NPI's Cascadia Advocate

Offering commentary and analysis from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's uplifting perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Friday, November 3rd, 2023

Joy Hollingsworth leads Alex Hudson for Seattle City Council District #3, NPI poll finds

Seat­tle City Coun­cil hope­ful Joy Hollingsworth is the clear favorite in the close­ly-watched con­test to deter­mine a suc­ces­sor to out­go­ing Coun­cilmem­ber Kshama Sawant, a new North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute poll has found.

In the aggre­gate, 52% of 327 like­ly Seat­tle City Coun­cil Dis­trict #3 vot­ers inter­viewed by Change Research this week for NPI said they had vot­ed or would be vot­ing for Hollingsworth, while 28% said they had vot­ed or would be vot­ing for Alex Hud­son, the oth­er final­ist for Coun­cil. 16% were not sure, 3% did not recall how they had vot­ed, and 1% said they would not vote in the contest.

Hollingsworth and Hud­son emerged from a large field of can­di­dates back in the sum­mer with near­ly iden­ti­cal shares of the vote. Hollingsworth had an Elec­tion Night advan­tage, but Hud­son caught up as the late bal­lots were counted.

In the end, they fin­ished with­in a few dozen votes of each oth­er: Hollingsworth had 9,690 votes (36.87%) at cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, while Hud­son had 9,601 votes (36.53%). Six oth­er can­di­dates failed to advance: Alex Coo­ley, Bob­by Good­win, Ry Arm­strong, Shob­hit Agar­w­al, Andrew Ash­io­fu, and Efrain Hudnell.

Our sur­vey indi­cates that Hollingsworth has opened up a sub­stan­tial lead over Hud­son since then. Hollingsworth is the choice of every group of vot­ers in our sur­vey except for eigh­teen to thir­ty-four year olds, who favor Hud­son. Hollingsworth leads among those who have already vot­ed (48% of the sam­ple) as well as those who have yet to vote (51% of the sample).

Hollingsworth is a native of the Cen­tral Dis­trict, one of the neigh­bor­hoods in the 3rd. She is a skilled bas­ket­ball play­er, hav­ing played in high school, col­lege (at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona) and then pro­fes­sion­al­ly. After Wash­ing­ton vot­ers decrim­i­nal­ized cannabis in 2012, Hollingsworth and her broth­er launched Hollingsworth Farms, “a fam­i­ly-owned and oper­at­ed cannabis com­pa­ny locat­ed on the Olympic Penin­su­la.” It’s one of the few inde­pen­dent, Black-owned cannabis oper­a­tions in the State of Wash­ing­ton, Hollingsworth’s cam­paign says.

Hollingsworth is endorsed by Seat­tle May­or Bruce Har­rell, King Coun­ty Coun­cilmem­ber Gir­may Zahi­lay, The Seat­tle Times, The Seat­tle Medi­um, and the North­west Asian Week­ly. (See more of her endorse­ments at her web­site).

Alex Hud­son is from Red­mond (NPI’s home­town!) and was raised on a small fam­i­ly farm in unin­cor­po­rat­ed east King Coun­ty. She is a grad­u­ate of West­ern Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in Belling­ham, where she found­ed a stu­dent club affil­i­at­ed with the ACLU of Wash­ing­ton. She went on to lead the First Hill Improve­ment Asso­ci­a­tion, where she worked to increase access to hous­ing. Lat­er, she became the exec­u­tive direc­tor of Trans­porta­tion Choic­es Coali­tion (TCC), which works to improve free­dom of mobil­i­ty, espe­cial­ly for those who can’t or don’t want to drive.

Hud­son is endorsed by King Coun­ty Coun­cilmem­bers Clau­dia Bal­duc­ci, Joe McDer­mott, and Rod Dem­bows­ki, as well as The Stranger, The Urban­ist, and Pub­li­co­la. (See more of her endorse­ments at her web­site).

Here’s the exact ques­tions we asked and the respons­es we received:

Already voted

QUESTION: In the elec­tion for Seat­tle City Coun­cil Dis­trict #3, who did you vote for?

Respon­dents who told us that they had already vot­ed were shown this question. 

  • Joy Hollingsworth: 59%
  • Alex Hud­son: 34%
  • Do not recall: 7%
  • Did not vote on this: 0%

Haven’t yet voted

QUESTION: The can­di­dates for Seat­tle City Coun­cil Dis­trict #3 are list­ed below in the order they appear on the gen­er­al elec­tion bal­lot. Who are you vot­ing for?

Respon­dents who told us that they had not yet vot­ed were shown this question. 

  • Joy Hollingsworth: 38%
  • Alex Hud­son: 20%
  • Not sure: 42%

FOLLOW-UP QUESTION ASKED OF UNDECIDED VOTERS ONLY: If you had to choose, who would you vote for? Links to the can­di­dates’ web­sites are here if you’d like to learn more about them:

Joy Hollingsworth
Alex Hud­son

If you had to choose, who would you vote for?

  • Joy Hollingsworth: 25%
  • Alex Hud­son: 5%
  • Not sure: 66%
  • Would not vote: 4%

Aggregate responses

COMBINED ANSWERS (AGGREGATE), ALL QUESTIONS:

  • Joy Hollingsworth: 52%
  • Alex Hud­son: 28%
  • Not sure: 16%
  • Do not recall: 3%
  • Would not vote: 1%
  • Did not vote on this: 0%

Joy Hollingsworth’s name was always shown to respon­dents first and Alex Hud­son’s name was always shown sec­ond, as that is the order the can­di­dates are list­ed on the gen­er­al elec­tion bal­lot. The can­di­dates’ pho­tographs from the voter’s pam­phlet state­ment were shown to vot­ers along­side their names.

Our sur­vey of 327 like­ly 2023 Seat­tle City Coun­cil Dis­trict #3 gen­er­al elec­tion vot­ers was in the field from Tues­day, Octo­ber 31st, until today, Fri­day, Novem­ber 3rd. The poll was con­duct­ed entire­ly online for the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute by Change Research and has a mod­eled mar­gin of error of 5.7%.

Fol­low this link if you’re inter­est­ed in a detailed primer on the survey’s method­ol­o­gy along with infor­ma­tion about who took the poll.

We asked fol­low-up ques­tions of respon­dents who had already vot­ed for both Hollingsworth and Hud­son to tell us about their choice in their own words.

Hollingsworth sup­port­ers cit­ed Har­rel­l’s endorse­ment as an impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion, along with her biog­ra­phy and pub­lic safe­ty stances.

Why vote for Joy Hollingsworth?

“Her expe­ri­ence, she val­ues pub­lic safe­ty, she seems to be able to work well with stake­hold­ers, she is sup­port­ed by the may­or, I agree with her stand on issues affect­ing the city, she is smart and artic­u­late, she grew up in D3 [Seat­tle City Coun­cil Dis­trict #3],” said a strong Demo­c­ra­t­ic female vot­er from Capi­tol Hill / First Hill between the ages of fifty and sixty-four.

“She has expe­ri­ence and great his­to­ry of con­nec­tions in Dis­trict 3 area. And she is strong­ly focused on pub­lic safe­ty, which I think should be Seat­tle’s high­est pri­or­i­ty,” said an inde­pen­dent female vot­er between the ages of thir­ty-five and forty-nine who lives in the south­east­ern part of the district.

“She is the bet­ter can­di­date. She grew up in Seat­tle and appears gen­uine­ly invest­ed in the com­mu­ni­ty. Not every­one with the polit­i­cal sci­ence degree knows what is best. I am cer­tain­ly a STEM pro­fes­sion­al, but hor­ti­cul­ture and expe­ri­en­tial learn­ing is extreme­ly valu­able as well,” said a strong Demo­c­ra­t­ic male vot­er between the ages of eigh­teen to thir­ty-four from Capi­tol Hill / First Hill.

And here’s a few very short com­ments we received about Joy:

  • Expen­sive expe­ri­ence across a lot of dif­fer­ent rel­e­vant areas.
  • Focus on crime and stop cod­dling the homeless.
  • Lis­ten­ing to com­mu­ni­ty, impor­tant rep­re­sen­ta­tion for the dis­trict and council.
  • Long Cen­tral Area pres­ence, more mod­er­ate stances.

Hud­son sup­port­ers cit­ed their per­son­al con­ver­sa­tions with her and said she was well pre­pared to gov­ern, with well thought out posi­tions on issues like transit.

Why vote for Alex Hudson?

“I’ve met her and got a chance to talk about her views and expe­ri­ence and what she would do on the Coun­cil. I liked her ideas and aligned with her pro­gres­sive but prag­mat­ic views,” said a strong Demo­c­ra­t­ic female vot­er from the south­east­ern part of the dis­trict between the ages of eigh­teen and thirty-four.

“She has a much bet­ter plat­form on hous­ing and tran­sit than her oppo­nent, and while my views on polic­ing don’t entire­ly align with Hud­son’s I felt even less aligned with Hollingsworth’s focus on unre­al­is­tic hir­ing goals for SPD and her gen­er­al exag­ger­a­tion of the state of crime in Seat­tle,” said a strong Demo­c­ra­t­ic male vot­er from Capi­tol Hill / First Hill between the ages of eigh­teen and thirty-four.

That was the tough­est choice on the entire bal­lot: Alex got my vote based on her work his­to­ry with hous­ing and trans­porta­tion plan­ning,” said a strong Demo­c­ra­t­ic male vot­er from Capi­tol Hill / First Hill between the ages of fifty and six­ty-four. (Empha­sis is the respondent’s.) 

And here’s a few very short com­ments we received about Alex:

  • Pol­i­cy expe­ri­ence, strong over­all cre­den­tials. Good ideas for city plan­ning and growth.
  • Pub­lic tran­sit focus and a real­i­ty based approach to policing.
  • Knowl­edge­able of the job. Does not sup­port present police behavior.
  • Urban­ist with vision for future of Seattle.

Hollingsworth’s strength in the sur­vey stems from her appeal to many groups of vot­ers. She has major­i­ty sup­port among strong Democ­rats, inde­pen­dents, and Repub­li­cans, for exam­ple, which is impres­sive. We just don’t see that very often.

She also has the sup­port of 62% of respon­dents in Madrona, Leschi, and the Cen­tral Dis­trict and the sup­port of 58% of respon­dents in Mont­lake, Madi­son Park, Madi­son Val­ley, Portage Bay, and East­lake. On Capi­tol Hill and First Hill, it’s a clos­er con­test, but Hollingsworth leads there, too, with 44% to Hud­son’s 33%.

Polls can’t pre­dict elec­toral out­comes, they can only sug­gest what might hap­pen, but these sur­vey results are a cer­tain­ly com­pelling piece of evi­dence that Hollingsworth’s cam­paign is res­onat­ing with vot­ers and is on track to prevail.

You might have noticed ear­li­er that 48% of our sam­ple has already vot­ed, while 51% have yet to vote. His­tor­i­cal­ly, in our polling, the already vot­ed sub­sam­ple has been a good indi­ca­tor of how the results will turn out, because peo­ple who have already vot­ed have come to a deci­sion they can tell us about.

It’s not uncom­mon in non­par­ti­san local races for a lot of peo­ple to be unsure who they are going to sup­port right up until they sit down to vote. We’ve pub­lished, on many occa­sions, poll find­ings in which the largest group of vot­ers were unde­cid­ed. We’re very com­fort­able hav­ing a sam­ple in which a sub­stan­tial num­ber of vot­ers report that they have already vot­ed (which, it should be not­ed, is not the same thing as hav­ing returned a bal­lot — that’s a sub­se­quent step!)

And remem­ber, we saw a lead for Hollingsworth among those who haven’t vot­ed, too. Hollingsworth also picked up far more sup­port than Alex Hud­son did when we nudged not sure vot­ers in the not-yet-vot­ed group to make a decision.

Our col­league Ben Sul­li­van of Change Research, who over­saw the field­ing of this sur­vey for the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute, not­ed: “We aren’t see­ing a fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence in the views of peo­ple who have already vot­ed and those who have not yet vot­ed, so even if those who have already vot­ed are over­rep­re­sent­ed here, it should­n’t skew the out­comes much.”

Two years ago, NPI com­mis­sioned Change Research to han­dle the field­ing for our inau­gur­al polls of the Seat­tle elec­torate. In sev­en out of sev­en city­wide con­tests, the can­di­date who led in our Octo­ber 2021 sur­vey of the elec­torate went on to win. More analy­sis is avail­able in this Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate post.

Lat­er today, we’ll bring you more find­ings from our pre­elec­tion poll of Seat­tle City Coun­cil Dis­trict #3, includ­ing vot­ers’ views on the hous­ing levy!

Wednesday, November 1st, 2023

Time to worry about Snohomish County, too: Washington’s right wing frets about Sheriff Adam Fortney’s reelection prospects

With less than one week to go until Gen­er­al Elec­tion Day 2023, there’s mount­ing evi­dence that local Repub­li­cans and right wing groups are grow­ing con­cerned that key races aren’t going to turn out in their favor. I wrote last week about how Lisa Brown’s ascen­dant can­di­da­cy for May­or of Spokane has Repub­li­cans across the state spooked. Now, it appears that Repub­li­cans are also wor­ried about the reelec­tion prospects of right wing Sno­homish Coun­ty Sher­iff Adam Fortney.

They have many rea­sons to be nervous.

It’s been rough going for Fort­ney as sher­iff these past four years:

  • He lost the Sno­homish Coun­ty sher­iff office’s accred­i­ta­tion, which his pre­de­ces­sor Ty Tre­nary had worked hard to get. (Most coun­ty sher­if­f’s offices in the state are not accred­it­ed by the Wash­ing­ton Asso­ci­a­tion of Sher­iffs & Police Chiefs; Sno­homish Coun­ty was one of the few that was.)
  • He ordered account­abil­i­ty tools put into police cars to mea­sure offi­cers’ dri­ving removed, say­ing: “I am going to trust them to dri­ve their car.” (The devices cap­tured vehi­cle loca­tion, direc­tion of trav­el, speed, brak­ing and airbag deploy­ment, as well as the use of emer­gency lights and seat belts.)
  • He decid­ed to re-hire not one, not two, but three deputies who had wise­ly been ter­mi­nat­ed by Tre­nary for mis­con­duct. His ratio­nale, in his own words: “I’m the new sher­iff… I get to weigh in on my guys’ discipline.”
  • He stu­pid­ly hired a vig­i­lante to be a sher­if­f’s deputy, then when that deci­sion was under scruti­ny and crit­i­cism from the pub­lic and the press, he defend­ed it, only to reverse course a month lat­er after con­clud­ing it was an unten­able sit­u­a­tion that was mak­ing the sher­if­f’s office look bad.
  • He declared he would not enforce law­ful pub­lic health mea­sures intend­ed to pro­tect Wash­ing­to­ni­ans from a dead­ly dis­ease: SARS CoV‑2, the nov­el coro­n­avirus, also known more sim­ply as COVID-19.

And inap­pro­pri­ate inci­dents like this:

In 2019, Fort­ney helped orga­nized a ride­a­long for Anna Rohrbough, a con­ser­v­a­tive Sno­homish Coun­ty Coun­cil can­di­date. He had donat­ed $125 to her cam­paign. She gave $250 to his. The Repub­li­can can­di­date used pho­tos from the ride in a Face­book post. Ride­a­longs were sus­pend­ed after the incident.

Fort­ney sur­vived two recall attempts ear­ly in his term; the logis­tics of get­ting a recall before vot­ers proved too dif­fi­cult for orga­niz­ers back in 2020. But now Fort­ney has to face the vot­ers of Wash­ing­ton’s third largest coun­ty because the four year term he was elect­ed to in 2019 is expir­ing, and he wants another.

Stand­ing in the way of his goal of a sec­ond term is his oppo­nent Susan­na John­son, who has decades of expe­ri­ence work­ing in the sher­if­f’s office and is notably endorsed by Fort­ney’s liv­ing pre­de­ces­sors: Ty Tre­nary, John Lovick, Rick Bart, and Jim Sharf, plus for­mer inter­im sher­iff Tom Davis.

The for­mer four par­tic­i­pat­ed in a video tes­ti­mo­ni­al urg­ing a vote for John­son, which you can watch here if you’re inter­est­ed.

The Her­ald of Everett, the largest news­pa­per in Sno­homish Coun­ty, is also back­ing Susan­na John­son. Though it should­n’t have come as any sur­prise to any­one giv­en Fort­ney’s record, the paper’s recent endorse­ment of John­son — and its account­abil­i­ty-focused news cov­er­age of this con­test — has nev­er­the­less real­ly ran­kled local right wing com­men­ta­tors and media operatives.

Pod­cast host Bran­di Kruse, for exam­ple, was so irri­tat­ed that she pledged to help recruit peo­ple to wave signs for Fort­ney, a pledge she then made good on:

I had no inten­tion of get­ting involved in the race for Sno­homish Coun­ty Sher­iff, but the Everett Her­ald just made it per­son­al. With days to go until the elec­tion, a reporter with the coun­ty’s largest news­pa­per did what has sad­ly become com­mon in polit­i­cal report­ing in this state. He pub­lished a piece look­ing to scare vot­ers away from sup­port­ing Sher­iff Adam Fort­ney by unfair­ly tying him to right-wing extrem­ism. The reporter called Fort­ney a “con­tro­ver­sial” “far-right” sher­iff with (gasp) “Con­sti­tu­tion­al leanings.”

It’s no sur­prise when fear­mon­ger­ing is used in polit­i­cal cam­paigns, we see that from both the left and the right. But as a for­mer jour­nal­ist, it pains me to see this kind of divi­sive, one-sided rhetoric from a news orga­ni­za­tion so close to an elec­tion – and in a race where pub­lic safe­ty should be at the heart of the conversation.

I very rarely endorse polit­i­cal can­di­dates, in part because fans of our show are fierce­ly inde­pen­dent-mind­ed and take great pride in research­ing can­di­dates for them­selves. I know they will do that in this race as well, and encour­age every­one to research both Sher­iff Fort­ney and his oppo­nent, Susan­na John­son, before cast­ing a vote.

But I sim­ply refuse to stand back and watch a news out­let tip the scales by prey­ing on the fears and emo­tions of vot­ers. It goes against every­thing I stand for, and every­thing we’re try­ing to change with the show.

Please join me tomor­row, Mon­day Octo­ber 30 from 3:30–5pm to do some good-old-fash­ioned sign wav­ing for Sher­iff Fort­ney in Lyn­nwood. We will meet on the cor­ner of 196th and 44th by the Fred Meyer.

In addi­tion to pro­mot­ing a sign-wav­ing event for Fort­ney, Kruse also had him on her pod­cast, with the goal of mak­ing Fort­ney look as rea­son­able as pos­si­ble to bol­ster his appeal to vot­ers in the final days lead­ing up to the election.

In the appear­ance on Kruse’s show, Fort­ney tried to present him­self as some­one above par­ti­san pol­i­tics, echo­ing these pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed com­ments: “I don’t care about Repub­li­can or Demo­c­rat… I don’t care about red team or blue team.”

On the sur­face, this sort of talk might seem very strange, giv­en that Fort­ney is a a fierce right wing Repub­li­can, but it makes total sense to our team, because Fort­ney is try­ing to get reelect­ed in a juris­dic­tion that leans Demo­c­ra­t­ic and faces a no-non­sense chal­lenger who has a ton of com­mu­ni­ty support.

Right wing Repub­li­cans can parse elec­toral data just like any­one else, and they know that last year, Pat­ty Mur­ray got 57.52% of the vote in Sno­homish Coun­ty, despite a mas­sive­ly financed effort by Repub­li­cans to get Tiffany Smi­ley elected.

Repub­li­cans also know that their elec­toral coali­tion is chang­ing, both in Wash­ing­ton State and else­where, hav­ing been reshaped by Don­ald Trump. Vot­ers with col­lege degrees — who are the most reli­able odd-year vot­ers — have increas­ing­ly aban­doned the Repub­li­cans for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, the only one of the two major polit­i­cal par­ties that remains com­mit­ted to Amer­i­can democracy.

If Demo­c­ra­t­ic and Demo­c­ra­t­ic-lean­ing Sno­homish vot­ers unite behind Susan­na John­son, Adam Fort­ney can’t win. It’s that sim­ple. It’s basic elec­toral math in a juris­dic­tion like Sno­homish Coun­ty. Hence Fort­ney’s com­ments about pro­fess­ing not to care about Repub­li­can or Demo­c­rat, or claim­ing he’s a bipar­ti­san guy. He needs at least some vot­ers who lean Demo­c­ra­t­ic to embrace his candidacy.

In real­i­ty, Fort­ney is a very, very par­ti­san right wing Repub­li­can. I can say that with con­fi­dence because our team has been observ­ing both his words and deeds for a very long time. A few exam­ples that illus­trate the point:

  • A few months ago, Fort­ney brought extrem­ist sher­iff Mark Lamb of Ari­zona to town for a fundrais­er, at which a num­ber of guns were auc­tioned off. Lamb sup­port­ed the Jan­u­ary 6th insur­rec­tion and sub­scribes to the dis­cred­it­ed legal the­o­ry that sher­iffs are the supreme legal author­i­ty in the Unit­ed States and are not required to enforce laws they believe to be uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. No “apo­lit­i­cal” sher­iff would have brought Mark Lamb to town.
  • Fort­ney appeared at the “Sum­mer Free­dom Fest” orga­nized by Bri­an Hey­wood and Let’s Go Wash­ing­ton in July to pro­mote one of Hey­wood’s right wing ini­tia­tives, specif­i­cal­ly the one that would roll back recent­ly passed state laws to make police pur­suits safer. An “apo­lit­i­cal” sher­iff would­n’t be tak­ing part in an effort orga­nized by the Repub­li­can Par­ty to get rid of police reform laws sup­port­ed by the vast major­i­ty of voters.
  • More recent­ly, Fort­ney was part of a polit­i­cal event up in Everett orga­nized by a right wing talk radio sta­tion, Bon­neville’s AM 770 KTTH, fea­tur­ing Dave Reichert, Jason Rantz, Bryan Suits, Semi Bird, State Repub­li­can Chair Jim Walsh, and… Bran­di Kruse. It dou­bled as a pub­lic­i­ty event for Rantz, who is hawk­ing a book. Again, this is sim­ply not the kind of gath­er­ing that an “apo­lit­i­cal” elect­ed offi­cial would ever par­tic­i­pate in.

It’s entire­ly fair, giv­en what Fort­ney has said and done, to char­ac­ter­ize Fort­ney as an extrem­ist and a right wing Repub­li­can who has had a con­tro­ver­sial tenure as Sher­iff. Bran­di Kruse, despite claim­ing to have had “no inten­tion” of get­ting involved in the con­test, has been invest­ed in Fort­ney’s reelec­tion all along, which is why she’s jump­ing so ardent­ly to his defense now. Kruse (who appeared with Fort­ney at “Free­dom Fest” in July) can see a reelec­tion bid in trou­ble, so she’s try­ing to help give Fort­ney a last minute makeover of his cam­paign image.

Sim­i­lar­ly, The Lyn­nwood Times’ right wing pub­lish­er Mario Lot­more wants to see Fort­ney reelect­ed. Lot­more is real­ly unhap­py with the cov­er­age Fort­ney has been get­ting, so he pub­lished this com­plaint-laden edi­to­r­i­al a few days ago.

It could use a good fisk­ing, so I’m going to go through it bit by bit.

Let’s begin:

🚨To all of our read­ers, when did pub­lic safe­ty become a par­ti­san issue?

The answer here is sim­ple: it always has been. All issues are par­ti­san issues. That’s what makes them issues in the first place. If there aren’t mul­ti­ple sides and mul­ti­ple points of view, then there’s noth­ing at issue. “Not/shouldn’t be a par­ti­san issue” made an appear­ance on our Ban­ished Words List a few years ago, it’s a worth­less phrase that our team is tired of hear­ing and reading.

This morn­ing our inbox was inun­dat­ed with emails and my cell­phone with 14 voice­mails and 23 texts from read­ers frus­trat­ed at what they con­sid­er par­ti­san pro­pa­gan­da per­pet­u­at­ed by a com­pet­ing local news­pa­per in Sno­homish Coun­ty regard­ing the Sno­homish Coun­ty Sher­if­f’s Office race.

Those would be Fort­ney par­ti­sans wor­ried about Fort­ney’s reelec­tion. What were they expect­ing: that Fort­ney would be put on a pedestal by the local media?

We at the Lyn­nwood Times fol­low objec­tive jour­nal­ism and not the advo­ca­cy jour­nal­ism you read so much in main­stream news out­lets. This is why main­stream is fail­ing. Because of the inter­net, peo­ple can read a myr­i­ad of per­spec­tives and see through the propaganda.

We’ve scru­ti­nized what Lot­more and his team are pub­lish­ing at the Lyn­nwood Times and it isn’t what we’d con­sid­er objec­tive jour­nal­ism. It’s actu­al­ly advo­ca­cy jour­nal­ism. And that’s fine — advo­ca­cy jour­nal­ism, which we also pub­lish here on The Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate (note the word “Advo­cate” in the name!) has a rich tra­di­tion going back to before the found­ing of this country.

Con­trary to what Lot­more claims, big media out­lets aren’t in trou­ble because they prac­tice advo­ca­cy jour­nal­ism, or claim to adhere to the objec­tive tra­di­tion but real­ly don’t. Rather, the entire media indus­try is strug­gling to respond to huge eco­nom­ic and cul­tur­al shifts. Old busi­ness mod­els, espe­cial­ly adver­tis­ing-depen­dent ones, sim­ply don’t work any­more. Sur­viv­ing out­lets large and small, includ­ing rur­al fam­i­ly-run news­pa­pers, are all try­ing to find a path forward.

Main­stream news out­lets should tread care­ful­ly on mak­ing safe­ty a par­ti­san issue. In WA state, one par­ty has con­trolled the coun­ty and the state exec­u­tive gov­ern­ment for decades, incre­men­tal­ly pass­ing laws hin­der­ing polic­ing, legal­iz­ing drugs, and empow­er­ing offenders.

Again, pub­lic safe­ty has always been a par­ti­san issue.

As for con­trol of the coun­ty and state gov­ern­ments, it’s true that Wash­ing­ton and Sno­homish Coun­ty have been most­ly-Demo­c­ra­t­ic run for decades. That’s because the vot­ers keep elect­ing Democ­rats to gov­ern. But there have been a few excep­tions: Repub­li­cans con­trolled both cham­bers of the Leg­is­la­ture in the 1990s for a while, and this cen­tu­ry, they had a six-year stretch where they con­trolled the state Sen­ate. And, of course, Adam Fort­ney who is the cur­rent top cop in Sno­homish Coun­ty, is a right wing Repub­li­can, as we’ve established.

It must be not­ed that it was the vot­ers of Wash­ing­ton who decid­ed to decrim­i­nal­ize cannabis in 2012 through an ini­tia­tive to the peo­ple; the Leg­is­la­ture has fol­lowed their lead. And our research has found that the police reform laws law­mak­ers have passed more recent­ly are very pop­u­lar, includ­ing in swing counties.

The “chick­ens are com­ing home to roost,” to quote the infa­mous phase from Rev. Jere­mi­ah Wright, also known as Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma’s pas­tor. The polls show over­whelm­ing­ly, 67% of Amer­i­can’s reject the defund the police rhetoric and the failed poli­cies that we are now expe­ri­enc­ing. So, I say again, tread care­ful­ly on mak­ing safe­ty is a par­ti­san issue.

Invok­ing Jere­mi­ah Wright and Barack Oba­ma’s names in an edi­to­r­i­al about the cov­er­age of the Sno­homish Coun­ty sher­if­f’s race is an excel­lent way to announce to dis­cern­ing read­ers that you’re a right wing Repub­li­can who’s still quite mad about the out­come of the 2008 elec­tion, which Democ­rats won in a landslide.

As for “defund the police” rhetoric, that is nowa­days arguably espoused more by fanat­i­cal right wing Repub­li­cans than any­one on the left. It nev­er became pol­i­cy around here — the police weren’t defund­ed. But if Trump gets back in and gets a Repub­li­can major­i­ty next year, we could see the police get defund­ed, start­ing at the fed­er­al lev­el. Com­mit­ted sup­port­ers of Don­ald Trump speak of need­ing to dis­man­tle the FBI because they think law enforce­ment are out to get them.

The Depart­ment of Jus­tice’s suc­cess­ful pros­e­cu­tion of hun­dreds of Jan­u­ary 6th insur­rec­tion­ists has made them very, very angry and very, very resentful.

Here is a the­o­ry… The gov­ern­ing par­ty (and those elect­ed to rep­re­sent and pro­mote that gov­ern­ing par­ty) are putting ide­ol­o­gy before pub­lic safety.

A the­o­ry?

What you meant to say was “My view is…”

The “wel­com­ing city” and “sanc­tu­ary city” poli­cies passed in 2017 and 2018 direct­ing local and state law enforce­ment to NOT coop­er­ate with Fed­er­al immi­gra­tion enforce­ment, often by reject­ing “detain­er” requests embold­ened drug car­tels to estab­lish oper­a­tions in cities. Then sher­iffs and DA adopt­ed catch-and-release polices. Then we had sher­if­f’s and gov­er­nors across the coun­try and WA release crim­i­nal offend­ers because of c‑vid in 2020. Dur­ing that same year in 2020, elect­ed offi­cials refused to call out the vio­lence and destruc­tion of riot­ing through­out WA State and allowed vig­i­lantes to take over a por­tion of Seat­tle for weeks.

Lots of right wing gripes thrown togeth­er some­what inco­her­ent­ly here.

Elect­ed offi­cials of the gov­ern­ing par­ty allowed, and in some cas­es, pro­mot­ed Defund the Police rhetoric. Between 2021 to 2023, law­mak­ers passed bills reduc­ing sen­tenc­ing and con­se­quences for adult crimes and gang mem­bers who are minors, and let’s not for­get hin­der­ing pur­suit laws. DAs refused to enforce drug offens­es through­out WA state. Also, because of the defund the police rhetoric that turned into leg­is­la­tion or pol­i­cy, School Resource Offi­cers were tak­en out of pub­lic-school sys­tems through­out WA state and law enforce­ment per­son­nel left the pro­fes­sion in droves in which we are now fac­ing a polic­ing short­age through­out the state and Sno­homish Coun­ty. The ones that are there are over­worked and demoralized.

Anoth­er pas­sage of gripes.

Notice how there’s been absolute­ly no dis­cus­sion of:

  • The mur­ders (by police offi­cers sup­posed to be keep­ing peo­ple safe!) of George Floyd, Bre­on­na Tay­lor, Ahmaud Arbery, Manuel Ellis, and so many oth­ers, whose names could fill an entire blog post.
  • The costs to tax­pay­ers of lock­ing peo­ple up. We’ve been invest­ing in mass incar­cer­a­tion for decades, and it’s clear­ly not work­ing for us.
  • What’s actu­al­ly in those police reform laws passed by the Leg­is­la­ture, which pub­lic opin­ion research shows vot­ers are very sup­port­ive of.

Also, many pub­lic sec­tor pro­fes­sions are present­ly fac­ing per­son­nel shortages.

Lot­more fails to con­cede that com­plex dynam­ics are dri­ving trends affect­ing law enforce­ment right now. Those dynam­ics can be seen across the coun­try, in Repub­li­can-run juris­dic­tions as well as Demo­c­ra­t­ic ones.

So, I ask Sno­homish Coun­ty res­i­dents, who are to blame for the fen­tanyl epi­dem­ic, gangs in schools most like­ly orga­nized and run by drug car­tel prox­ies, surge in vio­lent crime, youth shoot­ings, and the fear of “pub­lic unsafe­ty” which is our new reality?

Adam Fort­ney is cur­rent­ly in charge of the Sno­homish Coun­ty sher­if­f’s office and has been for sev­er­al years. By your log­ic, should we just blame him?

If news out­lets want to make pub­lic safe­ty a par­ti­san issue, then where is the assess­ment of the con­tri­bu­tion to “pub­lic unsafe­ty” by the gov­ern­ing par­ty and the link of their elect­ed offi­cials and sur­ro­gates to that gov­ern­ing par­ty. Advo­ca­cy jour­nal­ism fails both the peo­ple and the profession.

There’s a say­ing: if you don’t like the heat, get out of the kitchen.

If par­ti­san pol­i­tics both­ers you so much, maybe do some­thing else? Also: If you don’t like advo­ca­cy jour­nal­ism, why do you prac­tice it while say­ing that it’s bad?

Sno­homish Coun­ty res­i­dents have two choic­es for the direc­tion of pub­lic safe­ty — a Sher­iff can­di­date backed by the gov­ern­ing par­ty or a Sher­iff that is not?

In oth­er words: Please vote for Adam Fort­ney, I’m real­ly wor­ried he won’t win! 

The 2023 local elec­tion cycle will con­clude lat­er this month with the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of offi­cial returns. Bal­lots are due back by next Tues­day, either to a drop box by 8 PM Pacif­ic, or to a post office by the last out­go­ing mail col­lec­tion time.

Do your part for our democ­ra­cy by being a vot­er this year — and every year.

Wednesday, November 1st, 2023

Sound Transit begins pre-revenue light rail testing on the Eastside, opens RTS garage

In the lat­est sign that the East­side’s long wait for light rail ser­vice is near­ing an end, Sound Tran­sit this week began pre-rev­enue test­ing on the future 2 Line between Belle­vue and Red­mond and invit­ed the pub­lic to begin using the Red­mond Tech­nol­o­gy Sta­tion garage in the heart of the Microsoft campus.

Sound Tran­sit has test­ed trains in Belle­vue and Red­mond before, but not to this extent. As the agency explained in a news release:

“This phase includes train­ing for oper­a­tors and main­te­nance staff, and con­tin­ued test­ing to ensure sta­tions, tracks, util­i­ties, and vehi­cles work togeth­er as expect­ed in prepa­ra­tion for the start of ser­vice next spring.”

“Light rail vehi­cles will run fre­quent­ly between the South Belle­vue and Red­mond Tech­nol­o­gy sta­tions, includ­ing at street cross­ings in the Bel-Red area [near the 130th Street sta­tion]. Pedes­tri­ans and motorists should be alert for trains and expect they could be run­ning at any time of the day or night.”

“In addi­tion to trains on the tracks, peo­ple can expect to see main­te­nance vehi­cles, test­ing equip­ment, and per­son­nel involved in the test­ing process, and hear sounds typ­i­cal in an oper­at­ing light rail sys­tem includ­ing sta­tion announce­ments, wheels on the tracks, and warn­ing sig­nals. The next phase of test­ing will be sim­u­lat­ed ser­vice, expect­ed to begin ear­ly next year.”

Because trains will be run­ning a lot more fre­quent­ly, folks trav­el­ing in the Bel-Red area need to pay atten­tion to their sur­round­ings. It’s cru­cial to look both ways before cross­ing train tracks. Don’t be com­pla­cent: those tracks are now in active use and will con­tin­ue to be in the future. Cross­ing tracks while star­ing at your iPhone and lis­ten­ing to music on your Air­Pods just isn’t a good idea.

Instead, pock­et the phone and pop your ear buds out, or take your head­phones off, so you can scout for any approach­ing trains using all of your senses.

For those curi­ous what it’s like to see trains rolling through the East­side, NPI high­ly rec­om­mends our Trainspot­ting with NPI series. The first install­ment has clips of train test­ing at night in Belle­vue. More recent install­ments have depict­ed trains oper­at­ing dur­ing the day in both Belle­vue and Red­mond, like this one.

While it won’t be pos­si­ble to ride Line 2 trains through the East­side until next spring at the ear­li­est, Red­mond area rid­ers who com­mute by car or bike for the last few miles of their mul­ti­modal trips can take advan­tage of the new­ly opened Red­mond Tech­nol­o­gy Sta­tion park­ing garage. It’s locat­ed where the Over­lake Park & Ride used to be, in the heart of the Microsoft cam­pus, adja­cent to the NE 40th exit from State Route 520. Sound Tran­sit says it con­tains three hun­dred park­ing stalls and cov­ered facil­i­ties for forty-four bicycles.

The entrance may not be obvi­ous to many rid­ers at first.

The park­ing garage does­n’t have a ground lev­el, because that’s where the RTS bus loop is locat­ed. Motorists may not use the bus loop entrance, which looks like the way to get in, because that’s reserved for bus­es and shut­tles only. (ST Express, King Coun­ty Metro, and Microsoft­’s Con­nec­tor all stop there.)

To access the garage, it’s nec­es­sary to turn right on NE 36th, then turn right into the sta­tion dri­ve­way as the road is curv­ing to the left. That dri­ve­way leads to a ramp that allows vehi­cles to ascend into the garage. There are sev­er­al lev­els avail­able, includ­ing a top lev­el with a pret­ty sweet view of the Microsoft campus.

“This garage pro­vides a new hub for tran­sit rid­ers and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers. It’s a step toward a more con­nect­ed East­side and Puget Sound region, allow­ing more peo­ple to access tran­sit,” said Sound Tran­sit Board Chair and King Coun­ty Exec­u­tive Dow Con­stan­tine, who joined Red­mond May­or Angela Bir­ney, Coun­cilmem­ber Clau­dia Bal­duc­ci, and CEO Julie Timm for a rib­bon cutting.

“The Red­mond Tech­nol­o­gy Sta­tion Park­ing Garage offers more mobil­i­ty options for more peo­ple across our region,” said Clau­dia Bal­duc­ci, also the Sound Tran­sit Sys­tem Expan­sion Com­mit­tee Chair. “This open­ing at Red­mond Tech­nol­o­gy Sta­tion rep­re­sents anoth­er excit­ing step for­ward as we build the future with light rail ser­vice that will con­nect peo­ple to the activ­i­ties and oppor­tu­ni­ties in some of the most dynam­ic neigh­bor­hoods on the Eastside.”

“The new struc­ture was built by Kiewit-Hoff­man,” Sound Tran­sit noted.

“Con­struc­tion on the garage was recent­ly com­plet­ed through strong part­ner­ship and col­lab­o­ra­tion between Sound Tran­sit, the con­trac­tor, and the city of Red­mond. Local Artist Kate Sweeney cre­at­ed the art­work dis­played on the garage ceil­ing above the tran­sit loop, depict­ing an algo­rithm known as the Apol­lon­ian Gas­ket. This work is a nod to the tech­nol­o­gy com­mu­ni­ty sur­round­ing the station.”

“The algo­rithm, named after the math­e­mati­cian Apol­lo­nius of Per­ga, is a frac­tal gen­er­at­ed from a col­lec­tion of tan­gent cir­cles con­tained with­in a sin­gle larg­er cir­cle. The sculp­tures hang like clouds over the bus wait­ing areas, cre­at­ing a live­ly and engag­ing space for passengers.”

Watch a clip of the rib­bon cutting:

Watch the speak­ing pro­gram that pre­ced­ed it:

NPI will con­tin­ue to bring you cov­er­age of the work to get the 2 Line ready for rid­ers in the spring of next year. These are excit­ing days for the Eastside!

Monday, October 30th, 2023

Longtime United States Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon to retire in 2024

One of the Pacif­ic North­west­’s longest-serv­ing mem­bers of Con­gress has decid­ed it’s time to pass the torch. Earl Blu­me­nauer, sev­en­ty-five, declared today he won’t seek reelec­tion as the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Ore­gon’s 3rd Dis­trict in 2024, bring­ing a dis­tin­guished career of pub­lic ser­vice to a close after half a century.

“For fifty years, I have served in elect­ed office at every lev­el — as a State Leg­is­la­tor, Mult­nom­ah Coun­ty Com­mis­sion­er, Port­land City Coun­cil mem­ber, and for twen­ty-sev­en years as a mem­ber of Con­gress,” said Blu­me­nauer in a state­ment announc­ing his retire­ment. “It is a dif­fi­cult deci­sion. Par­tic­u­lar­ly after the amaz­ing suc­cess of the last sev­er­al years. But sim­ply said, it is time to con­tin­ue my life’s mis­sion with­out the bur­den of day-to-day politics.”

“I have ded­i­cat­ed my career to cre­at­ing liv­able com­mu­ni­ties where peo­ple are safe, healthy, and eco­nom­i­cal­ly secure,” Blu­me­nauer noted.

“This mis­sion has guid­ed my involve­ment in Con­gress on a wide range of issues. I may best be known in Port­land for work on light rail, street­cars, and bicy­cles. But our work also includ­ed crit­i­cal issues of war and peace, cham­pi­oning the fight to end the failed war on drugs, help­ing to write the [Patient Pro­tec­tion and] Afford­able Care Act, res­cu­ing inde­pen­dent restau­rants, food and farm pol­i­cy, ani­mal wel­fare, and writ­ing the sin­gle largest invest­ment in renew­able ener­gy in history.”

“I look for­ward to con­tin­u­ing cham­pi­oning liv­able com­mu­ni­ties start­ing right here in Port­land and being a resource and a part­ner for the next generation.”

The affa­ble Blu­me­nauer is known for being a bow-tie wear­er and for his prin­ci­pled stands on issues. He became the most senior mem­ber of Ore­gon’s U.S. House del­e­ga­tion fol­low­ing the retire­ment of his friend Peter DeFazio at the end of the last Con­gress. All of the state’s oth­er Unit­ed States Rep­re­sen­ta­tives have few­er than ten years of ser­vice; most joined Con­gress with­in the last five years.

The 3rd Dis­trict is deep blue — it’s Ore­gon’s most Demo­c­ra­t­ic dis­trict, encom­pass­ing most of the City of Port­land as well as Gre­sham and Trout­dale, which means Democ­rats won’t have a prob­lem hold­ing it in 2024.

The cur­rent incar­na­tion of the dis­trict, which Blu­me­nauer has rep­re­sent­ed since he took over for Ron Wyden (one of Ore­gon’s U.S. Sen­a­tors since the mid-1990s) also includes Hood Riv­er, Mount Hood and its foothills, where com­mu­ni­ties like Sandy, Esta­ca­da, Bor­ing, and Dam­as­cus are locat­ed. The 3rd bor­ders three of Ore­gon’s five oth­er con­gres­sion­al dis­tricts: the 1st, the 5th, and the 2nd. It does not bor­der the 6th, though por­tions of the 6th are in close prox­im­i­ty to it.

Ore­gon Demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­ers began offer­ing trib­utes to Blu­me­nauer after his announce­ment, which con­firmed months of spec­u­la­tion he might not run again.

“Since I was in high school, Earl Blu­me­nauer has been a pow­er­ful force in the pol­i­cy and pol­i­tics of Ore­gon and Amer­i­ca,” said Sen­a­tor Jeff Merkley. “He is a nation­al leader on issues from urban trans­porta­tion and hous­ing to cli­mate and cannabis. I so thank him for his over fifty years of pub­lic service.”

“From the first time I met him to now, it’s always been a plea­sure to be his part­ner fight­ing for projects and pro­grams ben­e­fit­ing Ore­go­ni­ans. He has made his home­town of Port­land, and all of Ore­gon and the coun­try a bet­ter place.”

“I have been for­tu­nate to call Earl Blu­me­nauer a men­tor and a friend since I first ran for Con­gress,” said Blu­me­nauer’s col­league Suzanne Bonam­i­ci, who rep­re­sents the 1st Dis­trict. “The Port­land region, the State of Ore­gon, and the coun­try have all ben­e­fit­ed enor­mous­ly from Earl’s vision and leadership.”

“Through­out his many years of pub­lic ser­vice, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Blumenauer
has been a con­sis­tent & vocal advo­cate for Ore­gon val­ues,” said Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Andrea Sali­nas, who rep­re­sents the state’s newest con­gres­sion­al dis­trict. “I know I speak for the entire Ore­gon del­e­ga­tion when I say Earl will be great­ly missed in Con­gress. I wish him & his fam­i­ly all the best in this new chapter.”

One of Blu­me­nauer’s two Repub­li­can col­leagues swift­ly offered her thanks, too.

“Thank you for your decades of ser­vice to Ore­go­ni­ans, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Blu­me­nauer,” said Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Lori Chavez-DeRe­mer, who cur­rent­ly rep­re­sents the 5th Dis­trict and suc­ceed­ed Kurt Schrad­er at the begin­ning of 2023. “I appre­ci­at­ed the advice you gave me when I was just get­ting start­ed ear­li­er this year, and I look for­ward to serv­ing out the remain­der of this Con­gress with you.”

Blu­me­nauer’s office cit­ed the fol­low­ing as his accomplishments:

  • Lead­ing the Ways and Means Com­mit­tee to craft pro­vi­sions includ­ed in the sin­gle largest mea­sure to com­bat the cli­mate cri­sis in Amer­i­can his­to­ry: the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act.
  • Secur­ing more than $1.5 tril­lion in the Bipar­ti­san Infra­struc­ture Law, the largest invest­ment in rebuild­ing and renew­ing Amer­i­ca in his­to­ry. This includ­ed his­toric amounts of fund­ing for active trans­porta­tion: a 70% increase in bike and pedes­tri­an fund­ing and the cre­ation of a $1 bil­lion Safe Streets and Roads for All program.
  • Sav­ing more than 100,000 restau­rants dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic by cre­at­ing the $28.6 bil­lion Restau­rant Revi­tal­iza­tion Fund.
  • Expand­ing health care cov­er­age for more than 500,000 Ore­go­ni­ans through the Afford­able Care Act, includ­ing a new Medicare ben­e­fit for end-of-life care planning.
  • Pro­vid­ing key lead­er­ship in oppo­si­tion to America’s mis­ad­ven­tures in the trag­ic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the late Sen­a­tors John McCain and Ted Kennedy, he passed leg­is­la­tion to cre­ate a path­way to legal per­ma­nent sta­tus for Iraqi and Afghan nation­als who direct­ly sup­port­ed the U.S. mil­i­tary mis­sion in their country.
  • As a local elect­ed offi­cial and mem­ber of Con­gress, Blu­me­nauer was respon­si­ble for the devel­op­ment of Portland’s inno­v­a­tive tran­sit sys­tem, includ­ing the light rail and street­car sys­tem. This includes build­ing out Portland’s bike net­work, mak­ing Port­land inter­na­tion­al­ly rec­og­nized as one of the nation’s most liv­able cities.

Blu­me­nauer also:

  • Became Con­gress’ lead­ing cham­pi­on in end­ing the failed war on drugs. He found­ed the Con­gres­sion­al Cannabis Cau­cus as a forum to edu­cate mem­bers of Con­gress about fed­er­al cannabis pol­i­cy ini­tia­tives, authored the leg­isla­tive blue­print for fed­er­al legal­iza­tion and has cam­paigned in every suc­cess­ful state legal­iza­tion effort.
  • Cre­at­ed a nation­al bike move­ment shap­ing com­mu­ni­ties large and small. He is rec­og­nized as one of the top 25 change mak­ers in cycling his­to­ry. He found­ed the Con­gres­sion­al Bicy­cle Cau­cus to bring mem­bers of Con­gress togeth­er to prac­tice bike-par­ti­san­ship. Since estab­lished in 1996, the Cau­cus has suc­cess­ful­ly secured a $2.45 bil­lion increase in fed­er­al fund­ing for bik­ing and walk­ing and cre­at­ed a tax ben­e­fit for com­muters bik­ing to work.
  • Became rec­og­nized as an envi­ron­men­tal cham­pi­on for pro­tect­ing resources across Amer­i­ca. Here in Ore­gon, his leg­is­la­tion pro­tect­ed 127,000 acres of wilder­ness and 80 miles of Wild and Scenic Rivers in the Mt. Hood Nation­al For­est and Colum­bia Riv­er Gorge, pre­serv­ing these spe­cial places for gen­er­a­tions to come.
  • Authored the Sen­a­tor Paul Simon Water for the World Act, the most com­pre­hen­sive piece of inter­na­tion­al water pol­i­cy to date affect­ing the lives of hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple. Blu­me­nauer is rec­og­nized as a pre­em­i­nent cham­pi­on for water and sanitation.
  • Cham­pi­oned major leg­is­la­tion to stop imports of ille­gal­ly har­vest­ed tim­ber from around the world into the Unit­ed States. This became a mod­el for coun­tries around the world.
  • Cre­at­ed the Small Starts pro­gram to help street­car projects across the coun­try receive fed­er­al fund­ing and tech­ni­cal assis­tance. This pro­gram led to over 22 street­car projects around the coun­try so far, includ­ing three in Portland.

Though Blu­me­nauer’s release men­tions his advo­ca­cy for light rail, it does­n’t men­tion his involve­ment in the found­ing of Rail~Volution, the annu­al tran­sit and mobil­i­ty con­fer­ence, now known as Mpac (Mobil­i­ty / Com­mu­ni­ty / Possibility).

Rail~Volution, which NPI staff have attend­ed in past years, has been a bright light for bet­ter and more ubiq­ui­tous tran­sit dur­ing the lat­est chap­ter of a very car-cen­tric era in Amer­i­can his­to­ry. We can’t thank Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Blu­me­nauer enough for his lead­er­ship in advanc­ing this impor­tant cause.

Blu­me­nauer spoke to The Willamette Week at length pri­or to cir­cu­lat­ing the news release con­vey­ing his deci­sion to leave Con­gress. He knows he’s giv­ing up an oppor­tu­ni­ty to poten­tial­ly be in the major­i­ty in 2025 and 2026.

“I do think we are going to take con­trol. I’m quite con­fi­dent of that,” Blu­me­nauer told WWeek dur­ing his sit-down. “But it’s not cer­tain to me that the things that I care about in terms of inter­na­tion­al water and san­i­ta­tion, cannabis reform, flood insur­ance, cli­mate change, trans­porta­tion safe­ty — I’m not cer­tain that that the best way to make a con­tri­bu­tion to that is in Congress.”

Blu­me­nauer is increas­ing­ly con­cerned about unchecked drug use in Port­land and says he’ll be turn­ing his atten­tion to improv­ing pub­lic safe­ty and com­mu­ni­ty well-being in the Rose City after he leaves Con­gress at the end of next year.

Blu­me­nauer also told WWeek he won’t be get­ting involved in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry to pick his suc­ces­sor. That means no endorsement.

“Can­di­dates either being recruit­ed or active­ly seek­ing sup­port include for­mer Mult­nom­ah Coun­ty Chair Deb­o­rah Kafoury, Mult­nom­ah Coun­ty Com­mis­sion­er Susheela Jaya­pal, state Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Travis Nel­son (D‑Portland), and Gre­sham City Coun­cilor Eddy Morales,” the week­ly explained.

Nel­son hap­pens to be one of Ore­gon’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee mem­bers and is con­sid­ered by many to be a ris­ing star in the party.

Ore­gon will hold its 2024 pri­ma­ry on Tues­day, May 21st. Whichev­er Demo­c­ra­t­ic hope­ful secures the par­ty’s nom­i­na­tion for Con­gress in the 3rd Dis­trict is extreme­ly like­ly to go on to become Blu­me­nauer’s suc­ces­sor in November.

Sunday, October 29th, 2023

Last Week In Congress: How Cascadia’s U.S. lawmakers voted (October 16th-27th)

Good morn­ing! Here’s how Cascadia’s Mem­bers of Con­gress vot­ed on major issues dur­ing the leg­isla­tive week end­ing Octo­ber 27th, 2023.

Chamber of the United States House of Representatives

The House cham­ber (U.S. Con­gress photo)

MIKE JOHNSON’S ELECTION AS SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: The House on Octo­ber 24th elect­ed Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mike John­son of Louisiana to be the fifty-sixth Speak­er in Unit­ed States his­to­ry, with all Repub­li­cans who were present vot­ing for his elec­tion. Democ­rats uni­form­ly vot­ed for their leader, Hakeem Jeffries.

John­son received 220 votes and Jef­fries 209.

John­son sup­port­er Elise Ste­fanik, R‑New York, said: “A deeply respect­ed con­sti­tu­tion­al lawyer, Mike has ded­i­cat­ed his life to pre­serv­ing America’s great prin­ci­ples of life, lib­er­ty and the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness… Amer­i­cans fun­da­men­tal­ly under­stand that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment has been ille­gal­ly weaponized against we the peo­ple, shred­ding the Con­sti­tu­tion, tar­get­ing con­ser­v­a­tives and par­ents…  The peo­ple are look­ing to this great cham­ber to save Amer­i­ca and save Amer­i­ca we will.”

Jef­fries sup­port­er Pete Aguilar, D‑California, said: “This has been about one thing. This has been about who can appease Don­ald Trump. House Repub­li­cans have put their names behind some­one who has been called the most impor­tant archi­tect of the elec­toral col­lege objec­tions. He spear­head­ed the legal effort, joined by more than 100 of our col­leagues on the oth­er side of the aisle, in sup­port of a dan­ger­ous and base­less law­suit to over­turn the results of the 2020 election.”

The House was able to resume leg­isla­tive busi­ness fol­low­ing John­son’s election.

Thanks to VoteFacts.com News Reports for the floor debate sum­ma­ry.

The State of Idaho

Vot­ing for Mike John­son (2): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mike Simp­son and Russ Fulcher

The State of Oregon

Vot­ing for Hakeem Jef­fries (4): Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Suzanne Bonam­i­ci, Earl Blu­me­nauer, Val Hoyle, and Andrea Salinas

Vot­ing for Mike John­son (2): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Cliff Bentz and Lori Chavez-DeRemer

The State of Washington

Vot­ing for Hakeem Jef­fries (8): Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Suzan Del­Bene, Rick Larsen, Marie Glue­senkamp Perez, Derek Kilmer, Prami­la Jaya­pal, Kim Schri­er, Adam Smith, and Mar­i­lyn Strickland

Vot­ing for Mike John­son (2): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Dan New­house and Cathy McMor­ris Rodgers

Cas­ca­dia total: 12 votes for Hakeem Jef­fries, 6 votes for Mike Johnson

Read More »

Wednesday, October 25th, 2023

House Republicans pick a new Speaker at last: Ultra MAGA Congressman Mike Johnson

After weeks of feud­ing amongst them­selves, Repub­li­cans in the Unit­ed States House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives vot­ed today to elect a new Speak­er who comes from the par­ty’s Trumpian wing: Ultra MAGA Con­gress­man Mike John­son of Louisiana, who has no expe­ri­ence serv­ing in the cham­ber pri­or to the Trump error.

The vote to elect John­son was unan­i­mous among Repub­li­cans, with all 220 Repub­li­cans who vot­ed back­ing his can­di­da­cy. Democ­rats, mean­while, vot­ed unan­i­mous­ly for their leader, Hakeem Jef­fries, who is expect­ed to become Speak­er in Jan­u­ary of 2025 if Democ­rats recap­ture the House major­i­ty next year.

Four rep­re­sen­ta­tives did not par­tic­i­pate in the vote:

  • Bren­dan F. Boyle (D‑Pennsylvania)
  • J. Luis Cor­rea (D‑California)
  • Vicente Gon­za­lez (D‑Texas)
  • Der­rick Van Orden (R‑Wisconsin)

John­son is the first Speak­er in U.S. his­to­ry to come from the state of Louisiana.

If you’ve nev­er heard of Mike John­son, that’s under­stand­able, because he has not been a key fig­ure in House Repub­li­can lead­er­ship until now. John­son has been described as bet­ter man­nered than oth­er ultra MAGA mem­bers of the cau­cus, like fire­brand Jim Jor­dan, but ide­o­log­i­cal­ly, John­son is way, way out there.

Here’s a few key para­graphs from his Wikipedia entry:

A mem­ber of the Chris­t­ian right fac­tion of the Repub­li­can Par­ty, John­son is known for his strong sup­port for a nation­wide abor­tion ban and an end to legal same-sex mar­riages. He has called for the Supreme Court deci­sion Oberge­fell v. Hodges to be over­turned and for med­ical mar­i­jua­na to be restrict­ed, refer­ring to the lat­ter as a “gate­way drug”. In Decem­ber 2020, John­son signed an ami­cus brief in sup­port of Texas v. Penn­syl­va­nia, a law­suit filed at the Supreme Court con­test­ing the results of the 2020 pres­i­den­tial election.

In Jan­u­ary 2021, John­son vot­ed to over­turn the elec­tion results in Penn­syl­va­nia. John­son has cul­ti­vat­ed close ties to Protes­tant fun­da­men­tal­ist groups Answers in Gen­e­sis, Louisiana Fam­i­ly Forum, Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom, and Focus on the Family.

Pri­or to his career as a politi­cian, he worked with them to “rep­re­sent church­es, pas­tors and con­gre­gants whose vision of reli­gious free­dom con­flict­ed with gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions”. John­son sup­ports end­ing Amer­i­can mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia.

So, just to recap:

  • John­son is mil­i­tant­ly opposed to repro­duc­tive rights and favors a nation­wide ban on abor­tion, includ­ing in blue states.
  • John­son opposed LGBTQ+ rights and wants to get rid of the free­dom to mar­ry — a right now enshrined in fed­er­al law.
  • John­son oppos­es end­ing the failed war on drugs and imple­ment­ing a new approach to reg­u­lat­ing the use of con­trolled substances.
  • John­son oppos­es aid for Ukraine, a democ­ra­cy fight­ing for its sur­vival against a mur­der­ous neigh­bor­ing regime that wants to con­quer it.
  • John­son is an insur­rec­tion­ist who tried to help Don­ald Trump remain in pow­er after he lost the 2020 elec­tion to Pres­i­dent Biden fair and square.

John­son is just as bad or worse than Jim Jor­dan on a whole range of issues and con­cerns, yet every sin­gle “rea­son­able” or “mod­er­ate” Repub­li­can vot­ed to put him in the Speak­er’s chair. Every sin­gle one. They may come to regret their deci­sion, espe­cial­ly the ones who rep­re­sent dis­tricts that vot­ed for Joe Biden.

Reporters and observers, take note: At a crit­i­cal junc­ture for the coun­try, Repub­li­cans like Don Bacon did what they have so often done before: They will­ing­ly vot­ed to give more pow­er to an extrem­ist who wants to impose their mil­i­tant strict father moral­i­ty on every sin­gle Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty and family.

John­son and his wife are pod­cast­ers, and reporters are now scru­ti­niz­ing their record­ings for insights into what John­son believes and how he might legislate.

“The pod­casts, span­ning 69 episodes, offer an extend­ed win­dow into Mr. John­son’s views and pol­i­tics, as he co-hosts the pro­gram with his wife, a licensed pas­toral coun­selor,” The New York Times’ Steve Eder explained in a live­blog update dis­cussing John­son’s elec­tion. “In it, the man who has just been elect­ed speak­er, an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, talks at length about his vehe­ment oppo­si­tion to abor­tion rights, calls the Demo­c­ra­t­ic agen­da social­ist, and rails against the pros­e­cu­tion of Mr. Trump for his efforts to inter­fere in the 2020 election.”

“It is the hon­or of a life­time to have been elect­ed the 56th Speak­er of the House,” said John­son in a state­ment post­ed to speaker.gov.

“Thank you to my col­leagues, friends, staff, and fam­i­ly for the unmatched sup­port through­out this process. It has been an ardu­ous few weeks, and a reminder that the House is as com­pli­cat­ed and diverse as the peo­ple we rep­re­sent. The urgency of this moment demands bold, deci­sive action to restore trust, advance our leg­isla­tive pri­or­i­ties, and demon­strate good governance.”

“Our House Repub­li­can Con­fer­ence is unit­ed, and eager to work,” John­son added, in a com­ment that lacks cred­i­bil­i­ty. “As Speak­er, I will ensure the House deliv­ers results and inspires change for the Amer­i­can peo­ple. We will restore trust in this body. We will advance a com­pre­hen­sive con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­cy agen­da, com­bat the harm­ful poli­cies of the Biden Admin­is­tra­tion, and sup­port our allies abroad. And we will restore san­i­ty to a gov­ern­ment des­per­ate­ly in need of it.”

Democ­rats offered a range of reac­tions to John­son’s election.

Pres­i­dent Biden and Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Chuck Schumer, who’ll have to deal with John­son to avert a gov­ern­ment shut­down, offered their con­grat­u­la­tions, but point­ed out that time was run­ning out to agree on fis­cal policy.

“Jill and I con­grat­u­late Speak­er John­son on his elec­tion,” said Pres­i­dent Biden.

“As I said when this process began, who­ev­er the Speak­er is, I will seek to work with them in good faith on behalf of the Amer­i­can peo­ple. That’s a prin­ci­ple I have always held to, and that I’ve act­ed on – deliv­er­ing major bipar­ti­san leg­is­la­tion on infra­struc­ture, out­com­pet­ing Chi­na, gun reform, and vet­er­ans care.”

“I restat­ed my will­ing­ness to con­tin­ue work­ing across the aisle after Repub­li­cans won the major­i­ty in the House last year. By the same token, the Amer­i­can peo­ple have made clear that they expect House Repub­li­cans to work with me and with Sen­ate Democ­rats to gov­ern across the aisle – to pro­tect our urgent nation­al secu­ri­ty inter­ests and grow our econ­o­my for the mid­dle class.”

“While House Repub­li­cans spent the last 22 days deter­min­ing who would lead their con­fer­ence, I have worked on those press­ing issues, propos­ing a his­toric sup­ple­men­tal fund­ing pack­age that advances our bipar­ti­san nation­al secu­ri­ty inter­ests in Israel and Ukraine, secures our bor­der, and invests in the Amer­i­can peo­ple. These pri­or­i­ties have been endorsed by lead­ers in both parties.”

“We need to move swift­ly to address our nation­al secu­ri­ty needs and to avoid a shut­down in 22 days. Even though we have real dis­agree­ments about impor­tant issues, there should be mutu­al effort to find com­mon ground wher­ev­er we can. This is a time for all of us to act respon­si­bly, and to put the good of the Amer­i­can peo­ple and the every­day pri­or­i­ties of Amer­i­can fam­i­lies above any partisanship.”

Pres­i­dent Biden and Vice Pres­i­dent Har­ris’ cam­paign offered a very dif­fer­ent take.

“MAGA Mike Johnson’s ascen­sion to the speak­er­ship cements the extreme MAGA takeover of the House Repub­li­can Con­fer­ence,” said Ammar Mous­sa, spokesper­son for Biden-Har­ris 2024, in a state­ment pro­vid­ed to NPI.

“Now, Don­ald Trump has his loy­al foot sol­dier to ban abor­tion nation­wide, lead efforts to deny free and fair elec­tion results, gut Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare, and advance the extreme MAGA agen­da at the expense of mid­dle-class families.”

“Twen­ty-two days before Con­gress must act to avoid a gov­ern­ment shut­down and while our allies over­seas at war depend on our help, extreme MAGA House Repub­li­cans ele­vat­ed a man to sec­ond-in-line to the pres­i­den­cy who still won’t admit Pres­i­dent Biden won the 2020 elec­tion,” Mous­sa added.

“The Amer­i­can peo­ple have reject­ed the extreme MAGA ide­ol­o­gy at the bal­lot box because they under­stand what’s at stake. And so to every MAGA Repub­li­can who sup­port­ed this choice: We’ll see you in November.”

With today’s roll call for Speak­er hav­ing been exact­ly along par­ty lines, there’s no con­trary votes to ana­lyze. Every Repub­li­can from the Pacif­ic North­west — Lori Chavez-DeRe­mer, Cliff Bentz, Dan New­house, Cathy McMor­ris Rodgers, Russ Fulcher, Mike Simp­son, Matt Rosendale, Ryan Zinke — gave John­son their support.

John­son’s ascen­sion ends a peri­od of paral­y­sis in the House. It is a devel­op­ment that sur­prised some observers, who were not expect­ing the dead­lock to be bro­ken so swift­ly after Tom Emmer end­ed his bid for the speak­er­ship. Emmer was the third hope­ful for Speak­er who had to pull the plug on his can­di­da­cy after real­iz­ing he would­n’t be able to get 217 votes, after Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan.

John­son has not yet com­ment­ed on whether he’s going to aggres­sive­ly sup­port the base­less impeach­ment inquiry begun by Kevin McCarthy sev­er­al weeks ago, but Trump will prob­a­bly be expect­ing him to, and John­son is a loy­al sol­dier for Trump. Trump declared that he was pleased with the selec­tion of John­son, using all caps to declare that John­son would be “a great speak­er” in an online posting.

Tuesday, October 24th, 2023

Washington, Oregon, and Idaho are all among the states suing Meta for exploiting youth

A coali­tion of sev­er­al dozen states today filed a land­mark law­suit against Meta Plat­forms, the com­pa­ny con­trolled by Mark Zucker­berg that owns and oper­ates Face­book, Insta­gram, and What­sapp, alleg­ing that it has vio­lat­ed numer­ous fed­er­al and state laws through its harm­ful and decep­tive busi­ness practices.

Among those states are Wash­ing­ton, Ore­gon, and Ida­ho, each of which is par­tic­i­pat­ing in the case. The for­mer are alleg­ing vio­la­tions of their respec­tive laws.

Wash­ing­ton, rep­re­sent­ed by Attor­ney Gen­er­al Bob Fer­gu­son, alleges vio­la­tions of Wash­ing­ton’s Con­sumer Pro­tec­tion Act, Wash. Rev. Code. § 19.86.

“Meta engaged in decep­tive acts or prac­tices affect­ing Wash­ing­ton con­sumers, includ­ing young users, par­ents of young users, and Meta adver­tis­ers, and in vio­la­tion of Wash. Rev. Code. § 19.86.020 by mak­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tions, direct­ly or indi­rect­ly, express­ly or by impli­ca­tion, regard­ing its Social Media Plat­forms,” the law­suit says. It then cites sev­en spe­cif­ic ways in which Meta vio­lat­ed the law.

Ore­gon, rep­re­sent­ed by Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ellen Rosen­blum, alleges vio­la­tions of Oregon’s Unlaw­ful Trade Prac­tices Act (UTPA), pur­suant to O.R.S. § 646.636:

“Meta, act­ing in the course of its busi­ness­es, voca­tions, or occu­pa­tions, vio­lat­ed O.R.S. § 646.608(1)(e) when Meta express­ly and by impli­ca­tion made false or mis­lead­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tions that its goods or ser­vices have char­ac­ter­is­tics, uses, ben­e­fits or qual­i­ties that the goods or ser­vices do not have. The rep­re­sen­ta­tions relate to Meta’s Social Media Plat­forms,” the law­suit says.

Ida­ho, rep­re­sent­ed by Attor­ney Gen­er­al Raúl Labrador, is not request­ing any state-spe­cif­ic relief. How­ev­er, it is join­ing the oth­er states in alleg­ing that Meta vio­lat­ed COPPA. That’s the Chil­dren’s Online Pri­va­cy Pro­tec­tion Rule, a fed­er­al reg­u­la­tion which “impos­es cer­tain require­ments on oper­a­tors of web­sites or online ser­vices direct­ed to chil­dren under thir­teen years of age, and on oper­a­tors of oth­er web­sites or online ser­vices that have actu­al knowl­edge that they are col­lect­ing per­son­al infor­ma­tion online from a child under thir­teen years of age.”

“Over the past decade, Meta — itself and through its flag­ship Social Media Plat­forms Face­book and Insta­gram (its Social Media Plat­forms or Platforms)—has pro­found­ly altered the psy­cho­log­i­cal and social real­i­ties of a gen­er­a­tion of young Amer­i­cans,” the plain­tiff states argue in their intro­duc­tions,” the law­suit alleges.

“Meta has har­nessed pow­er­ful and unprece­dent­ed tech­nolo­gies to entice, engage, and ulti­mate­ly ensnare youth and teens. Its motive is prof­it, and in seek­ing to max­i­mize its finan­cial gains, Meta has repeat­ed­ly mis­led the pub­lic about the sub­stan­tial dan­gers of its Social Media Plat­forms,” the suit adds.

“It has con­cealed the ways in which these Plat­forms exploit and manip­u­late its most vul­ner­a­ble con­sumers: teenagers and chil­dren. And it has ignored the sweep­ing dam­age these Plat­forms have caused to the men­tal and phys­i­cal health of our nation’s youth. In doing so, Meta engaged in, and con­tin­ues to engage in, decep­tive and unlaw­ful con­duct in vio­la­tion of state and fed­er­al law.”

A lat­er pas­sage in the suit — parts of which are heav­i­ly redact­ed, appar­ent­ly to pro­tect pro­pri­etary trade secrets — delves fur­ther into one of these arguments.

That pas­sage notes: “Meta’s design choic­es and prac­tices take advan­tage of and con­tribute to young users’ sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty to addic­tion. They exploit psy­cho­log­i­cal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties of young users through the false promise that mean­ing­ful social con­nec­tion lies in the next sto­ry, image, or video and that ignor­ing the next piece of social con­tent could lead to social isolation.”

The alleged­ly ille­gal con­duct dis­cussed in the law­suit will be famil­iar to any­one who has watched The Social Dilem­ma, a docu­d­ra­ma that came out in 2020 on Net­flix and fea­tured sev­er­al peo­ple who were for­mer­ly employed at Meta and Google, includ­ing Tim Kendall, for­mer direc­tor of mon­e­ti­za­tion at Facebook.

Meta pub­lished a dig­i­tal paper in response to The Social Dilem­ma which tried to dis­cred­it the state­ments made by for­mer insid­ers by say­ing in part that they no longer work at Meta or oth­er big tech com­pa­nies, so they can’t author­i­ta­tive­ly crit­i­cize the likes of Meta — a very con­ve­nient and self-serv­ing posture:

“Rather than offer a nuanced look at tech­nol­o­gy, it [the film] gives a dis­tort­ed view of how social media plat­forms work to cre­ate a con­ve­nient scape­goat for what are dif­fi­cult and com­plex soci­etal prob­lems. The film’s cre­ators do not include insights from those cur­rent­ly work­ing at the com­pa­nies or any experts that take a dif­fer­ent view to the nar­ra­tive put for­ward by the film.”

“They also don’t acknowl­edge — crit­i­cal­ly or oth­er­wise — the efforts already tak­en by com­pa­nies to address many of the issues they raise. Instead, they rely on com­men­tary from those who haven’t been on the inside for many years.”

No doubt Meta will once again claim that it is being sub­ject­ed to unfair criticism.

“We’re dis­ap­point­ed that instead of work­ing pro­duc­tive­ly with com­pa­nies across the indus­try to cre­ate clear, age-appro­pri­ate stan­dards for the many apps teens use, the attor­neys gen­er­al have cho­sen this path,” the com­pa­ny said after the law­suit was announced by the dozens of states bring­ing it.

Meta would not have to be “dis­ap­point­ed” to be on the receiv­ing end of a law­suit like this if its busi­ness prac­tices were eth­i­cal and respon­si­ble. There’s a grow­ing moun­tain of evi­dence that the com­pa­ny has repeat­ed­ly cho­sen to put its own finan­cial inter­ests above the safe­ty and well-being of its bil­lions of users.

“Meta has been the sub­ject of wide­spread and grow­ing pub­lic scruti­ny,” not­ed a release from Attor­ney Gen­er­al Bob Fer­gu­son’s office announc­ing the suit.

“Around the time the coali­tion start­ed its inves­ti­ga­tion, a whistle­blow­er at Meta revealed that the com­pa­ny was cir­cu­lat­ing exten­sive research inter­nal­ly regard­ing the risk of harm to its users, includ­ing youth. The com­pa­ny has also been the tar­get of bipar­ti­san Con­gres­sion­al hear­ings on the safe­ty of kids online and a doc­u­men­tary film fea­tur­ing warn­ings from for­mer Meta insid­ers who helped design the fea­tures at the cen­ter of the coalition’s fed­er­al lawsuit.”

The com­plaint ini­ti­at­ing the law­suit may be read in its entire­ty below.

Mul­ti-state com­plaint against Meta

Monday, October 23rd, 2023

Lisa Brown’s ascendant candidacy for Mayor of Spokane has Republicans very worried

The last few years have been rough for Repub­li­cans in Wash­ing­ton State.

Since Don­ald Trump became the face of their “par­ty,” in cycle after cycle, whether local, midterm, or pres­i­den­tial, they’ve lost ground at every lev­el to the Democ­rats as Ever­green State vot­ers turn away from their increas­ing­ly tox­ic pol­i­tics and back­wards poli­cies. It’s a now-sev­en year trend that shows few signs of ceasing.

Con­sid­er the history.

With­in a year of Trump’s Elec­toral Col­lege vic­to­ry, in 2017, Democ­rats end­ed Repub­li­cans’ hold on the Wash­ing­ton State Sen­ate by win­ning a spe­cial elec­tion in the 45th Dis­trict that sent Man­ka Dhin­gra to the state­house. Dhin­gra has been over­whelm­ing­ly reelect­ed twice since then, and is now a can­di­date for AG.

In 2018, Democ­rats sig­nif­i­cant­ly expand­ed their leg­isla­tive majori­ties in both cham­bers, adding sev­en seats in the House and three in the Sen­ate. They also cap­tured the 8th Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict from Repub­li­cans for the first time, elect­ing pedi­a­tri­cian Kim Schri­er to the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 2020, Democ­rats reclaimed the office of State Trea­sur­er from Repub­li­cans by elect­ing Mike Pel­lic­ciot­ti, the only Demo­c­ra­t­ic chal­lenger to pre­vail over a Repub­li­can hold­ing statewide exec­u­tive office. The par­ty also main­tained its leg­isla­tive majori­ties by send­ing right wing leg­is­la­tors Steve O’Ban and Luanne van Wer­ven pack­ing in the 28th and 42nd Leg­isla­tive Dis­tricts at the same time Repub­li­cans were tak­ing over the 19th Leg­isla­tive District.

In 2021, Democ­rats expand­ed their major­i­ty on the King Coun­ty Coun­cil, elect­ing Sarah Per­ry to replace long­time Coun­cilmem­ber Kathy Lam­bert. Mean­while, long­time Repub­li­can Sec­re­tary of State Kim Wyman resigned and was replaced via guber­na­to­r­i­al appoint­ment with a Demo­c­rat: Steve Hobbs.

In 2022, Democ­rats recap­tured the 3rd Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict in South­west Wash­ing­ton with Marie Glue­senkamp Perez and grew their majori­ties in the state­house by one seat in each cham­ber while retain­ing Steve Hobbs as Sec­re­tary of State — in what was sup­posed to be a “red wave” year.

And, of course, dur­ing this times­pan, Democ­rats have also suc­cess­ful­ly held on to what they already had — the oth­er statewide exec­u­tive depart­ment posi­tions, for instance, and Wash­ing­ton’s two U.S. Sen­ate seats and oth­er U.S. House seats.

Democ­rats aren’t done. This year, they’re look­ing for more gains, and one of their top tar­gets is the may­or­ship of Spokane, Wash­ing­ton’s sec­ond largest city.

The posi­tion is offi­cial­ly “non­par­ti­san,” but the absence of par­ty labels on the bal­lot does­n’t mean the can­di­dates don’t have par­ty affil­i­a­tions or strong­ly held con­vic­tions. Incum­bent May­or Nadine Wood­ward is a well known Repub­li­can, while her chal­lenger Lisa Brown is a well known Democrat.

Wood­ward, who is com­plet­ing her first term, suc­ceed­ed fel­low Repub­li­can David Con­don, who served two terms as May­or of Spokane. Alto­geth­er, that’s twelve years of Repub­li­can con­trol of the Lilac City, an era that began before the Trump years. And it looks like it might be com­ing to an end next month, with Wood­ward’s reelec­tion bid in extreme­ly rough shape and Lisa Brown ascendant.

Brown won the Top Two round, gar­ner­ing 47.53% of the vote, while Wood­ward only man­aged 36.59% — a tru­ly abysmal per­for­mance for an incum­bent. NPI under­stands that Wood­ward’s back­ers have data that affirms her weak stand­ing, which is why the Real­tors and oth­ers are spend­ing a for­tune to try to save her.

Right wing media is also sound­ing the alarm, show­ing how wor­ried Repub­li­cans are about tak­ing anoth­er big loss in a key Wash­ing­ton State race.

Con­sid­er this recent mini-edi­to­r­i­al from The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH:

[E]veryone needs to do what they can in order to get as much sup­port as human­ly pos­si­ble for final­ly, an actu­al Repub­li­can who’s in office and a may­or of a major city. So go with Nadine Wood­ward. Vote for her. Tell your friends to vote for her. Make sure you don’t have folks in Spokane that you haven’t con­nect­ed with and got this in front of them. Make sure they know not to vote for Lisa Brown.

These are non­par­ti­san races, right? These are… They’re tech­ni­cal­ly not run­ning as Repub­li­can or Demo­c­rat. Wood­ward is a Repub­li­can and Lisa Brown is crazy, crazy, crazy to the left. Like crazy to the left, and she would be an absolute dis­as­ter for Spokane. 

If you think the crime cri­sis that has exist­ed as a result of the Democ­rats in the Leg­is­la­ture is some­thing to behold, wait until Lisa Brown gets in charge. It’s going to get much, much, much worse.

It’s real­ly telling that Rantz — a host in the Seat­tle mar­ket — is spend­ing air­time on his KTTH show to denounce Lisa Brown. It speaks to Repub­li­cans’ state of mind. They know Wood­ward is an incred­i­bly weak posi­tion, with lots of self-inflict­ed wounds, includ­ing her deci­sion to appear at a gath­er­ing orga­nized by white suprema­cist Matt Shea short­ly after the August Top Two elec­tion. And they know that vot­ers in Spokane aren’t hap­py with Wood­ward’s record, either.

So, they’re throw­ing every­thing they can at Lisa Brown. It’s des­per­a­tion time.

It’s amus­ing to hear Rantz gripe about how “nasty” the con­test is get­ting. (Rantz is espe­cial­ly upset that an anti-Wood­ward inde­pen­dent expen­di­ture is crit­i­ciz­ing one of Wood­ward’s wealthy back­ers, devel­op­er Lar­ry Stone, with this ad.) The attacks Wood­ward’s sup­port­ers are mak­ing against Brown don’t both­er him, of course, only what Brown sup­port­ers are say­ing about Wood­ward both­ers him.

Repub­li­cans have had more than a decade of con­trol in Spokane and plen­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ties to demon­strate an apti­tude for gov­ern­ing Wash­ing­ton’s sec­ond largest city — oppor­tu­ni­ties that have been repeat­ed­ly squan­dered. Wood­ward is the incum­bent may­or, but if you haven’t been fol­low­ing this con­test, you could be for­giv­en for not know­ing that, giv­en how poor­ly she’s per­formed so far.

Bal­lots are due on Novem­ber 7th at 8 PM and the first results in the Spokane may­oral and city coun­cil con­tests will be released short­ly after that.

Sunday, October 22nd, 2023

Last Week In Congress: How Cascadia’s U.S. lawmakers voted (October 16th-20th)

Good morn­ing! Here’s how Cascadia’s Mem­bers of Con­gress vot­ed on major issues dur­ing the leg­isla­tive week end­ing Octo­ber 6th, 2023.

Chamber of the United States House of Representatives

The House cham­ber (U.S. Con­gress photo)

FIRST ATTEMPT BY JIM JORDAN TO BECOME SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: The House on Octo­ber 17th failed to elect a Speak­er, with House Repub­li­can con­fer­ence nom­i­nee Jim Jor­dan falling short of a major­i­ty of mem­bers present and vot­ing. Democ­rats unan­i­mous­ly backed their leader, Hakeem Jef­fries, for the top post. This was Jor­dan’s first attempt to become Speaker.

The fol­low­ing mem­bers received votes for Speak­er in this round:

  • Jef­fries: 212
  • Jor­dan: 200
  • Scalise: 7
  • McCarthy: 6
  • Zeldin: 3
  • Gar­cia, Mike: 1
  • Emmer: 1
  • Cole: 1
  • Massie: 1
  • Not Vot­ing: 1

The roll call from the Pacif­ic North­west was as follows:

The State of Idaho

Vot­ing for Steve Scalise (1): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mike Simpson

Vot­ing for Jim Jor­dan (1): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Russ Fulcher

The State of Oregon

Vot­ing for Hakeem Jef­fries (4): Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Suzanne Bonam­i­ci, Earl Blu­me­nauer, Val Hoyle, and Andrea Salinas

Vot­ing for Kevin McCarthy (1): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Lori Chavez-DeRemer

Vot­ing for Jim Jor­dan (1): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Cliff Bentz

The State of Washington

Vot­ing for Hakeem Jef­fries (8): Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Suzan Del­Bene, Rick Larsen, Marie Glue­senkamp Perez, Derek Kilmer, Prami­la Jaya­pal, Kim Schri­er, Adam Smith, and Mar­i­lyn Strickland

Vot­ing for Jim Jor­dan (2): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Dan New­house and Cathy McMor­ris Rodgers

Cas­ca­dia total: 12 votes for Hakeem Jef­fries, 4 votes for Jim Jor­dan, 1 vote for Kevin McCarthy, 1 vote for Steve Scalise

SECOND ATTEMPT BY JIM JORDAN TO BECOME SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: The House on Octo­ber 18th failed to elect a Speak­er, with House Repub­li­can con­fer­ence nom­i­nee Jim Jor­dan again falling short of a major­i­ty of mem­bers present and vot­ing. Democ­rats unan­i­mous­ly backed their leader, Hakeem Jef­fries, for the top post. This was Jor­dan’s sec­ond attempt to become Speak­er. He received one few­er vote than in his first attempt on Octo­ber 17th.

The fol­low­ing mem­bers received votes for Speak­er in this round:

  • Jef­fries: 212
  • Jor­dan: 199
  • Scalise: 7
  • McCarthy: 5
  • Zeldin: 3
  • Don­alds: 1
  • Emmer: 1
  • Gar­cia, Mike: 1
  • Boehn­er: 1
  • Granger: 1
  • West­er­man: 1
  • Miller, Can­dice: 1

The roll call from the Pacif­ic North­west was as follows:

The State of Idaho

Vot­ing for Steve Scalise (1): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mike Simpson

Vot­ing for Jim Jor­dan (1): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Russ Fulcher

The State of Oregon

Vot­ing for Hakeem Jef­fries (4): Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Suzanne Bonam­i­ci, Earl Blu­me­nauer, Val Hoyle, and Andrea Salinas

Vot­ing for Kevin McCarthy (1): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Lori Chavez-DeRemer

Vot­ing for Jim Jor­dan (1): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Cliff Bentz

The State of Washington

Vot­ing for Hakeem Jef­fries (8): Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Suzan Del­Bene, Rick Larsen, Marie Glue­senkamp Perez, Derek Kilmer, Prami­la Jaya­pal, Kim Schri­er, Adam Smith, and Mar­i­lyn Strickland

Vot­ing for Jim Jor­dan (2): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Dan New­house and Cathy McMor­ris Rodgers

Cas­ca­dia total: 12 votes for Hakeem Jef­fries, 4 votes for Jim Jor­dan, 1 vote for Kevin McCarthy, 1 vote for Steve Scalise

THIRD AND FINAL ATTEMPT BY JIM JORDAN TO BECOME SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: The House on Octo­ber 20th failed to elect a Speak­er for the third time in the past week. Democ­rats unan­i­mous­ly backed their leader, Hakeem Jef­fries, for the top post. This was Jim Jor­dan’s third attempt to become Speak­er. He received five few­er votes than in his sec­ond attempt. After los­ing for the third time, the House Repub­li­can cau­cus held an inter­nal vote via secret bal­lot to resolve the ques­tion of whether Jor­dan should con­tin­ue to seek the speak­er­ship; a major­i­ty of the con­fer­ence vot­ed against him, and he end­ed his bid for Speaker.

The fol­low­ing mem­bers received votes for Speak­er in this round:

  • Jef­fries: 210
  • Jor­dan: 194
  • Scalise: 8
  • McHen­ry: 6
  • Zeldin: 4
  • Don­alds: 2
  • McCarthy: 2
  • Gar­cia, Mike: 1
  • Emmer: 1
  • West­er­man: 1
  • Not Vot­ing: 4

The roll call from the Pacif­ic North­west was as follows:

The State of Idaho

Vot­ing for Steve Scalise (1): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mike Simpson

Vot­ing for Jim Jor­dan (1): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Russ Fulcher

The State of Oregon

Vot­ing for Hakeem Jef­fries (4): Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Suzanne Bonam­i­ci, Earl Blu­me­nauer, Val Hoyle, and Andrea Salinas

Vot­ing for Patrick McHen­ry (1): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Lori Chavez-DeRemer

Vot­ing for Jim Jor­dan (1): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Cliff Bentz

The State of Washington

Vot­ing for Hakeem Jef­fries (8): Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Suzan Del­Bene, Rick Larsen, Marie Glue­senkamp Perez, Derek Kilmer, Prami­la Jaya­pal, Kim Schri­er, Adam Smith, and Mar­i­lyn Strickland

Vot­ing for Jim Jor­dan (2): Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Dan New­house and Cathy McMor­ris Rodgers

Cas­ca­dia total: 12 votes for Hakeem Jef­fries, 4 votes for Jim Jor­dan, 1 vote for Patrick McHen­ry, 1 vote for Steve Scalise

In the United States Senate

Chamber of the United States Senate

The Sen­ate cham­ber (U.S. Con­gress photo)

JENNIFER L. HALL, U.S. DISTRICT COURT JUDGE: The Sen­ate on Octo­ber 17th con­firmed the nom­i­na­tion of Jen­nifer L. Hall to be a judge on the U.S. Dis­trict Court for Delaware. Hall has been a mag­is­trate judge on the Delaware court since 2019; pre­vi­ous­ly, she was a fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor in the state. A sup­port­er, Sen­a­tor Christo­pher Coons, D‑Delaware, said Hal­l’s “excep­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions, strong char­ac­ter, and even tem­pera­ment will make her an asset to the Dis­trict of Delaware.” The vote was 67 yeas to 29 nays.

The State of Idaho

Vot­ing Nay (2):
Repub­li­can Sen­a­tors Jim Risch and Mike Crapo

The State of Oregon

Vot­ing Yea (2):
Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley

The State of Washington

Vot­ing Yea (2):
Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors Maria Cantwell and Pat­ty Murray

Cas­ca­dia total: 4 yea votes, 2 nay votes

JULIA KATHLEEN MUNLEY, U.S. DISTRICT COURT JUDGE: The Sen­ate on Octo­ber 17th con­firmed the nom­i­na­tion of Julia Kath­leen Mun­ley to be a judge on the U.S. Dis­trict Court for the Mid­dle Dis­trict of Penn­syl­va­nia. Mun­ley was a pri­vate prac­tice lawyer in the state for more than two decades then, in 2016, took her cur­rent role as a coun­ty tri­al court judge. A sup­port­er, Sen­a­tor Dick Durbin, D‑Ill., said Mun­ley’s “sig­nif­i­cant lit­i­ga­tion back­ground and expe­ri­ence as a state court judge will serve her well on the fed­er­al bench.”

The vote was 52 yeas to 45 nays.

The State of Idaho

Vot­ing Nay (2):
Repub­li­can Sen­a­tors Jim Risch and Mike Crapo

The State of Oregon

Vot­ing Yea (2):
Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley

The State of Washington

Vot­ing Yea (2):
Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors Maria Cantwell and Pat­ty Murray

Cas­ca­dia total: 4 yea votes, 2 nay votes

KARLA ANN GILBRIDGE, GENERAL COUNSEL FOR EEOC: The Sen­ate on Octo­ber 17th con­firmed the nom­i­na­tion of Kar­la Ann Gilbride to be gen­er­al coun­sel for the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­ni­ty Com­mis­sion for a four-year term. Gilbride has been a pri­vate prac­tice employ­ment lawyer since 2009, most recent­ly at the Pub­lic Jus­tice law firm. The vote was 50 yeas to 46 nays.

The State of Idaho

Vot­ing Nay (2):
Repub­li­can Sen­a­tors Jim Risch and Mike Crapo

The State of Oregon

Vot­ing Yea (2):
Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley

The State of Washington

Vot­ing Yea (2):
Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors Maria Cantwell and Pat­ty Murray

Cas­ca­dia total: 4 yea votes, 2 nay votes

VOIDING CFPB RULE REQUIRING BANKS TO SUBMIT SMALL BUSINESS CREDIT INFO: The Sen­ate on Octo­ber 18th passed a Repub­li­can res­o­lu­tion (S.J. Res. 32), spon­sored by Sen­a­tor John Kennedy, R‑Louisiana, to dis­ap­prove of and void a Con­sumer Finan­cial Pro­tec­tion Bureau agency rule issued this May that requires banks and oth­er finan­cial com­pa­nies to sub­mit small busi­ness cred­it appli­ca­tion infor­ma­tion to the Bureau. Kennedy said the Bureau has per­vert­ed Con­gress’s intent for it to only col­lect a nar­row set of infor­ma­tion by also requir­ing pri­vate, sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion about gen­der, race, and ethnicity.

A res­o­lu­tion oppo­nent, Sen­a­tor Sher­rod Brown, D‑Ohio, said: “More data means more account­abil­i­ty, ensur­ing that lenders reach minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ties and help­ing to root out dis­crim­i­na­tion.” The vote was 53 yeas to 44 nays.

The State of Idaho

Vot­ing Yea (2):
Repub­li­can Sen­a­tors Jim Risch and Mike Crapo

The State of Oregon

Vot­ing Nay (2):
Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley

The State of Washington

Vot­ing Nay (2):
Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors Maria Cantwell and Pat­ty Murray

Cas­ca­dia total: 2 yea votes, 4 nay votes

RESOLUTION SUPPORTING ISRAEL: The Sen­ate on Octo­ber 19th passed a res­o­lu­tion (S. Res. 417), spon­sored by Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Chuck Schumer, D‑New York, to express sup­port for Israel in the cur­rent, esca­lat­ed phase of its war with Hamas, includ­ing will­ing­ness to resup­ply Israel with mil­i­tary assets, but with­out autho­riz­ing the use of U.S. mil­i­tary force against Hamas.

Schumer said: “We demand Hamas stop their attacks and release all hostages, includ­ing Amer­i­can hostages. We urge the world to unite against Hamas and against nations like Iran that sup­port glob­al terrorism.”

The vote was unan­i­mous with 97 yeas.

The State of Idaho

Vot­ing Yea (2):
Repub­li­can Sen­a­tors Jim Risch and Mike Crapo

The State of Oregon

Vot­ing Yea (2):
Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley

The State of Washington

Vot­ing Yea (2):
Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tors Maria Cantwell and Pat­ty Murray

Cas­ca­dia total: 6 yea votes

Key votes ahead

The House is most­ly par­a­lyzed until it elects a new Speak­er. House Repub­li­cans are search­ing for a way for­ward, with mul­ti­ple can­di­dates explor­ing bids for Speak­er. Floor votes won’t be held on leg­is­la­tion or oth­er busi­ness until a new Speak­er can be found, which could be weeks from now.

The Sen­ate will take up the nom­i­na­tion of Michael G. Whitak­er, of Ver­mont, to be Admin­is­tra­tor of the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion for the term of five years. Lat­er, it will con­sid­er the nom­i­na­tion of Jes­si­ca Looman, of Min­neso­ta, to be Admin­is­tra­tor of the Wage and Hour Divi­sion, Depart­ment of Labor.

Edi­tor’s Note: The infor­ma­tion in NPI’s week­ly How Cas­ca­di­a’s U.S. law­mak­ers vot­ed fea­ture is pro­vid­ed by Tar­get­ed News Ser­vice. All rights are reserved. Repro­duc­tion of this post is not per­mit­ted, not even with attri­bu­tion. Use the per­ma­nent link to this post to share it… thanks!

© 2023 Tar­get­ed News Ser­vice, LLC. 

Saturday, October 21st, 2023

Watch three OR-05 Democratic contenders make the case for their party’s nomination

Hel­lo again from Sun­riv­er and the 2023 Ore­gon Summit!

Fol­low­ing lunch this after­noon, many Sum­mit atten­dees gath­ered in the Sun­riv­er Resort’s Great Hall to hear from three of the can­di­dates run­ning for Con­gress in Ore­gon’s 5th Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict: State Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Janelle Bynum, pre­vi­ous OR-05 Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee Jamie McLeod-Skin­ner, and Metro Pres­i­dent Lynn Peter­son. The 5th is a cross-Cas­cades dis­trict that Repub­li­cans were able to flip last year when Lori Chavez-DeRe­mer defeat­ed McLeod-Skin­ner in a close race.

Democ­rats would very much like to take OR-05 back next year and help elect a Demo­c­ra­t­ic major­i­ty in the Unit­ed States House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives. Chavez-DeRe­mer is the only Repub­li­can mem­ber of Con­gress from the Pacif­ic North­west who is con­sid­ered to be at risk of los­ing her seat, because the oth­er seats held by Repub­li­cans are all in dis­tricts that have very con­ser­v­a­tive electorates.

The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty of Ore­gon gave Bynum, McLeod-Skin­ner, and Peter­son the oppor­tu­ni­ty to make a pitch to Sum­mit atten­dees dur­ing a near­ly hour­long forum mod­er­at­ed by recent­ly elect­ed DPO Chair Rosa Colquitt.

Soft­ware engi­neer and AFSCME mem­ber Cameron Pahl, who is also seek­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty’s nom­i­na­tion, was not invit­ed to par­tic­i­pate in the forum, though some of his sup­port­ers attend­ed and cir­cu­lat­ed his lit­er­a­ture afterward.

Here is how the three can­di­dates who par­tic­i­pat­ed describe themselves:

Janelle Bynum

A moth­er of four chil­dren and a small busi­ness own­er of restau­rants, Janelle Bynum knows our com­mu­ni­ty and works hard for us. It’s what her par­ents taught her to do.

The daugh­ter of teach­ers, her par­ents taught Janelle that edu­ca­tion was the key to a bet­ter, safer world. When drug vio­lence threat­ened her inner city neigh­bor­hood in Wash­ing­ton, DC, Janelle put that ide­al into prac­tice. She earned schol­ar­ships and put her­self through school, earn­ing her Bachelor’s degree in Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer­ing and her Master’s degree in Busi­ness Administration.

Today, Janelle and her hus­band, Mark, live in Hap­py Val­ley with their chil­dren. Janelle oper­ates her family’s small busi­ness, run­ning four restau­rants in our com­mu­ni­ty. In her restau­rants, Janelle con­tin­ues to embody those ideals taught to her ear­ly in life, men­tor­ing her employ­ees, pro­vid­ing schol­ar­ships to con­tin­ue their edu­ca­tion and encour­ag­ing them to dream big.

Jamie McLeod-Skin­ner

Raised by a sin­gle mom when she was young, Jamie McLeod-Skin­ner worked her way through col­lege and became an engi­neer, a pub­lic ser­vant, and a small busi­ness own­er. Jamie led the effort to help Ore­gon com­mu­ni­ties recov­er after the dev­as­tat­ing fires and she cur­rent­ly works in emer­gency pre­pared­ness, afford­able hous­ing, and as a leader in pro­tect­ing Oregon’s watersheds.

She will bring her diverse expe­ri­ences to address our biggest chal­lenges: fight­ing for work­ing Ore­go­ni­ans, pro­tect­ing our envi­ron­ment, and pre­serv­ing our democracy.

Through pro­fes­sion­al work, pub­lic ser­vice, and vol­un­teerism, she uses her back­ground in engi­neer­ing, region­al plan­ning, law, and as a small busi­ness own­er to bridge our divides for bet­ter stew­ard­ship of our envi­ron­ment, econ­o­my, and democracy.

Lynn Peter­son

Metro Pres­i­dent Lynn Peter­son is serv­ing her sec­ond term lead­ing the nation’s only elect­ed region­al government.

A trans­porta­tion engi­neer and urban plan­ner by train­ing, Peter­son pre­vi­ous­ly served as the first elect­ed Chair of Clacka­mas Coun­ty – the largest coun­ty in Oregon’s 5th Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict. She also worked as Trans­porta­tion Advi­sor to a past Ore­gon Gov­er­nor, and served as Wash­ing­ton State’s Sec­re­tary of Transportation.

A life­long Demo­c­rat active in her par­ty, enters the race with over 50 promi­nent endorse­ments from office­hold­ers and can­di­dates at all lev­els of Ore­gon gov­ern­ment. A vet­er­an cam­paign­er, Lynn has won each of her five cam­paigns for local and region­al office, and suc­cess­ful­ly led four recent region­al bal­lot mea­sures to victory.

The forum con­sist­ed of open­ing state­ments, ques­tions asked by Colquitt which were pro­vid­ed to the can­di­dates in advance, and clos­ing statements.

Watch the forum here:

Colquit­t’s first ques­tion con­cerned Chavez-DeRe­mer’s refusal to hold town hall meet­ings. She asked if the hope­fuls would each com­mit to hold­ing town halls.

Every sin­gle can­di­date offered an emphat­ic yes.

Lynn Peter­son observed that some­times the “seeds of an idea is a start­ing point and then we need to cul­ti­vate it togeth­er”. Town halls are an impor­tant com­po­nent of con­gres­sion­al account­abil­i­ty and transparency.

McLeod-Skin­ner con­tend­ed that it is part of the job to hold month­ly town hall meet­ings with con­stituents. Show­ing up is crit­i­cal to account­abil­i­ty, she said.

Janelle Bynum told atten­dees that she is known for show­ing up and tak­ing action, cit­ing her tra­di­tion of taco town halls, where peo­ple invite her to a town hall oppor­tu­ni­ty and pro­vide tacos for atten­dees to enjoy.

The next ques­tion relat­ed to sup­port­ing Ore­gon’s labor movement.

All can­di­dates affirmed that they will be strong, pro-labor U.S. representatives.

Peter­son told atten­dees that she comes from a fam­i­ly of union work­ers and strives to sup­port strik­ing work­ers and uphold their col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing rights. Peter­son men­tioned that at Metro (the region’s only region­al gov­ern­ment) they increased their min­i­mum wage to $20 an hour and will con­tin­ue to strive for more.

McLeod-Skin­ner said she wants to pro­tect pen­sions through PLA (Project Labor Agree­ments) and make the most of oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­struct pub­lic works projects with union labor using infra­struc­ture dollars.

Bynum spoke about her upbring­ing, men­tion­ing her par­ents and how they were fur­loughed numer­ous times. Bynum is a cham­pi­on for paid fam­i­ly leave and pro­vid­ing path­ways for young peo­ple to enter the build­ing trades.

The third ques­tion was about cli­mate damage.

Peter­son talked about reduc­ing emis­sions through elec­tric vehi­cle adoption.

McLeod-Skin­ner argued that Amer­i­ca needs long term solu­tions, includ­ing an elec­tri­cal grid sup­port­ed by renew­able ener­gy sources.

Bynum said she thinks about the issue from the per­spec­tive of a mom work­ing to leave a bet­ter plan­et behind for her chil­dren. She’d also like to make Ore­gon a hub for clean ener­gy and show how a piv­ot away from fos­sil fuels can be realized.

The can­di­dates’ clos­ing state­ments were per­haps the most inter­est­ing part of the forum. Each used their three min­utes to call atten­tion to what they believe are their strengths and why they would make the best nom­i­nee in Ore­gon’s 5th.

Here are their clos­ing state­ments in their entirety:

Janelle Bynum’s pitch

Democ­rats, thank you so much for hav­ing us here today.

We’ve all gath­ered here today for the very same rea­son. Elec­tions have con­se­quences, and we can­not afford anoth­er Lori Chavez-DeRe­mer term. With her rep­re­sent­ing us in Con­gress, our voic­es aren’t at the table. The needs of our com­mu­ni­ty aren’t being prioritized.

And instead, we have a rep­re­sen­ta­tive who’s more inter­est­ed in pleas­ing the extreme mem­bers of her par­ty and spe­cial inter­ests than any­one else than actu­al­ly legislating.

The num­bers don’t lie. I’m the only one that has beat­en her twice and will beat her again. That’s because the tough­est chal­lenges of our time, whether it be cli­mate or hous­ing or safe­ty, I will always bring peo­ple together.

We will always have tough dis­cus­sions and we will always find com­mon ground. And because of that ethos, I have an actu­al track record of tan­gi­ble suc­cess. Because par­ents rec­og­nize when their kids are learn­ing, com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers know when their com­mu­ni­ty is safer, com­muters rec­og­nize when their dri­ve to work gets a lit­tle bit bet­ter, and work­ing peo­ple are excit­ed about the invest­ments in the econ­o­my and the cre­ation of good jobs close to home.

The per­spec­tive that I bring is valuable.

As some­one who left home at fif­teen because my par­ents want­ed me to get a bet­ter edu­ca­tion away from the drugs and vio­lence. As a small busi­ness woman who knows what it’s like to sign the check of a kid hav­ing their first job and sup­port a thriv­ing local economy.

As an elec­tri­cal engi­neer — the best kind! — who likes to take apart com­plex issues and put togeth­er solutions.

As a mom of four chil­dren who wants our daugh­ters and our sons to have the very same rights. At the end of the day it’s about our chil­dren for me. Are they safe? Are they nourished?

Do they have access to high qual­i­ty education?

Will they have bet­ter oppor­tu­ni­ties than their parents?

Our chil­dren are watch­ing as their fates are being decid­ed in our halls of pow­er. Deci­sion mak­ers should be the adults in the room. And sad­ly, that’s not the case. Our chil­dren deserve bet­ter. And Ore­gon deserves bet­ter. And that’s why I’m run­ning for Congress.

I’m so proud of the move­ment we’ve built to pay oppor­tu­ni­ty for­ward in Ore­gon. And I’m grate­ful for the sup­port from lead­ers like Con­gress­woman Sali­nas, Con­gress­woman Bonam­i­ci, and the Con­gres­sion­al Black Cau­cus. Ore­gon House Speak­er Dan Ray­field and Leader Julie Fahey. I invite you today to join Team Bynum at JanelleBynum.com. And thank you for hav­ing us all today.

Lynn Peterson’s pitch

Thank you again to the DPO, team mem­bers, and the vol­un­teers for putting on this event this weekend.

Lis­ten, I was also raised by a sin­gle mom who was an edu­ca­tor, and a fam­i­ly of teach­ers that believed in the pow­er of unionization.

And I learned the pow­er of pub­lic edu­ca­tion, team­work, and that true lead­er­ship is col­lab­o­ra­tive and based on truth.

I pushed against the glass ceil­ing and I had a mom who encour­aged it and let me run with it. I pushed through the glass ceil­ing as a civ­il engi­neer in an agency with a ten bil­lion dol­lar bian­nu­al bud­get and 6,800 employ­ees while work­ing on racial equi­ty and cli­mate change.

And I pushed the the size of the box open as an elect­ed offi­cial in Ore­gon pol­i­tics. I pushed through those ceil­ings with those that need­ed an ally, with my union broth­ers and sis­ters, my women part­ners, my Black, Lati­no, indige­nous, Jew­ish, Mus­lim, LGBTQ, trans broth­ers and sis­ters as well.

I am not afraid of a fight or to stand up for what is right. The best com­pli­ment I ever got was from the Clacka­mas Coun­ty Sher­iff Deputies [who said] Lynn, no mat­ter how many big guys with big guns we bring to talk to you, you told us the truth and treat­ed us fair­ly. We as Democ­rats need to con­tin­ue to mea­sure suc­cess, not by what we promise, but what we deliver.

I am proud of my demon­strat­ed record of accom­plish­ment in bricks and mor­tar, in lives touched and restored, in work­ers ele­vat­ed, in women and BIPOC com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers who see them­selves in dif­fer­ent roles and lead­er­ship positions.

I have won in Clacka­mas Coun­ty five times. And that rep­re­sents forty-nine per­cent of the CD 5 district.

My dis­trict I cov­er now is two and a half con­gres­sion­al dis­tricts in pop­u­la­tion. Add in the Mult­nom­ah Coun­ty por­tion of that, we are just over fifty per­cent of the dis­trict that has vot­ed for me and the bal­lot mea­sures that we have put out to make the region and state a bet­ter and stronger place now and in the future.

Now, let’s go make it a win in May by stand­ing togeth­er for progress. And I ask for your vote and sup­port to retire Lori Chavez-DeRe­mer once and for all. Thank you.

Jamie McLeod-Skinner’s pitch

Well, thanks DPO staff for orga­niz­ing and our Chair for orga­niz­ing this forum. Thanks for y’all for being here.

Thanks for both of you for com­ing to Cen­tral Ore­gon. I’m so pas­sion­ate about that last ques­tion we were talk­ing about housing.

Those are great tourists and all. I want to also say that in terms of a, a, a fed­er­al tool is CDBG funds because cities can’t han­dle them along with SDCs, but, I’m work­ing on an afford­able hous­ing project right now. That is work I’m real­ly pas­sion­ate about. Also, uh, look­ing at the attacks on our schools, which we know is com­ing and some­one who’s been on a rur­al ESD board, these are chal­leng­ing times. We’re see­ing book ban­ning and oth­er things hap­pen­ing right here in Cen­tral Oregon.

You know, we learned a lot last year and, what I’ve done is built on the strengths and made adjust­ments where needed.

But this is such an impor­tant race.

No one doubts that, but we will not win it by not under­stand­ing it.

And… I think, assum­ing it is just a Metro-based dis­trict, not only is [that a] huge dis­re­spect to the rest of the dis­trict, it’s also… does not ful­ly under­stand the dis­trict. Look, I, crushed at Mult­nom­ah, I won in Clacka­mas, we all beat Lori in those areas.

This race will be won out­side the Metro area, and so that’s crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant for Democ­rats to understand.

If you ignore that and blow that off, we will lose this seat next year. And that’s real­ly, real­ly impor­tant. So what I’ve done… I’ve got a much, much more expe­ri­enced and stronger team. We’ve got a more focused strat­e­gy. And, great sup­port from the grass­roots with­in the dis­trict, with­in the district.

And lead­ers, com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers with­in the dis­trict. Up to D.C., we’ve got the LGBT Equal­i­ty PAC. I, I know there’s, there’s been two PACs at the fed­er­al lev­el, and con­gres­sion­al folks at the fed­er­al lev­el, who have a dif­fer­ent take on this race. But… the LGBT com­mu­ni­ty is under attack right now, and these are issues that are going to be front and cen­ter in the next cou­ple of years.

You know, it’s going to come down to CD5 vot­ers, and I’m up over forty points in the pri­ma­ry poll of like­ly vot­ers, and that was using the gov­er­nor’s polling orga­ni­za­tion to make sure we had accu­rate data. Real­ly appre­ci­ate all the sup­port we’ve got. We’re going to have a much more tar­get­ed strat­e­gy, like I said.

Bot­tom line’s is, my team is com­mit­ted to, you know, sup­port­ing work­ing fam­i­lies. Mak­ing sure we’re pro­tect­ing our envi­ron­ment and pro­tect­ing our fun­da­men­tal rights and pro­tect­ing our allies abroad. I’m the only one up here with inter­na­tion­al expe­ri­ence as well. Want­ed to encour­age folks to join us at jamiefororegon.com to contribute.

Again, I don’t take cor­po­rate PAC mon­ey and so real­ly appre­ci­ate that sup­port too. But also want­ed to say that, um, again, we’ll be, Dems will be hit hard no mat­ter who the nom­i­nee is.

And so one of the rea­sons why I’m so, I want us to be so focused on the, on win­ning, the gen­er­al is, I’ve pro­posed a “keep it clean” pledge to both my colleagues.

I sent it to them about two months ago and about a month ago, and I’d wel­come you right now if you want to sign this pledge right now to keep it clean, the pri­ma­ry, so we can be focused on win­ning the gen­er­al. And I’ll have this on our table if you want to see it, but I also right now want to invite both my col­leagues to sign it if you will.

Either [of you]? No? Okay. We ought to win this, folks. Thank you all for being here, and we’d appre­ci­ate your sup­port. Thank you.

Ore­gon’s 2024 pri­ma­ry will be held on Tues­day, May 21st, 2024.

At that time, vot­ers will decide which Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­tender will earn a spot on the state’s gen­er­al elec­tion bal­lot and face Lori Chavez-DeRe­mer, who is expect­ed to eas­i­ly pre­vail in the dis­tric­t’s Repub­li­can primary.

Saturday, October 21st, 2023

Minnesota’s Peggy Flanagan keynotes Saturday breakfast at 2023 Oregon Summit

Greet­ings from Sunriver!

Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of our team at NPI are here in this high desert resort town for the 2023 Ore­gon Sum­mit, the bien­ni­al strate­gic gath­er­ing of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty of Ore­gon, known as the DPO for short. The Ore­gon Sum­mit is a beloved tra­di­tion in the Beaver State that brings togeth­er pro­gres­sive activists, elect­ed lead­ers, and strate­gists for a week­end of plan­ning, dis­cus­sion, and socializing.

The Sum­mit kicked off last night with a wel­come recep­tion fea­tur­ing Gov­er­nor Tina Kotek. Today, there’s a full itin­er­ary of ses­sions which includes ple­nar­ies, work­shops, a ban­quet din­ner, and even a can­di­date forum with some of the con­tenders vying to take on Repub­li­can Lori Chavez-DeRe­mer in the 5th Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict. The 5th is the dis­trict that rene­gade Demo­c­rat Kurt Schrad­er used to rep­re­sent, which the DPO could­n’t hold dur­ing last year’s midterms.

The first ses­sion was a break­fast with statewide elect­ed lead­ers, which just wrapped up. It began with insight­ful remarks from Labor Com­mis­sion­er Christi­na Stephen­son, who under­scored the impor­tance of fos­ter­ing a safe and dis­crim­i­na­tion-free envi­ron­ment in Ore­gon and empha­sized that it’s impor­tant for work­ing peo­ple to be able to access repro­duc­tive healthcare.

Draw­ing par­al­lels between the 1960s and the present, Stephen­son crit­i­cal­ly exam­ined the role of the Supreme Court, express­ing con­cern over its recent spate of awful deci­sions. She warned against the slip­pery slope the Court has put the coun­try on and called for vig­i­lant pro­tec­tion of civ­il rights in Oregon.

Stephen­son fur­ther urged the audi­ence to make wise choic­es in the upcom­ing elec­tions, high­light­ing the need to elect can­di­dates based on their qual­i­fi­ca­tions and con­vic­tions, rather than their per­son­al­i­ty or relatability.

Fol­low­ing Stephen­son, retir­ing Ore­gon Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ellen Rosen­blum took the stage, empha­siz­ing the impor­tance of data secu­ri­ty, pub­lic access to infor­ma­tion, and the pro­tec­tion of Ore­go­ni­ans’ privacy.

She tout­ed joint efforts with the state police and the FBI to address hate crimes and cel­e­brat­ed the suc­cess­ful imple­men­ta­tion of a statewide soft­ware project aimed at improv­ing child sup­port pay­ment distribution.

Rosen­blum also addressed the issue of stu­dent debt, advo­cat­ing for account­abil­i­ty among for-prof­it col­leges and the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of loan ser­vice providers. She high­light­ed the intro­duc­tion of a “gold stan­dard” of legal advice for state agen­cies and attor­neys, ensur­ing high-qual­i­ty rep­re­sen­ta­tion with­in the court system.

Rosen­blum also men­tioned her office’s work to defend Mea­sure 114, last year’s gun safe­ty ini­tia­tive, elic­it­ing a wave of applause from the audi­ence. She under­scored the urgency of address­ing issues relat­ed to elder abuse, hate crimes, and civ­il rights, as well as the need to con­front the fen­tanyl crisis.

Tobias Read, Ore­gon State Trea­sur­er, then shared an update on what his office has been work­ing on, high­light­ing his active role in man­ag­ing sig­nif­i­cant invest­ments, includ­ing Oregon’s Retire­ment Fund, to sup­port the old­er adult pop­u­la­tion. He drew atten­tion to the pos­i­tive impact of the Ore­gon Col­lege Sav­ings plans on col­lege atten­dance and grad­u­a­tion rates, and reaf­firmed his com­mit­ment to enhanc­ing diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclusivity.

Peg­gy Flana­gan, Lieu­tenant Gov­er­nor of Min­neso­ta, con­clud­ed the ses­sion with a pow­er­ful keynote speech, shar­ing per­son­al sto­ries and advo­cat­ing for greater coop­er­a­tion between trib­al nations and the fed­er­al and state governments.

She high­light­ed the new Min­neso­ta Demo­c­ra­t­ic major­i­ty’s leg­isla­tive achieve­ments in rais­ing wages, extend­ing unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits, and pro­vid­ing uni­ver­sal, no-cost school meals for all stu­dents, some­thing Wash­ing­ton and Ore­gon haven’t got­ten done yet. Min­neso­ta Democ­rats, she explained, did­n’t want to waste the oppor­tu­ni­ty giv­en to them by vot­ers to gov­ern. That’s why they’ve been mov­ing bold­ly to get things done with their majori­ties, rather than being cautious.

Flana­gan also made light of some of the ridicu­lous com­ments and absurd sit­u­a­tions she’s faced dur­ing her time in pub­lic ser­vice, includ­ing a dis­parag­ing com­ment made by a crit­ic who advised her to dress like a lieu­tenant governor.

Next up are sev­er­al work­shops, which will be fol­lowed by a lunch with Demo­c­ra­t­ic mem­bers of Ore­gon’s con­gres­sion­al delegation.

Friday, October 20th, 2023

Bowing to reality and a vote of no confidence, Jim Jordan ends his bid for Speaker

Insur­rec­tion­ist enabler Jim Jor­dan of Ohio will not become the next Speak­er of the Unit­ed States of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, the House Repub­li­can cau­cus has decided.

Jor­dan’s cam­paign for the post came to an abrupt and humil­i­at­ing end when he unex­pect­ed­ly lost an inter­nal vote, con­duct­ed by secret bal­lot, to answer the ques­tion of whether he should remain the con­fer­ence’s nom­i­nee after fail­ing to get elect­ed Speak­er on the floor of the House not once, not twice, but thrice.

And that was despite hav­ing the endorse­ment of Don­ald Trump.

Jor­dan had already been expe­ri­enc­ing neg­a­tive momen­tum between those floor votes, with sev­er­al Repub­li­cans pulling their sup­port and leav­ing him well short of the thresh­old of a major­i­ty of rep­re­sen­ta­tives present and vot­ing he need­ed to win. Democ­rats put up their leader, Hakeem Jef­fries, in each round of vot­ing, as expect­ed, and every Demo­c­ra­t­ic mem­ber of the cau­cus sup­port­ed him.

Jor­dan fig­ured he’d buy him­self more time to win over hold­outs by get­ting explic­it per­mis­sion from the cau­cus to keep on cam­paign­ing for Speaker.

It did­n’t work.

Repub­li­cans have a slim major­i­ty in the House this Con­gress and can’t elect a Speak­er them­selves with­out near una­nim­i­ty in their ranks.

That’s a big prob­lem for them, because they are a frac­tured group that does­n’t trust or like each oth­er. In the past, they have tried to keep their feud­ing behind closed doors, but in the last few weeks, their infight­ing has explod­ed into pub­lic view to a degree our team feels is unprece­dent­ed. Many have demon­strat­ed an increased will­ing­ness to go on the record and crit­i­cize their fel­low Repub­li­cans, open­ly dis­re­gard­ing the once-sacred “Eleventh Commandment.”

Con­sid­er these on the record comments:

“If you are going to blow a bridge, you bet­ter have anoth­er one to cross. And those eight clear­ly didn’t have anoth­er one to cross before they blew this bridge.”

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mike Waltz (R‑Florida), com­ment­ing on the motion to vacate brought by Matt Gaetz, which eight Repub­li­cans supported

“I don’t think there is a sin­gle per­son in that room that can get 217 votes… Peo­ple are start­ing to real­ize that Kevin McCarthy kept this thing togeth­er with duct tape and sil­ly put­ty. And it’s not as easy as they think.”

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Kel­ly Arm­strong (R‑North Dako­ta), admit­ting that Repub­li­cans are extreme­ly stuck after the ouster of Kevin McCarthy

“The most pop­u­lar Repub­li­can in Con­gress was just knifed in an anony­mous vote in a secret closed door meet­ing in the base­ment of the Capitol.”

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Matt Gaetz (R‑Florida), grum­bling that Jor­dan’s gam­bit to keep his bid for Speak­er alive end­ed in a humil­i­at­ing failure

“There’s noth­ing that peo­ple can give us. There’s noth­ing that peo­ple can trade. That’s not what this is about.”

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mario Diaz-Balart (R‑Florida), explain­ing that those who are stri­dent­ly against Jor­dan becom­ing Speak­er don’t want any­thing from him or his backers

“One thing I can­not stom­ach, or sup­port is a bul­ly… Some­one who threat­ens anoth­er with bod­i­ly harm or tries to sup­press dif­fer­ing opin­ions under­mines oppor­tu­ni­ty for uni­ty and regard for free­dom of speech.”

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mar­i­an­nette Miller-Meeks (R‑Iowa), decry­ing the death threats she’s received from Jor­dan backers

“I think a lot of these guys play to the clicks. If you live in an echo cham­ber and you’re only talk­ing to peo­ple that agree with you, I think, well, you have an unre­al­is­tic view of what’s going on, then.”

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Don Bacon (R‑Nebraska) describ­ing many of his ultra MAGA col­leagues, who have no inter­est in governing

And then there was this from Flori­da’s ultra MAGA Gov­er­nor Ron DeSantis:

“Look, I think it’s unfor­tu­nate that these guys can’t get their act togeth­er,” said Mr. DeSan­tis, a Repub­li­can run­ning for pres­i­dent who once served in the House. “It’s like the gang that can’t shoot straight. They’ve been run­ning around like chick­ens with their heads cut off. It’s not inspir­ing con­fi­dence. There’s a lot of theater.”

Polit­i­cal the­ater is actu­al­ly noth­ing new — it’s been part of the Repub­li­can M.O. for a very long time. What is new is the utter dys­func­tion and degree to which the infight­ing is on dis­play for every­one to see. Most of what seems to unite these Repub­li­cans is what they don’t like — e.g. Pres­i­dent Biden and Demo­c­ra­t­ic poli­cies. They objec­tive­ly lack ideas to help the coun­try and haven’t done much leg­is­lat­ing since they got con­trol of the House of Representatives.

If we look back at what’s hap­pened so far this year — and you can browse NPI’s archive of Last Week In Con­gress for vote data — we can see the House just has­n’t done very much. It’s an insti­tu­tion lurch­ing from cri­sis to crisis.

There was the strug­gle to elect Kevin McCarthy that start­ed every­thing in Jan­u­ary, there was the pas­sage of some bills dead on arrival in the Sen­ate that were designed to stoke the cul­ture wars Repub­li­cans want to wage, there was the debt ceil­ing deal, there was the base­less impeach­ment inquiry, and then more recent­ly, there was the pas­sage of the con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion to keep the gov­ern­ment open, plus some “inves­ti­ga­tions” launched by  to gen­er­ate anti-Biden media coverage.

In between, there have been only a few small pol­i­cy wins here and there that got bipar­ti­san and some­times even unan­i­mous sup­port, like Ruben Gal­le­go’s Native Amer­i­can Child Pro­tec­tion Act, which passed in September.

When Democ­rats had tri­fec­ta con­trol in the last Con­gress, they got a lot done, despite hav­ing only slim majori­ties them­selves. The list is long — it includ­ed the Infra­struc­ture and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Sci­ence Act, the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act, the Respect for Mar­riage Act, the Amer­i­can Res­cue Plan, the Postal Ser­vice Reform Act, and the Elec­toral Count Reform and Pres­i­den­tial Tran­si­tion Improve­ment Act. That’s just a sam­pling — there’s much more.

There was no who’ll be our Speak­er sideshow in the last Congress.

Demo­c­ra­t­ic Speak­er Nan­cy Pelosi, who Repub­li­cans love to denounce, ran a tight ship, as always, and made sure that the votes were count­ed before bring­ing motions or leg­is­la­tion to the floor. Her suc­ces­sor, Hakeem Jef­fries, hopes that vot­ers remem­ber how dys­func­tion­al Repub­li­cans have been this Con­gress when they’re decid­ing who should rep­re­sent them in the House in 2024.

So do oth­er Demo­c­ra­t­ic leaders.

“Before most Amer­i­cans have even fin­ished their work week, House Repub­li­cans have already giv­en them­selves an ear­ly start to the week­end after only get­ting fur­ther away from putting out their own dump­ster fire,” said Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee Chair Jaime Har­ri­son in a statement.

“It seemed like the Chaos Con­fer­ence reached rock bot­tom 17 days ago when they oust­ed their own speak­er, but the House GOP spent the last two and a half weeks only fur­ther prov­ing to the Amer­i­can peo­ple that they are unfit to gov­ern. Instead of work­ing to avoid a loom­ing gov­ern­ment shut­down or sup­port­ing our allies in Israel and Ukraine, House Repub­li­cans have shame­ful­ly thrown in the tow­el – before what will inevitably be anoth­er long week of new lows.”

“The Amer­i­can peo­ple deserve better.”

Saturday, October 14th, 2023

Republicans remain paralyzed and speaker-less over a week after McCarthy’s ouster

The tur­moil of House Repub­li­cans, divid­ed by fac­tions and feuds, shows a par­ty unable to gov­ern at a time when America’s com­mit­ments are vital­ly need­ed abroad while at home, anoth­er gov­ern­ment shut­down looms in just five weeks.

While Israel’s Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu and arch-rival Ben­ny Gantz have formed a wartime uni­ty gov­ern­ment, as did the Unit­ed States when Franklin Roo­sevelt invit­ed Repub­li­can lumi­nar­ies to take top posts, Repub­li­cans in the “peo­ples House” can­not even pick a Speak­er from their own ranks.

They are the con­fir­ma­tion of an axiom made famous by Sam Ray­burn and LBJ: “Any fool can kick a barn down. But it takes a real car­pen­ter to build one.”

A few ultra MAGA rep­re­sen­ta­tives suc­cess­ful­ly deposed House Speak­er Kevin McCarthy for dar­ing to agree on a con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion that kept the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment going for less than two months. The cau­cus then failed to sup­port Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Steve Scalise as his suc­ces­sor, even though the Louisiana Repub­li­can once described him­self as “David Duke with­out the bag­gage.”) (Duke is a for­mer Impe­r­i­al Wiz­ard of the Ku Klux Klan.)

The Trump wor­ship­pers’ can­di­date is Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jim Jor­dan, the screechy chair of a com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing impeach­ment of Pres­i­dent Biden. “The peo­ple want Jim Jor­dan,” mes­saged deposed Fox Busi­ness host Lou Dobbs. Sen­a­tor Ted Cruz, R‑Texas, opined: “My phi­los­o­phy in polit­i­cal endorse­ments is to sup­port the strongest con­ser­v­a­tive who can win. That is Jim Jordan.”

As stal­wart con­ser­v­a­tive Liz Cheney (once a mem­ber of House Repub­li­can lead­er­ship) point­ed out, how­ev­er: “Jim Jor­dan was involved in Trump’s con­spir­a­cy to steal the elec­tion and seize pow­er. He urged Pence to refuse to count law­ful elec­toral votes… They’ll lose the House major­i­ty and deserve to.”

Jor­dan, a Free­dom Cau­cus founder and fix­ture on right-wing media, was nom­i­nat­ed for Speak­er by the House Repub­li­can Cau­cus late on Fri­day afternoon.

Pro­gres­sives might cheer the prospect, except that they are a key com­po­nent in keep­ing the coun­try togeth­er, and the gov­ern­ment func­tion­al, while the Repub­li­can Par­ty comes apart. With the dan­ger of anoth­er Trump can­di­da­cy loom­ing, we must focus at least some of the country’s atten­tion on jobs being cre­at­ed and goals achieved thanks to the infra­struc­ture pack­age, the CHIPS and Sci­ence Act and the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act. Heck, the North­west has just been picked as one of sev­en nation­wide hubs for clean hydrogen.

Still, the Repub­li­cans are a spec­ta­cle. The mono­lith­ic right-wing media is even fray­ing. Ex-House Speak­er Newt Gin­grich has demand­ed on FNC that Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Matt Gaetz (who kicked the barn down and insti­gat­ed McCarthy’s removal), be thrown out of the Repub­li­can Caucus.

Talk show host Mark Levin depicts Gaetz as a trai­tor “work­ing with the Marx­ists in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.” Mean­time, FNC host Lau­ra Ingra­ham host­ed Gaetz the night of McCarthy’s ouster and cheered him on with encour­ag­ing com­ments such as “Gaetz was bril­liant in tak­ing out McCarthy. Genius!”

The Repub­li­can implo­sion is root­ed in sev­er­al fac­tors. The first is right wing media, start­ing with Rush Lim­baugh in the ear­ly Clin­ton years, fol­lowed by Fox News in the late 1990s and a pro­lif­er­a­tion of mini-Limbaughs.

What fol­lowed was a diver­gence that con­tin­ues to this day. When hand­ed majori­ties, some par­ty estab­lish­ment con­ser­v­a­tives have want­ed to gov­ern, albeit by cut­ting social and envi­ron­men­tal pro­grams to the bone and giv­ing tax breaks to the rich. (They’ve suc­ceed­ed on the lat­ter count.)

To achieve rat­ings, how­ev­er, the talk show host need to keep listeners/viewers mad, and tuned in. Hence, they come down hard on any effort to work out society’s com­pro­mis­es, even when it is to their advan­tage. Right-wing media killed a 2007 immi­gra­tion reform pack­age that passed the Sen­ate by a 68–30 vote.

The Repub­li­can lead­er­ship used to use mon­ey as a cud­gel in enforc­ing obe­di­ence. It could be with­held as pun­ish­ment. Con­trol the mon­ey and you could con­trol the mem­bers, as demon­strat­ed by Sen­ate Repub­li­can Leader Mitch McConnell.

The rise of right-wing media, and 247 news cycles, have allowed Con­gress’ emp­ty drums to bang loud­ly. The Inter­net has helped. Fundrais­ing let­ters used to require vol­un­teers. Staff would be pressed into fundrais­ing par­ties over stale piz­za. Nowa­days, all you have to do is push a fin­ger and send out an email.

Mak­ing noise has become a key to cam­paign bucks. Look at the mil­lions raised by con­spir­a­cy pro­mot­er Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene in Geor­gia, or the bankrolling of failed fas­cist House hope­ful Joe Kent (who’s run­ning again) in this state.

Dur­ing debate over McCarthy’s ouster, col­leagues bit­ter­ly com­plained that Gaetz and Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Nan­cy Mace, R‑South Car­oli­na, were send­ing out a bliz­zard of fundrais­ing appeals quot­ing their rhetoric on the House floor.

The Repub­li­can base has also been rad­i­cal­ized. They’ve raged at social change, which con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics has not stopped. The Equal Rights Amend­ment was blocked, but there are now twen­ty-three female sen­a­tors and three female jus­tices on the Supreme Court. Mar­riage equal­i­ty has become the law of the land, and with over­whelm­ing sup­port from mil­len­ni­als and Gen­er­a­tion Z.

If you want to wit­ness the anger, buy a tick­et to the Sno­homish Coun­ty Repub­li­cans’ Lin­coln Day Din­ner or watch the speak­ers being brought in to address King Coun­ty Repub­li­cans. Cov­er­ing the 2012 race for Gov­er­nor, I repeat­ed­ly watched Repub­li­can Attor­ney Gen­er­al Rob McKen­na be forced to serve as warmup speak­er while a radio talk show host was the headliner.

Of course, Trump fans the flames of this right-wing rad­i­cal­ism, with his con­spir­a­cy charges and his coup attempt, as well as rhetoric that is increas­ing­ly vio­lent. He hauls in mil­lions, even using fundrais­ing blasts to deliv­er threats to those who don’t pony up.

Biden’s defeat­ed pre­de­ces­sor has talked about charg­ing MSNBC with “trea­son,” like­wise just retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair­man Gen­er­al Mark Mil­ley. At his civ­il tri­al for busi­ness fraud, he has called New York Attor­ney Gen­er­al Leti­tia James a “polit­i­cal ani­mal,” Judge Arthur Engoron a “rogue,” and slan­dered the judge’s law clerk by false­ly describ­ing her as Sen­a­tor Chuck Schumer’s “girl­friend.”

Kevin McCarthy tried cease­less pan­der­ing, start­ing with his trip to Mar-a-Lago days after the Jan­u­ary 6th, 2021 insur­rec­tion at the U.S. Capitol.

Mil­i­tant extrem­ists were giv­en seats on the House Rules Com­mit­tee. Jim Jor­dan was giv­en an impeach­ment plat­form. Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Adam Schiff was thrown off the House Intel­li­gence Committee.

All to no avail.

The spec­ta­cle in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., should not turn off rea­son­able peo­ple to pol­i­tics. Quite the con­trary. They should engage and reen­gage. Attempts to hijack the coun­try have been turned back before by decent peo­ple, wit­ness the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and McCarthy­ism in the 1950s.

We have a Repub­lic to preserve.

Wednesday, October 11th, 2023

The “vanity candidacy” of Bobby Kennedy, Jr.: A very dangerous distraction

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., billed the Philadel­phia launch of his inde­pen­dent can­di­da­cy as “an address to the nation”, but the pres­i­den­tial hope­ful went unseen or was or bare­ly glimpsed in Mon­day tele­casts, as news cov­er­age zeroed in on Hamas’ assault or Israeli set­tle­ments and mil­i­tary posts bor­der­ing the Gaza Strip.

Bob­by Jr., is, how­ev­er, a per­son who can strut sit­ting down, and will seize on any vehi­cle – anti-vaxxer con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, pick­et­ing by strik­ing work­ers, oppo­si­tion to the U.S. aid­ing Ukraine – to thrust him­self into the pub­lic lime­light. He has skin in the 2024 game, the White House but also high­er lec­ture fees.

He also has Amer­i­can Val­ues 2024, a PAC that has raised $28 mil­lion and begins the inde­pen­dent bid with $11.28 mil­lion in the bank. The PAC has a big Mel­lon con­trib­u­tor and is court­ing Elon Musk. But Kennedy’s poll rat­ings, once four­teen per­cent when run­ning as a Demo­c­rat, have fall­en as vot­ers become aware of his embrace of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and flir­ta­tion with the extreme right.

The Repub­li­cans are wor­ried, as well they might be.

The reli­able Quin­nip­i­ac Poll asked vot­ers’ views of Kennedy. Forty-eight per­cent of Repub­li­cans gave him a thumbs-up while eigh­teen per­cent disapproved.

Just four­teen per­cent of Democ­rats approved of RFK, Jr., while fifty-sev­en per­cent gave him thumbs down. Inde­pen­dents were split, thir­ty-six per­cent approv­ing and thir­ty-sev­en per­cent disapproving.

A quar­ter of the elec­torate don’t know Kennedy. The Trump cam­paign, which feasts on con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, moved imme­di­ate­ly to address the threat.

“Vot­ers should not be deceived by any­one who pre­tends to have con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues,” spokesman Steven Che­ung said in a statement.

Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee Chair­man Rona McDaniel opined: “Make no mis­take: A Demo­c­rat in independent’s cloth­ing is still a Demo­c­rat. RFK, Jr., can­not hide from his record of endors­ing Hillary, sup­port­ing the Green New Deal, fight­ing against the Key­stone Pipeline and prais­ing AOC’s tax hikes – he is your tra­di­tion­al elit­ist lib­er­al and vot­ers will not be fooled.”

True, once upon a time Bob­by was being arrest­ed out­side the White House in a demon­stra­tion against the Key­stone Pipeline.

Late­ly, how­ev­er, we’ve seen him fuel­ing a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that Bill Gates some­how was involved spread­ing the coronavirus.

Bob­by showed up in Olympia as anti-vaxxer Repub­li­cans’ chief wit­ness when Wash­ing­ton leg­is­la­tors took up (and lat­er enact­ed) leg­is­la­tion strength­en­ing vac­ci­na­tion require­ments for chil­dren in our state’s pub­lic schools. (Bob­by was kicked off Insta­gram in 2021 for spread­ing mis­in­for­ma­tion about vaccines.)

Democ­rats, how­ev­er, have rea­sons to wor­ry as well.

The Green Par­ty can­di­da­cy of Ralph Nad­er almost cer­tain­ly helped flip the pres­i­den­cy to George W. Bush in 2000. Remem­ber, Nad­er took 100,000 bal­lots in Flori­da while Al Gore lost the Sun­shine State by just 500 votes.

Nad­er cam­paigned almost entire­ly in “blue” states, includ­ing Wash­ing­ton and Ore­gon. I inter­viewed him on an Octo­ber swing through the North­west. He railed against the Clin­ton Admin­is­tra­tion, debunked Gore’s envi­ron­men­tal cre­den­tials, while utter­ing hard­ly a word crit­i­cal of Bush.

Four of Bobby’s sib­lings – Rory, Ker­ry, and Joseph P. Kennedy II plus Kath­leen Kennedy Townsend – denounced his can­di­da­cy in a state­ment Mon­day. “Bob­by might share the same name as our father,” they wrote, “but he does not share the same val­ues, vision or judg­ment. Today’s announce­ment is deeply sad­den­ing for us. We denounce his can­di­da­cy and believe it to be per­ilous for our country.”

Jack Schloss­berg, grand­son of Pres­i­dent John F. Kennedy, filmed a video denounc­ing his cousin for “trad­ing on Camelot, con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and con­flict for per­son­al fame and gain.”

“I know him, I have no idea why any­one thinks he should be pres­i­dent,” Schloss­berg added. “What I do know is his can­di­da­cy is an embar­rass­ment. Let’s not be dis­tract­ed by somebody’s van­i­ty project.”

Kennedy faces a daunt­ing chal­lenged try­ing to get on the bal­lot in even half of the fifty states. Expect that he will direct fire at the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee, and not at the Trump cam­paign. Expect selec­tive cov­er­age by Fox News, which will select clips of Bob­by denounc­ing the Democrats.

In 2000, some North­west Democ­rats – includ­ing a Seat­tle City Coun­cil mem­ber – flirt­ed with Nad­er before return­ing, late in the game, to Gore.

The dam­age? Gore had to expend resources in our region which should have gone to Ohio, a state he nar­row­ly lost.

Schloss­berg put it best: “Joe Biden shares my grandfather’s vision of Amer­i­ca, that we do things not because they are easy but because they are hard.”

Pro­gres­sives face a hard task turn­ing back a MAGA move­ment built on con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, lies, and dem­a­goguery, all of which is broad­cast on right-wing media and under­writ­ten by wealthy donors. Noth­ing less than the free­dom of our repub­lic is at stake. This is no time to indulge Bobby’s lec­ture fees.

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