mental health for children and adults. In 2013, he won legislative approval for higher taxes on tobacco to pay for children’s programs. In 2021, the legislature boosted funding to community providers by $1 billion.

By the time he retired in 2022, Courtney was saying in interviews with the media, “Everybody says they want to deal with mental health — just not today. There’s always something else. I have seen it over and over again. That is why we are still struggling and not moved ahead on this.”

Still struggling? After spending how much? Did Courtney not notice legislators, social justice advocates and the media broadening the definition of “mentally ill” to include more and more afflictions.

Oregon now has more mentally ill people than ever because it can pay off if someone is trying to escape responsibility. Perhaps Oregon State Hospital’s Salem campus should have been renamed “Courtney’s Cuckoo Nest.”

Courtney himself was part of the problem. Go back and listen to a 2017 interview on OPB’s “Think Out Loud.”

Buried in his ramblings are revealing insights. He links mental illness to everything — including job performance and classroom performance. He talks about two of his early political defeats, including a run for Congress, that left him scared.

“You’re not hot, buddy. You lose two in a row,” he told himself. “You’re on all fours begging. … I ran scared for the rest of my life.”

Asked what the biggest issue was in 2017, Courtney replied that Portland had gotten so crowded. So had Salem. It took him 20 minutes to get to work. Oregon was starting to struggle with infrastructure.

“No matter how many schools you build, the classes are overcrowded. … Everything is becoming a struggle. .… Nice parks are overused. … There isn’t a political solution … to mitigate population,” Courtney said, his pessimism on full display.

The East Coast is wore out in many areas, he added, suggesting that’s where Oregon was headed.

“Once you fall behind a certain amount, you don’t catch up,” Courtney said.

In 2003, when he ascended to the presidency of the Senate he declared, “I’ll do whatever I can do to help bring people together or resolve differences.”

As his career was winding down, the hatred was thick.

So many institutions in America resemble our high school pecking orders. Oregon’s state legislature is like a mean high school. The cool kids get the cool “leadership” posts and sneer at those who have no clout.

Although every candidate in the state running for the legislature sells himself or herself as a “leader,” once in Salem only a few actually get to lead. The rest had better go along. Consider some of the leadership posts. A “whip” is an official of a political party whose task is to ensure party discipline.

"Whips are the party's ‘enforcers.’ They work to ensure that their fellow political party legislators attend voting sessions and vote according to their party's official policy.”

Later in his career, Courtney occasionally warned Democrats of their arrogance from being the dominant party for so long. They needed to be careful. But he only went so far trying to rein them in. Had he gone too far, would they have continued to elect him president of the Senate? Or would he have been on all fours begging?

There is also the sucking up and the back-stabbing that are part of the political process.

A classic example: During one legislative session several years ago, then-state Sen. Sara Gelser (D-Corvallis), who now goes by Gelser-Blouin, took to the Senate floor with an announcement. She was wearing a sun dress dotted with dachsunds — Courtney’s favorite dog. His current dachshund was named Dilly.

Gelser was all grins and giggles: “President Courtney, I’m wearing my Dilly dress … .”

When a legislator has a record of pushing high-profile legislative bills, as Gelser did, every vote counts — especially from the Senate president who awards committee assignments and decides which bills go forward.

Courtney acknowledged Gelser’s Dilly dress.

But in 2019 Gelser — riding the #MeToo wave that landed her in Time Magazine — publicly humiliated Courtney when he failed to apologize enough after she complained that one of her colleagues had groped her.

Later, Courtney did apologize. He made a special appearance to the Senate floor while on medical leave, to support Gelser’s Senate Concurrent Resolution 25.

“Senator Gelser, I publicly apologize to any and all survivors that have experienced any form of harassment, sexual harassment, workplace harassment, in the state Capitol,” Courtney said. “We must do better, I must do better and that is why I made sure today I was coming here to vote yes on this. So thank you.”

In response, Gelser took to Twitter and complained that Courtney had co-opted the resolution.

“Also notable is that the survivor staff who wrote this were not asked for their consent to have their bill used for this purpose,” Gelser wrote. “This resolution and this day was supposed to be about survivors.”

This week when Courtney died, Gelser took to Twitter/X again and recalled the day he had just returned from a graveside service for a former state hospital patient whose cremains were transferred to an appropriate urn for burial.

“At the end of the service, the family gifted Peter with the copper cannister that held this patient for decades on a shelf in that dark shed. When I walked into his office he was sitting at his long table, gazing at the cannister he gently held in his hands. He looked at me and placed the oxidized cannister in my hands. ‘This was a person,’ he said. ‘All the things we do here. It’s all about people, the ones we see and the ones we don’t.”

Courtney had singled out Gelser for this offering, probably because the mentally ill and disabled were her priorities, too.

Yes, some people are seen by Oregon’s legislators. And some aren’t.

Our state has many fine human beings who try to do their best to live meaningful lives, work, take care of themselves and their families — and are invisible. They don’t belong to an identity group wanting something. They can’t be counted on to vote in thanks for whichever politician has delivered on whatever privilege or advantage was sought through legislation.

Gov. Kotek invoked Courtney’s spirit at the renaming of the Salem campus of the Oregon State Hospital.

“It’s really good for us to be here, particularly today,” Kotek told a crowd of hospital employees and lawmakers who worked with Courtney. “I know that Peter Michael Coleman Courtney, my friend, the former president of the Oregon Senate is here right now in spirit to make sure we get this right.”

If the truth is known, Courtney never liked her.

His spirit could just as easily be hanging around, reminding her and legislators of St. Benedict’s admonition in his Rule for monks:

“Day by day, remind yourself that you are going to die.”