I can see the appeal of this approach and, living in Oregon, it's definitely frustrating to have things ground to a halt for long periods of time.

That said, I can acknowledge that Oregon Democrats have effectively no opposition to act within the state and that...creates problems. Portland effectively controls the entire state and the decisions Portland makes, while generally geared towards progressive ideals, are often made without the consideration of the rest of the state.

For example, Oregon banned self-service gas pumps a while back because people thought they were too dangerous. That put a big squeeze on rural people because gas stations had to raise prices to pay for a dedicated, trained pump jockey and would limit their hours or where new stations would open. It made gas in rural places harder to find and more expensive which is not good for rural people because we tend to have to drive a lot more and we tend to need vehicles that aren't as good on gas mileage.

That has thankfully been amended but it took a number of years to get that through.

The Democrats tend to act without any real consideration of the needs of people outside Portland for understandable reasons - Portland is where the majority of their voter base is. This leads to a lot of simmering frustration in rural areas that bleeds over into radical right-wing politics. As I said before, people pull the levers of power they have available to them and if what's available is extremism that's what they're going to do.

The PNW in general is a hotbed of far-right politics in large part because the dynamic up here has been for Democrats to act largely unopposed and that's fed a longstanding antipathy, especially from rural voters who tend to largely be Republican. The Democrats don't really seem to be concerned by this trend.

Rural areas are already pretty much ignored in legislation so Republican legislators showing up or not is kind of irrelevant. Their views are already not considered by people creating the laws.

To be clear, I'm not trying to paint this "poor Republicans" picture where there's just nothing they can do and they're part of the downtrodden. Make no mistake, the continuing rightward lurch of the Republican party means it's a lot harder to work with Republican legislators because they're selected by a Republican electorate that follows the zeitgeist of their party and, for the moment, that's conspiratorial bigotry to a large degree. I can recognize that it's hard to work with someone like that.

That said, there are still issues that need to be decided and completely sidelining one part of your government is probably going to have some negative knock-on consequences and we're seeing those consequences in the form of a dramatic rise in right-wing extremism that has a basis in the PNW.