This has not been a legislative session for the optimists trusting our elected leaders would soar up to the state’s challenges and inspire Oregonians with solutions.

There were bright moments of progress. Much of it has been more like what happened Thursday, June 1, at the first meeting of the newly formed “Joint” Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

It looked like any other committee meeting in the Legislature with legislators gathered and seated. It was not like most other meetings.

It was conspicuously partisan, tawdry and diminished, whatever the hope may have been to extract some good.

The legislators gathered to meet — Senate Minority Leader Tim Knopp, R-Bend; House Minority Leader Vikki Breese-Iverson, R-Prineville; Sens. Dick Anderson, R-Lincoln City, and Brian Boquist, I-Dallas; and Reps. Greg Smith, R-Heppner, and E. Werner Reschke, R-Klamath Falls — were like a carnival mirror distortion of what happens when Democrats hope for a quorum on the Senate floor. The meeting was “joint” only in the sense that there were Republicans and an independent, and members of the House and Senate.

No Democrats.

It was far from the official committee that Republicans had wished for.

The awkward truth is there are issues worthy of a truly joint committee looking into what went wrong at the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission and more. But for Republicans to expect Democrats to show up for this “joint” committee when Republicans are not showing up in the Senate was silly.

Who did show up from the public to testify was curious. There were about 10 speakers, before the recording we watched abruptly ended. One by one they stood up and told the committee members that Republican members of the Senate should show up to work and vote and end their boycott of floor sessions.

We don’t know if the testimony was curated or bubbled up naturally. It was, though, both oversight and accountability.