Lawmakers are primed to do the most damage to the will of the people late at night at the end of a legislative session. These secret machinations can occur anywhere—in New York over a decade ago, one frustrated state senator tried and failed to end the practice he labeled “vampire voting”—but in Oregon this year, a bizarre set of circumstances unfolded one summer night just before the state legislature adjourned for 2025.

On June 23, Democratic state senators introduced an amendment to a tax proposal 95 minutes before midnight local time in Salem. The senators responsible for the measure went unnamed in that document except for their point of origin, the Senate Committee on Finance and Revenue. The subject was preschool.

They weren’t aiming to create but destroy. The amendment would have prohibited any county from collecting county income tax revenues for a preschool or early-education program that did not align with state standards. The measure would “not apply to a county that, as of January 1, 2025, had a population of less than 700,000.” Translation: That only applies to one place in Oregon: Multnomah County, home to the state’s largest metropolitan area, population 795,897. Portland is the county seat.

In case the intent wasn’t clear, the state senators went on to specify that the governor and the Board of County Commissioners of Multnomah County had to come to an “intergovernmental agreement” to phase out any program that met those parameters by June 30, 2027. Another amendment, introduced the following day, would have mandated that successful ballot initiatives comply with a specific numeric formula in order to pass.