Friday, February 19, 2016

Koch comments on Bernie Sanders

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By Charles G. Koch February 18 at 5:44 PM

Charles G. Koch is chairman and chief executive of Koch Industries.

As he campaigns for the Democratic nomination for president, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) often sounds like he’s running as much against me as he is the other candidates. I have never met the senator, but I know from listening to him that we disagree on plenty when it comes to public policy.

Even so, I see benefits in searching for common ground and greater civility during this overly negative campaign season. That’s why, in spite of the fact that he often misrepresents where I stand on issues, the senator should know that we do agree on at least one — an issue that resonates with people who feel that hard work and making a contribution will no longer enable them to succeed.

The senator is upset with a political and economic system that is often rigged to help the privileged few at the expense of everyone else, particularly the least advantaged. He believes that we have a two-tiered society that increasingly dooms millions of our fellow citizens to lives of poverty and hopelessness. He thinks many corporations seek and benefit from corporate welfare while ordinary citizens are denied opportunities and a level playing field.

I agree with him.

Democrats and Republicans have too often favored policies and regulations that pick winners and losers. This helps perpetuate a cycle of control, dependency, cronyism and poverty in the United States. These are complicated issues, but it’s not enough to say that government alone is to blame. Large portions of the business community have actively pushed for these policies.

Consider the regulations, handouts, mandates, subsidies and other forms of largesse our elected officials dole out to the wealthy and well-connected. The tax code alone contains $1.5 trillion in exemptions and special-interest carve-outs. Anti-competitive regulations cost businesses an additional $1.9 trillion every year. Perversely, this regulatory burden falls hardest on small companies, innovators and the poor, while benefitting many large companies like ours. This unfairly benefits established firms and penalizes new entrants, contributing to a two-tiered society.

Whenever we allow government to pick winners and losers, we impede progress and move further away from a society of mutual benefit. This pits individuals and groups against each other and corrupts the business community, which inevitably becomes less focused on creating value for customers. That’s why Koch Industries opposes all forms of corporate welfare — even those that benefit us. (The government’s ethanol mandate is a good example. We oppose that mandate, even though we are the fifth-largest ethanol producer in the United States.)

It may surprise the senator to learn that our framework in deciding whether to support or oppose a policy is not determined by its effect on our bottom line (or by which party sponsors the legislation), but by whether it will make people’s lives better or worse.

With this in mind, the United States’ next president must be willing to rethink decades of misguided policies enacted by both parties that are creating a permanent underclass.

Our criminal justice system, which is in dire need of reform, is another issue where the senator shares some of my concerns. Families and entire communities are being ripped apart by laws that unjustly destroy the lives of low-level and nonviolent offenders.

.Today, if you’re poor and get caught possessing and selling pot, you could end up in jail. Your conviction will hold you back from many opportunities in life. However, if you are well-connected and have ample financial resources, the rules change dramatically. Where is the justice in that?

Arbitrary restrictions limit the ability of ex-offenders to get housing, student or business loans, credit cards, a meaningful job or even to vote. Public policy must change if people are to have the chance to succeed after making amends for their transgressions. At Koch Industries we’re practicing our principles by “banning the box.” We have voluntarily removed the question about prior criminal convictions from our job application.

At this point you may be asking yourself, “Is Charles Koch feeling the Bern?”

Hardly.

I applaud the senator for giving a voice to many Americans struggling to get ahead in a system too often stacked in favor of the haves, but I disagree with his desire to expand the federal government’s control over people’s lives. This is what built so many barriers to opportunity in the first place.

Consider America’s War on Poverty. Since its launch under President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, we have spent roughly $22 trillion, yet our poverty rate remains at 14.8 percent. Instead of preventing, curing and relieving the causes and symptoms of poverty (the goals of the program when it began), too many communities have been torn apart and remain in peril while even more tax dollars pour into this broken system.

It is results, not intentions, that matter. History has proven that a bigger, more controlling, more complex and costlier federal government leaves the disadvantaged less likely to improve their lives.

When it comes to electing our next president, we should reward those candidates, Democrat or Republican, most committed to the principles of a free society. Those principles start with the right to live your life as you see fit as long as you don’t infringe on the ability of others to do the same. They include equality before the law, free speech and free markets and treating people with dignity, respect and tolerance. In a society governed by such principles, people succeed by helping others improve their lives.

I don’t expect to agree with every position a candidate holds, but all Americans deserve a president who, on balance, can demonstrate a commitment to a set of ideas and values that will lead to peace, civility and well-being rather than conflict, contempt and division. When such a candidate emerges, he or she will have my enthusiastic support.

Above is from:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-koch-this-is-the-one-issue-where-bernie-sanders-is-right/2016/02/18/cdd2c228-d5c1-11e5-be55-2cc3c1e4b76b_story.html

How Rauner handles local Republican matters

  • Bernard Schoenburg: Local Republican leader critical of Gov. Rauner's 'ambush' at GOP Lincoln Day Dinner

    • By Bernard Schoenburg
      Political Writer

      Posted Feb. 17, 2016 at 10:07 PM

      Interesting timing, some would say, that Gov. BRUCE RAUNER would pick a video message delivered at last week’s Sangamon County GOP Lincoln Day Dinner to announce his endorsement of state Trooper BRYCE BENTON over state Sen. SAM McCANN in the 50th Senate District Republican primary.
      That’s because the Sangamon County party is backing the incumbent — McCann, of Plainview — and that has been known for a while.
      Rauner had refused earlier requests to say if he was for Springfield resident Benton.
      FRED FLORETH of Springfield, a member of the Republican State Central Committee from the 13th Congressional District, didn’t like the message or how it was done.
      A couple of days after the dinner, Floreth sent an email to precinct committeemen and “other Republican friends” with whom he communicates. He quoted ABRAHAM LINCOLN: “Stand with anyone who stands right; stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.” He said that quote was on a sign hanging in the Litchfield High School locker room when he was a Purple Panther playing basketball.
      “I stand with Governor Bruce Rauner on his ‘Turnaround Agenda,’” Floreth wrote. “I support him in his efforts to end business as usual in the state of Illinois."
      “The governor has every right to endorse whoever he wants,” Floreth added.
      But, he said, “His pre-recorded, ambush, endorsement” of McCann’s opponent “was not good.”
      “Senator McCann was an honored guest on stage at the event,” Floreth wrote. “Sangamon County Republican Party Chairman ROSEMARIE LONG has publicly endorsed Sam. The governor’s surprise announcement of his endorsement of McCann’s opponent on the Prairie Capital Convention Center’s video screen was needlessly embarrassing to Senator McCann and Chairman Long.
      “I have found Bryce Benton to be a sincere young man,” Floreth added. “He has served well on the Springfield Metropolitan Exposition and Auditorium Authority board. He is being poorly served, though, by commercials being run by DAN PROFT’s Liberty Principles PAC calling Senator McCann ‘MIKE MADIGAN’s favorite senator.’ Bryce should do the honorable thing and denounce this ludicrous claim.”
      Floreth added that McCann “has been a consistent and eloquent conservative voice on social issues. In addition, he is fiscally prudent. He is thoughtfully independent and strives to represent his constituents to the best of his ability. I strongly urge his re-nomination and re-election.”
    • It was after that statement came out that The State Journal-Register ran a story Monday about McCann having billed his campaign more than $38,000 for mileage in the last year and some added thousands in payments for “grouped expenditures.”
      Floreth said he thinks the size of McCann’s district justifies plenty of driving, and he noted that it was campaign funds — not taxpayer funds — that are referenced in the story.
      While the anti-McCann ads have been produced through independent expenditures of Proft’s political action committee, Benton continued to link McCann to Madigan in a statement as part of a news release on his campaign’s letterhead.
      “Voters deserve better than an unethical state senator working with Mike Madigan to raise taxes,” Benton said in that release. “It’s time to elect an ethical conservative who will fight for us.”
      “I think that we need somebody who’s going to tell voters what they believe and not what they want to hear,” Benton told me when I asked about his release. “”When he ran for state Senate initially, he campaigned as a fiscal conservative. I’ve talked to a lot of people around the district who feel like he turned his back on that almost immediately."
      Benton said he would have voted against bills to allow state worker contracts to go to arbitration — supported by McCann and what McCann says are the overwhelming number of constituents who contacted him.
      “I think that to take the governor and anyone who’s accountable to taxpayers out of that process is not the right way to go,” Benton said.
      His release also called on McCann to document “every dollar” of mileage reimbursement and grouped expenditures on his campaign reports.
      “I think I have accounted for every dollar,” McCann said. That despite McCann's description of grouped expenditures for the SJ-R story as being for things including mileage, office supplies, and candy for parades. He is quoted there as saying, "I admit bookkeeping is not one of my strengths, but I’m getting better.”
      And McCann took issue with statements that link him to a tax increase.
      “My opponent’s campaign is characterizing it as a tax increase,” McCann said of his vote to allow arbitration in deadlocked contract talks. “Obviously, that’s a blatant lie because we haven’t voted on a tax increase” since he got in the Senate, he told the editorial board of The State Journal-Register this week.
    •  
    • AARON DeGROOT, spokesman for Benton, said Benton’s campaign doesn’t have “any control over independent expenditures” that are paying for the anti-McCann ads. He also said McCann “has not answered legitimate questions about his unpaid taxes and record of voting with Mike Madigan.”
      As of last year, tax liens against two McCann businesses totaled more than $124,000. McCann has said a clerical error on his part caused some problems, and he is still working with the IRS to prove his innocence.
      MIKE BIGGER of the Stark County city of Wyoming, represents the 18th Congressional District on the GOP State Central Committee, and is not taking sides in the McCann-Benton race.
      Floreth, meanwhile, remains on the March 15 primary ballot himself as a delegate candidate pledged to U.S. Sen. RAND PAUL of Kentucky.
      But Paul has dropped out of the presidential contest.
      “If, by some unlikely miracle, I am elected,” Foreth said in his newsletter, “I would then attend the national convention as one of the few truly ‘uncommitted’ delegates.”
      Benton’s late payments
      Sangamon County records show that Benton and his wife, AMY, were late in paying property taxes on their Springfield home four times in recent years, and paid small penalties.
      In 2013, they were less than a week late on the first installment, and a month late on the second. They paid a total of just under $39 in penalties plus $10 because the Sangamon County treasurer’s office sent a certified letter as a reminder.
      In 2014, they were between two and three weeks late on each installment, and paid almost $40 in penalties plus another $10 linked to a certified letter.
      Sangamon County Treasurer TOM CAVANAGH says that while 98,000 property tax bills go out in the county each cycle, about 8,000 generally get to the point where a certified letter is sent.
      “For us, delinquent taxes are routine,” Cavanagh said. “I mean, we deal with thousands and thousands of them.”
      He said the penalty is 1.5 percent of the amount owed for each month, including any part of the first month.
      DeGroot said Benton “has paid everything he owes in taxes,” while McCann is “dodging” tax liens and “milking his campaign account” for mileage reimbursements.

      Above is from: http://www.sj-r.com/article/20160217/NEWS/160219600/?Start=3

      Joint Planning coming to end

       

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      By Adam Poulisse
      Staff writer

      Posted Feb. 18, 2016 at 7:46 PM
      Updated Feb 18, 2016 at 8:46 PM

      BELVIDERE — City and Boone County leaders are divided over a decision to end a decades-long agreement to jointly plan for economic development and handle other planning and zoning matters.
      Boone County Board members voted 8-4 on Wednesday to give the city a 90-day notice that the planning agreement would end after some 40 years. Through the agreement, a joint Planning Department and Belvidere-Boone County Regional Planning Commission was established to create synergy on planning and zoning efforts. The original agreement has been amended over the years.
      Those in favor of the split say it will provide more clarity to employees, while those against it say canceling the agreement sends the wrong message to Belvidere.
      County Board Chairman Bob Walberg, along with board members Denny Ellingson , Sherry Giesecke , Raymond Larson , Jeff Carlisle , Karl Johnson, Brad Stark and Cory Lind voted in favor of the divorce. Ken Freeman , Sherry Branson , Craig Schultz and Cathy Ward were opposed.
      "This could easily turn out to be a much better relationship," Walberg said. "It's just very difficult to share an employee and have very clear guidance to give to the employee."
      Today , Walberg penned a letter to Belvidere Mayor Michael Chamberlain explaining his position.
      "I know we disagree on the future direction of this department but I believe each government having its own employees will improve our working relationship related to planning matters," Walberg's letter reads. "This doesn't have to be a negative in our intergovernmental relationship, on the contrary having employees with clear lines of direction and authority will improve the services we deliver to our residents."
      Belvidere Mayor Mike Chamberlain said the board's decision isn't a surprise.
      "We've been expecting it," he said. "It's very shortsighted by the county and more about county leadership than anything."
      The Belvidere-Boone County Planning Department has three employees: Interim Planning Director Kathy Miller, who is retiring in March, an administrative assistant who is a city employee, and associate planner Gina DelRose .
      DelRose said today she hasn't discussed the decision with the county, and declined to comment on the board's decision.
      About $18,000 in plat fees between the city and county and about $100,000 combined from the city's and county's general funds paid to operate the Planning Department, County Administrator Ken Terrinoni said. Transfers from the city and county, a village of Poplar Grove fee and miscellaneous grants also funded the department.
      Ward, R-2, attempted to table the motion, but it failed 8-4.
      She said the agreement is important because it allows city and county leaders to communicate effectively, work together and share development costs.

      "This is like a slap in the face — 'We don't need you, we don't want you, we don't need to be a part of you,' " Ward said. "Half the people that live in Boone County live in Belvidere. Most of the City Council didn't know this was going to take place."

      Giesecke, R-1, said it is a "bad agreement," and the board's decision doesn't end the county's association with Belvidere.
      "What we are doing is, we are canceling this contract," she told the board, "and if anyone took the time to realize that even if we decided to continue on, this contract is just built in to make people fail."
      "You can't terminate this relationship," Giesecke said. "The relationship is there. The contract is being terminated."

      Adam Poulisse: 815-987-1344; apoulisse@rrstar.com; @adampoulisse

      Bad news for Ted Cruz: his eligibility for president is going to court

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      Updated by Dara Lind and Jeff Stein on February 18, 2016, 11:22 p.m. ET

      The Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago has agreed to hear a lawsuit on Sen. Ted Cruz's eligibility for president — virtually ensuring that the issue dominates the news in the run-up to the South Carolina primary.

      Cruz was born in Canada to a US citizen mother and a noncitizen father. The Constitution requires presidents be "natural-born citizens," but what exactly that requires hasn't been settled in court.

      Now, perhaps, it will be. The lawsuit in Illinois aims to resolve the question by challenging Cruz's eligibility for the presidency. It was filed by Lawrence Joyce, an attorney who has told local media that he supports Dr. Ben Carson and has had no connection with the Trump campaign.

      "Joyce said his concern is that the eligibility issue lie unresolved during Republican primaries, thus letting the Democrats take advantage of it after a potential Cruz nomination, when it’d be too late," reports The Washington Examiner.

      When this question initially came up, the conventional wisdom among constitutional lawyers was that it was a non-issue: Cruz was obviously eligible. But as the debate has heated up among candidates (with Donald Trump, in particular, fanning the flames), it's also begun to heat up among constitutional law scholars.

      The issue is actually twofold: whether Ted Cruz should be considered a natural-born citizen, and whether Cruz's own preferred school of constitutional interpretation would see it that way.

      The problem: the meaning of "natural-born citizen"

      Here is what the Constitution says about who can be president:

      No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

      The problem is the Constitution doesn't define "natural born Citizen." Neither does any current law. And no one has ever brought a court case to decisively settle the question as a matter of US law.

      There are three ways someone can be a US citizen. He can be born in the US (regardless of who his parents are). He can be born outside the US to at least one US citizen parent, as long as certain criteria are met (those criteria are set by federal law and have been changed over time). Or he can immigrate here and then successfully apply for citizenship, a process called naturalization.

      Everyone agrees that the first category of people are natural-born citizens. Everyone agrees that the third category of people are not natural-born citizens (regardless of how unfair it might be that immigrants can't be president). But Ted Cruz is in the middle category, and this is where the meaning of "natural born" starts to get fuzzy.

      The only definition of "natural born" in US history would include Ted Cruz

      Because there's never been a court case to explicitly test the question of who counts as a natural-born citizen for the purpose of presidential eligibility, the question is by definition "unsettled." It hasn't been resolved yet. And court opinions that have mentioned the term in passing while ruling on other questions have come to very different opinions about what it means.

      But it's a stretch to say, as Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe did, that the scholarship on the question is "completely unsettled." That implies that scholars are totally split on the issue, which isn't exactly the case.

      The majority of constitutional law scholars who've written about the meaning of "natural-born citizen" have agreed that if a court were to rule on the question, it ought to rule that someone born outside the US but eligible for citizenship through parents counts as "natural born."

      One of the key arguments in favor of this point is that while there is no longer any law defining "natural born," there used to be one — way back in 1790. The Naturalization Act of 1790 explicitly said that "the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural-born citizens."

      That term disappeared from immigration law after 1795. While there's at least one scholar who argues that this was intentional, because Congress didn't want that definition to persist, there's no evidence for that. And since Congress didn't come up with an alternate definition, that remains, to this day, the only definition of "natural born" we have.

      This isn't a smoking gun. Scholars have looked at English precedents, US judicial decisions, bills, and congressional debates to figure out what the meaning of "natural born" is supposed to be and how (if at all) it's changed over time. But while some scholars have maintained that the evidence supports a narrow meaning of "natural born" — one that wouldn't include Ted Cruz — more of them agree that the evidence supports a broader one.

      What would legal scholar Ted Cruz say about the eligibility of candidate Ted Cruz?

      One of the constitutional scholars who used to think that the definition of "natural born" ought to include Ted Cruz is Laurence Tribe, who was Cruz's law professor at Harvard. But Tribe is now the leading scholar raising questions about Cruz's eligibility. Trump has taken to citing Tribe approvingly in rallies; Cruz has fired back that Tribe is a liberal professor who is only interested in taking him down.

      Why is Tribe is raising questions about Cruz's eligibility, even if Tribe thinks Cruz should ultimately be eligible? There are two answers.

      The first answer is that Tribe is making a claim about what Ted Cruz ought to believe the Constitution says.

      Cruz is a proud supporter of the conservative legal tradition of constitutional originalism: interpreting the Constitution not by what its words ought to mean today, but by what the Founding Fathers meant as they wrote them in 1787. Cruz is arguably the national politician most closely identified with originalism; he's certainly the presidential candidate with the closest ties to the conservative legal movement.

      According to Tribe, constitutional originalism defines "natural born" very narrowly, in a way that would exclude Cruz. By extension, Tribe argued in the Boston Globe, any judges Cruz would appoint to the federal bench as president would invalidate his own presidency.

      But Tribe clearly doesn't believe this line of argument himself because he is very much not an originalist. And one of the points of his column is that maybe if originalism is such an inflexible theory that it wouldn't allow one of its own biggest supporters to be president, it is generally a bad idea. He points out that the reason the Founding Fathers didn't want immigrants to be president is totally moot today — but so is the idea of a "well-ordered militia." And if originalists like Cruz still support the Second Amendment, Tribe says, they can't wave away the "natural-born citizen" clause either.

      Originalists disagree about what originalism is and what it says about "natural born"

      While you wouldn't know it from Tribe's piece, there is no one originalist take on what "natural-born citizen" means. The strongest supporters of a narrow definition that would exclude Cruz are generally originalists, and there's a more even split among originalists than there is among constitutional scholars as a whole.

      But since the Founding Fathers never actually debated the meaning of "natural-born citizen" when writing the Constitution, originalist scholars have had to turn to other sources to figure out what the common understanding of the phrase would have been at that time. And the answers scholars come to differ depending on which sources they consult.

      Some originalists, like Michael Ramsey of the University of San Diego — who fortuitously just finished a paper on this question when the topic came up in the campaign — argue that the Founding Fathers would have understood "natural-born citizen" to mean the same thing "natural-born subject" did in English law at the time.

      Over the century before the Revolution, Parliament had passed several bills clarifying that children born abroad to British subjects counted as "natural-born subjects" (this mattered for inheritance reasons). So by the time the Founding Fathers were writing down the Constitution, the broad definition of the term was fairly well established.

      Other originalists, like Mary Brigid McManamon of Widener University's Delaware Law School — who recently published a column in the Washington Post arguing that Cruz is ineligible to be president — think that laws passed by Parliament don't count.

      To McManamon, the precedent the Founding Fathers used wasn't British law as of 1787, but the English common law tradition (law made by courts rather than legislation). And in the common law, "natural born" did not apply to children born outside the bounds of the country. That's why Parliament had to pass bills to include such children.

      Each of these arguments is far more complicated, of course. (For one thing, some scholars argue that the common law wasn't as uniformly narrow as McManamon says it was.) But the debate among originalists as to what "natural born" means is really a debate among originalists as to what originalism ought to include. Should it include both common law and legislation, or just common law? Does a law passed in 1790 reflect the intent of the Founding Fathers, since so many of them were in Congress when it passed, or does it show that they needed to add something they thought wasn't in the Constitution already?

      The truth is that there isn't nearly as much of a gulf between originalism and "living constitutionalism" as there might seem to be. Originalists look to a number of sources to figure out what the Constitution means, just like anyone else does. And even the living constitutionalists who've written about natural-born citizenship care about what the Founding Fathers meant it to mean at the time — that's just not the be-all and end-all of their jurisprudence.

      This can only be settled in court. But who would nominate a walking court case?

      Ultimately, this is, quite literally, an academic debate. As long as no US court has issued a ruling on the question, it wouldn't matter if every legal scholar in America agreed on the hypothetical meaning of "natural born." It would still be legally unsettled.

      Congress could at least stick some kind of bandage on the question by passing a "sense of the Congress" resolution; that's what it did in 2008 to affirm the eligibility of John McCain, who landed in the "natural born" gray zone for different reasons from Cruz's. But the Senate has made it clear that it intends to do no such thing for Ted Cruz. This probably is less because they don't think Cruz is natural-born than because Senate Republicans really don't like Ted Cruz, but it's a problem for him nonetheless.

      That's the other answer to why Tribe is agitating against Ted Cruz. He doesn't believe any court in the country would actually rule that Cruz was ineligible (though, he claims, that's only because Cruz-style originalism isn't the norm). But, he writes, "it’s worth thinking about the legal cloud" hovering over Cruz in the meantime.

      The problem for Cruz here isn't so much that a court is likely to rule against him as it is that Republicans might be afraid to support Ted Cruz for the nomination because they're worried his eligibility will become an issue. A court taking up the issue days before the South Carolina primary is pretty much his worst nightmare.

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      Case against Ted Cruz's eligibility to be heard in Illinois on Friday

      By Theodore Schleifer, CNN

      Updated 8:37 PM ET, Thu February 18, 2016 | Video Source: CNN

      Washington (CNN)A judge in Illinois on Friday will hear a lawsuit challenging Ted Cruz's eligibility to serve as president, putting questions about the Texas senator's status back into the news the day before the South Carolina primary.

      Lawrence Joyce, an Illinois voter who has objected to Cruz's placement on the Illinois primary ballot next month, will have his case heard in the Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago. Joyce's previous objection, made to the state's Board of Elections, was dismissed on February 1.

        Once again, Cruz will have to defend his eligibility to serve as president after Donald Trump revived questions about his birth in Canada. Cruz maintains he is indeed a natural-born citizen since he was born to an American mother, though it has never been tested before in court.

        Trump has again threatened to sue Cruz himself.

        Oregon lawmakers approve landmark minimum wage increase

         

         

        Oregon lawmakers have approved landmark legislation that propels the state's minimum wage for all workers to the highest rank in the U.S., and does so through an unparalleled tiered system based on geography

         

        By Kristena Hansen, Associated Press 2 hours ago

        SALEM, Ore. (AP) -- Oregon lawmakers have approved landmark legislation that propels the state's minimum wage for all workers to the highest rank in the U.S., and does so through an unparalleled tiered system based on geography.

        The state House of Representatives on Thursday passed Senate Bill 1532, which now heads to Democratic Gov. Kate Brown, who said in a statement she will sign it into law.

        "I started this conversation last fall, bringing stakeholders together to craft a workable proposal; one that gives working families the much-needed wage boost they need, and addresses challenges for businesses and rural economies presented by the two impending ballot measures," Brown said.

        The move makes Oregon a trailblazer in the broader debate about minimum wage unfolding nationwide as the federal threshold remains unchanged from Great Recession levels.

        Oregon now joins 14 other states that have raised their rates over the past two years. Another dozen or so are considering taking up the issue this year, either through legislative action or ballot initiative, as issues of wage inequality and middle-class incomes have climbed to the forefront of presidential campaigns by Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Hilary Clinton.

        The bill was crafted as a compromise between what unions, businesses and farmers want and as an attempt to thwart more aggressive proposals that could go before voters in November. Those two proposals call for a statewide minimum of $13.50 or $15, and would be phased in over half the time. Labor unions have not yet indicated whether they'll follow through with ballot initiatives.

        Oregon follows moves in states such as Massachusetts, California and Vermont that recently boosted statewide minimums above $10. That stands in stark contrast to more conservative states such as Idaho, which has blocked previous efforts to raise its minimum beyond the federal level, and Arizona, where lawmakers are considering a bill that would block state funding to municipalities that set a local minimum wage.

        Oregon's new plan imposes a series of gradual increases over six years. By 2022, the state's current $9.25 an hour minimum - already one of the highest in the nation - would climb to $14.75 in metro Portland, $13.50 in smaller cities such as Salem and Eugene, and $12.50 in rural communities.

        Those minimums dethrone Massachusetts - where the statewide rate will climb to $11 an hour next year - from the top spot, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a D.C.-based think tank that tracks wage laws across the nation.

        While there are varying approaches to raising the minimum wage, the three-tiered regional system is uniquely Oregon's.

        States have targeted wage hikes for only government employees or certain industries, as seen recently in New York for fast-food workers, while others allow local jurisdictions to set their own rates above the state threshold, prompting recent hikes in cities such as Seattle and Los Angeles.

        Oregon, however, has made the unprecedented move to be the first state without a one-size-fits-all statewide minimum.

        "Oregon has always been at the forefront of new ideas in the country. We were the first to actually have a minimum wage," said Rep. Paul Holvey, a Democrat from Eugene. "Trust me, we're not solving all the problems, but we are making a substantial dent in it by pushing up from the bottom some wage equality ... from the huge disparity we have in incomes."

        The state is deeply divided between west and east by economic, cultural and political differences. The goal of the tiered approach is to balance the needs of the more urban west_where living costs have soared in rapidly growing Portland_and struggling farming communities in the east.

        Division over the minimum wage - currently at $7.25 in federal law - is also often split along party lines and pits low-wage workers against business groups, as has been seen in Oregon this year. Republicans, the minority party in the Oregon Statehouse, have opposed the increase.

        The President of Oregon Farm Bureau said Thursday's vote shows Democrats don't value family agriculture.

        "This enormous increase will force many family farmers to try to find ways to mechanize or transition away from labor-intensive products Oregon is known for, like apples, pears, milk and berries. Unfortunately, some will give up and sell, while others will simply go out of business," said Barry Bushue, President of Oregon Farm Bureau.

        David Cooper, an economic analyst the Economic Policy Institute, said wage increases have never lead to widespread damaging effects, but he also expressed hesitation about Oregon's regional approach.

        "I think any time you create these sorts of somewhat arbitrary geographic districts, that's when you can create opportunities for some sort of economic disruption," he said. "I would prefer the whole state got to the same wage level but at a slower pace by region so that everyone is held to the same standard."