Archives for January 2010

This is shaping up to be a pretty historic week for drug law reformers in Washington state. On Wednesday, the State House will be holding a hearing on not just a marijuana decriminalization bill, but also a full legalization bill that uses the state liquor stores for regulated sales of marijuana to those over 21. To coincide with that bill, a group called Sensible Washington has filed a ballot initiative to remove all criminal penalties for adult marijuana possession, manufacturing, and sales. If that collects enough signatures, it will be on the ballot this November. If it passes, it would essentially put the onus on the legislature to come up with a system of regulating sales.

In a previous post, I laid out my arguments for why the legislature should be working to pass a bill that legalizes and regulates marijuana. A number of the reasons for doing so are economic ones. Arguing against that rationale – sort of – is Bill Virgin in the Tacoma News-Tribune:

[Read more…]

House minority floor leader Doug Ericksen (R-42, Ferndale) says that if Seattle can’t make up its mind on how to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, Eastern Washington would be happy to take our money:

“As someone who actually understands that the Eastside means the east side of the state, not the east side of the lake, I get a little bit irritated with the amount of money we spend waiting for Seattle to make a decision on transportation projects,” Ericksen said. “We’d be happy to take that $3 billion and spread it to the rest of Washington.”

Notice how he doesn’t say “We’d be happy to take that $3 billion and use it to balance the state budget.” No, he’d just be happy to take money from an economically vital Seattle project and spread it around the red counties, whether it’s needed there or not.

Huh. I guess that’s what Republicans mean when they describe themselves as fiscal conservatives.

When I set out to write bluntly about my own health care coverage woes in the individual market, it’s not like I didn’t anticipate the predictable, knee-jerk response from my hateful trolls: “Get a job!”

In fact, this was exactly the response I was looking for, as nothing demonstrates the intellectual bankruptcy of the anti-reform crowd more than their refusal to recognize how our employment-based health insurance system distorts the market and stifles innovation.

For example, just take a look at some of my own varied career choices.

I graduated college in 1985 with a B.A. in History and a passion for musical theater, only to stumble into a proto-Dot.Com career years before the buzzword became vogue. Hired by Philadelphia-based Information Companies of America for the position of “20th Century Renaissance Man” (yes, that was the title I put on my cover letter), my original duties ranged from writing movie reviews to developing and maintaining online versions of health industry publications such as The Medical Letter, and the always entertaining Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

During my three-plus years at ICOA and its sister company, US Fax, I quickly rose to the somewhat inflated title of Vice President of Product Development, in which role I wrote the functional specs for a consumer-oriented online service that was never developed, and the world’s first store-and-forward fax mail and broadcast system that was, but which was never fully brought to market. It was an exciting, creative job that paid well and provided generous health benefits. In fact it paid so well compared to my frugal, post-college lifestyle, that I soon had enough savings to leave Philadelphia and the world of full-time employment to pursue my dream of writing Broadway musicals.

Moving to New York with my songwriting partner (he music, me words), I spent the next few years writing, rewriting and workshopping what eventually became The Don Juan and the Non Don Juan, a chamber musical that with the distance of years I can honestly say was only slightly worse than its title. The show opened in December of 1991 at the respected Vineyard Theater in Manhatten, only to close for good three weeks later. That’s right, I am the co-author of an Off-Broadway musical flop, and I’ve got the bad review in the New York Times to prove it. Not to mention the bad review in the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and so on.

Oh well. That’s show biz.

During my time in New York, and with the help of my songwriting partner, who was also a software engineer, I expanded my technical skills, taking on odd consulting and programming contracts to supplement my dwindling savings. Together we also developed the world’s first rhyming dictionary software, initially for my own use, but eventually with the goal of finding an interested publisher. After following my new wife to her native Seattle in 1992, she and I decided to publish the software ourselves, and in April of 1993 the newly redesigned A Zillion Kajillion Rhymes hit the shelves to generally positive acclaim. And yes, I have the good review in the New York Times to prove it.

That’s what you call irony.

I don’t necessarily recommend starting a business on credit cards, but that’s what we did, and over the next few years we went on to develop and publish upgraded versions for Mac, Windows and eventually Palm OS, a companion cliche and catchphrase thesaurus, and our best-selling, if most short-lived product, a space-simulator shoot-em-up game for Macintosh, whimsically titled Eat My Photons! At its peak, Eccentric Software had one employee in addition to ourselves, and several hundred thousand dollars a year in sales within the U.S. and abroad. We hired a local designer to create our packaging and sales literature, contracted with Trojan Lithograph in Kent to print, duplicate, assemble, warehouse and ship our product to resellers, and did tens of thousands of dollars of business annually with Auburn based Zones Inc., which for years served a dual role as both our biggest customer and our biggest vendor. (You didn’t think the ads in those software catalogs were free, did you?)

As a mom and pop startup we pumped our fair share of business into the local economy, but while we never operated at a loss, we also never made enough money to pay ourselves a decent wage, let alone pay off our capital investment. By 1997, after Zones unexpectedly stiffed us over a holiday promotion gone bad, we had accumulated a six-figure personal debt.

Oh well. That’s capitalism.

Still, it’s hard to consider either venture a total loss. Sure, I guess my musical flopped Off-Broadway, but how many aspiring writers even get that far? Few artists ever achieve commercial or critical success, and those who do usually do so only after years of struggle. Without so many writers, performers and directors willing to try and fail, there would be no Broadway, no Hollywood, no multi-billion dollar entertainment industry at all.

Likewise, few start-up businesses survive beyond a handful of years, yet even in “failing” contribute greatly to the economy, often while preparing their founders and employees for future success. My then-wife, a former magazine editor, took the skills and experience gained from our business and turned them into a more lucrative job at a young Real Networks, whose stock options (and health benefits) helped us pay off our debt, while granting me the luxury of enjoying the first few years of my daughter’s life as a stay at home dad.

And while our rhyming dictionary software never made us rich, it was more than a little gratifying to know that so many successful songwriters were using it to make their lyrics better. Indeed, for a number of years straight, there wasn’t a single Tony, Oscar, Grammy or CMA presentation that didn’t include at least one nominee who I knew for a fact to be a customer.

Sure, call us failures if you want, but it’s people like us, eager to innovate and willing to take risks who have always been the engine of our economy, and from whom the occasional spectacular success arises. Do we really want to make their struggle even harder? Do we really want to sneer at would-be entrepreneurs, that if they want access to health care they should go get a job?

Or to phrase the question as clearly as possible: why was my salaried position at a venture-backed startup worthy of equal access to affordable health coverage, while my 24-hour workdays at my own startup was not? What is the economic or moral justification in that?

Impoverished by my years as a progressive blogger and activist, I may very well have to give in to my trolls’ admonishment to get a real job—one which hopefully comes with generous benefits—but to suggest that salaried employment should be a prerequisite for access to affordable health care is to ignore the profound complexity and diversity of our economy, while totally dissing the entrepreneurial spirit on which it is supposedly based.

Thus, as an answer to my own health insurance woes, “Get a job!” isn’t just an insult to me, it is an insult to America. And, by stifling innovation, mobility and entrepreneurialism, it is a surefire recipe for economic stagnation and decline.

Today is the first day of the new legislative session, and I can’t tell you how much I dread writing about it.

Last week’s contest had two winners; ‘Finnished’, who guessed the correct city of Helsinki, Finland, and Dave Gibney, who found the exact location. Also thanks to wes.in.wa, who passed along how to get the link of your current view:

the “share your map” envelope icon at the lower left of the screen will give you a URL for the view on your screen at the time

Just post that URL after finding the correct location. Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Deuteronomy 23:1
No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the LORD.

Discuss.

Continued from yesterday’s roundup, a few more items from this week:

– New York City officials came under fire recently for putting out a pamphlet promoting safety tips for heroin users. The critics of these types of educational efforts are making the same logical error that proponents of teen sexual abstinence education make. They mistakenly believe in both cases that simply giving people information about a moral taboo encourages more people to explore that taboo. As the statistics on abstinence education vs. comprehensive sex education have shown, it isn’t true. And it’s just as wrong when it comes to illegal drug use. Law Enforcement Against Prohibition put out their own press release criticizing the DEA for attacking the pamphlet.

– A recent report by the Center for American Progress shows that an immigration reform proposal that provides a path to citizenship for currently undocumented immigrants and relaxes immigration restrictions would boost U.S. GDP by at least $1.5 trillion over the next ten years. The worst economic approach possible to dealing with the problem of illegal immigration – by far – is to try to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible.

– I’m sure it surprises no one that I agree with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that Washington’s felon voter ban unfairly discriminates against minorities. The evidence presented at trial is some of the same evidence I’ve occasionally cited here in order to point out the massive racial disparities that exist in drug law enforcement.

The restrictions on felon voting come from the Washington State Constitution itself. The actual wording of the Constitution states:

SECTION 3 WHO DISQUALIFIED. All persons convicted of infamous crime unless restored to their civil rights and all persons while they are judicially declared mentally incompetent are excluded from the elective franchise.

An infamous crime is defined as:

An “infamous crime” is a crime punishable by death in the state penitentiary or imprisonment in a state correctional facility.

The biggest disconnect that I see is that most felons in this state aren’t guilty of “infamous crimes”. They’re often guilty of non-violent crimes. In fact, before King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg started relegating them to District Court in 2008, two-thirds of his felony caseload were cases involving less than three grams of illegal drugs, the exact kinds of crimes for which the evidence introduced at trial shows clear racial disparities in who actually gets arrested, prosecuted, and convicted.

The State Constitution, with that clause, was written in 1889. At that time, not only was drug possession not an “infamous crime”, it wasn’t a crime at all. Opium, heroin, marijuana, and cocaine were all legally available to people. It’s possible that smugglers who were found guilty of trying to avoid paying opium import tariffs were guilty of “infamous crimes”, but certainly not the man on the street who had a small amount of drugs on him.

After the turn of the century, prohibitions on these drugs were slowly enacted. All along the West Coast, anti-Chinese sentiments led to crackdowns on opium. Across the country, racism against blacks fueled attempts to ban cocaine. And animosity towards Mexicans led to the federal bans on marijuana in 1937. No one anywhere should be surprised that the outcome of nearly a century of these laws – born out of racism themselves – would be overtly racist implementations.

I’m not an expert on the Voting Rights Act. I’m making a logical argument here rather than a strictly legal one – and sometimes the two are not the same – but I have trouble understanding the arguments against this decision that pretend that our criminal justice system doesn’t have glaring racial disparities. If Attorney General Rob McKenna makes that the primary argument in his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, he deserves to lose the case. After a century of America trying to enforce various drug prohibitions (even alcohol for a while – which New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia spoke out against because it targeted certain ethnic groups), these laws have ended up doing exactly what they were intended to do, to disproportionately put larger numbers of minorities behind bars.

Wow, quite a week. Here are some things going on as we roll into the new decade:

– The two major drug law reform bills introduced for this session, HB 1177 (decriminalization) and HB 2401 (legalization), will have a hearing in the Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness Committee next Wednesday, January 13. The evening before, Rick Steves will be hosting a forum in Olympia about reforming our marijuana laws. The Seattle Weekly takes a look at the movement nationwide on this front. Dominic Holden writes about the political risks involved for Seattle-area legislators like Chris Hurst if they block these bills.

One of the contention points for these bills is that neither one adequately addresses the question of home grows. Bill HB 1177 leaves the existing language that governs medical marijuana law alone. However, HB 2401 removes that language without fully addressing what would happen to people (current medical users) who already grow small gardens from themselves, or as part of a non-profit co-op (it does, in some cases, reduce that crime from a felony to a misdemeanor). There are concerns that the state could more readily go after people for growing plants outside of the new regulatory system. One co-sponsor of the bill, Roger Goodman from Kirkland, noted this as an oversight and hopes to clarify the bill within the session. A group of medical marijuana patients were circulating some proposed language to address their concerns specific to the medical marijuana statutes, but as of yet, it hasn’t picked up a legislative sponsor.

– As 2010 begins, there are updates on what might be the most heart-rending drug war tragedies of the last two years. In 2008, a Prince George, Maryland County SWAT team raided the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo and his family. Police chased down and shot Calvo’s two dogs and kept his family hostage for several hours before realizing that they had absolutely nothing to do with the package of marijuana randomly mailed to their home in a scheme involving a corrupt deliverymen. A few weeks ago, a judge ruled that Calvo’s lawsuit against the officers can proceed.

This past September, the killing of Georgia pastor Jonathan Ayers was another drug war tragedy. Ayers, who was known for going out of his way to help people in need, was giving a ride to a woman with a history of drug abuse. Unfortunately, that woman was also wanted by the police. After dropping the woman off at a gas station, undercover cops in an unmarked Escalade descended on Ayers’ vehicle (the gas station surveillance video is here). Seeing people come out of a regular-looking car with no uniforms and guns, Ayers sped off. He was shot by one of the officers and drove off the road. He died after being taken to a hospital. This story, however, appears to have an even worse ending for Ayers’ widow and their unborn child, as a Grand Jury ruled that the officers did nothing wrong.

UDPATE: Another tragic event from 2008, the shooting death of mother-of-six Tarika Wilson in a Lima, Ohio drug raid, has ended with a $1.5 million insurance settlement, but no lessons learned.

The Mayor of Nine-Eleven forgets:

(And there are some fifty more where that came from at Hominid Views.)

For the third time in as many weeks, the Seattle Times editorial board is advocating that Congress drop their efforts at health care reform for the foreseeable future.

Given the shrinkage of the economy since 2007, this is not the time to promise every American a new benefit. And that is what these bills want to do. By their attempt at generosity, they would raise the cost of creating a job, especially by small employers.

Spoken like somebody with decent health care coverage.

I, on the other hand, am not so fortunate. For all but a few scattered years of my adult life I have purchased my own health insurance coverage via individual plans, and every year I have seen my costs rise, my benefits fall, and my security ebb away. As of now I spend over $200 a month for a $1,900 deductible and zero preventative care. It is a “catastrophic” coverage plan that, should I ever become seriously ill or injured, would supposedly limit my out of pocket expenses to about $10,000 a year… plus the cost of prescription drugs.

That said, for the tens of thousands of dollars I have paid into the system over the past couple decades, I have never had a claim paid, and when I do seek medical care I am always billed the full retail rate… as much as four or five times higher than the negotiated rate my insurance company would have paid had they covered the service. If I had the income, I could spend more each month for more generous coverage, but as an individual it would always cost me much more and cover much less than the type of plans one can buy through a group. And even this expensive option would be closed off to me should I first develop a chronic illness or injury, which under current law would forever prevent me from purchasing adequate coverage due to a preexisting condition.

And to top it all off, as an individual, with no group or corporation to fight for me, I am exactly the type of person for whom insurance companies are notorious for dropping coverage once a claim is made.

I have never, in my entire life, had a lapse of coverage. I, my parents or our employers have faithfully paid into our health insurance “system” on my behalf for every single one of my 46 years. And yet with each passing year the likelihood that I will be left permanently destitute by a serious illness increases. And this is the broken system the Seattle Times would leave in place, possibly for another generation should our current attempt at comprehensive reform collapse?

But then, I guess, if you already have adequate coverage, reform must seem less urgent.

Gov. Chris Gregoire doesn’t seem so thrilled with the prospect of privatizing liquor sales in Washington. First of all, while proponents are attempting to use our current budget crisis as an argument for privatization, Gregoire rightly points out that the auditor’s report doesn’t show the state raising an additional dime in the short term. And second of all…

“This idea that we go the way of auctioning off, like West Virginia, let’s be clear, you’ll get rid of all your mom and pops,” she said. “You’ll have what they have, which is Rite Aid sells all liquor, is that what you want in Washington state? We contract out now, we contract out to mom and pops in rural areas. What does the auction get you, once every 10 years, possibly a couple hundred million dollars, if you sell high? Now, West Virginia, not that I’m very proud of this, doesn’t sell as much liquor as we do. So you’d better sell more to make up if you’re going to auction off, I’m not sure that’s good policy. You look at our minor consumption sales – we’re well below any state that has it privatized, by like 10 percent. You need to understand it doesn’t help you this biennium at all. Number two, does it really get you any money in the long haul, and number three what are the social policy issues that are implicated here and is that the right direction?”

Washington, like most state store states, not only has lower per capita liquor consumption than the national average, it also has a lower incidence of alcohol related social and health problems. The only way that privatization can significantly increase state revenues is by significantly increasing sales, and with it, the related social costs. So the revenue argument strikes me as awfully cynical.

But I also wonder if the recent interest in eliminating our state store system doesn’t have anything to do with recent legislative proposals to legalize marijuana and sell it through our state stores? We currently have all the infrastructure in place to buy, distribute and resell marijuana in a well-managed and well-controlled system. Dismantling this infrastructure would make it that much harder to implement legalization.

Hmm.

What’s heartbreaking about this Eli Sanders post concerning WA-03 is not that he wrote it, because everyone is entitled to his opinion. What’s heartbreaking is how utterly clueless he appears to be about democracy in general and SW Washington in particular.

Dwight Pelz, chair of the Washington State Democrats, won’t take sides yet. “We have several strong democratic candidates running right now,” he said. “We want to see who can get out there and get the most support before we let a good Democrat know we would like them to pull out of the race.”

He should figure it out as quickly as possible. Time’s a-wasting and Democrats need—way before the summer primary—to rally behind a single candidate if they want to hold on to this seat.

Luckily for those of us who actually live in WA-03, neither Pelz nor Sanders can actually stop people from running for office. Look, I get that everyone plays the “who can win” game, but in the end, if someone wants to throw their hat in the ring, you can’t stop them.

There are five Democrats running in WA-03. They are state Rep. Deb Wallace of Vancouver, Denny Heck, former Legislator and founder of TVW, state Sen. Craig Pridemore of Vancouver, political activist Maria Rodriguez-Salazar of Vancouver and political activist Cheryl Crist of Olympia.

Wallace has a solid, pro-business record and is well liked in Vancouver. I hold her in high regard. She’s a great example of the “big-tent” party, because she may have a different viewpoint but she doesn’t punch the hippies in the face just to score cheap points. Frankly I feel kind of bad about her not being my first choice, but Pridemore is a long-time friend and has his own proud record. Democrats would be lucky to choose between Wallace and Pridemore.

Heck has a lengthy resume, including stints as a Legislator in the late 1970’s and the early-to-mid 1980’s and as an aid to Gov. Booth Gardner in the early 1990’s. He also founded TVW and has business experience. I’ve never seen the guy in Clark County, and I’ve lived here since 1993. Maybe he comes to visit family at Christmas or something. He did grow up here.

Heck lost a race for Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1988 as an odds-on-favorite with WEA backing, so that tells you something. Then he quit and moved on to jobs he didn’t have to get elected at, and he hasn’t been back until…now.

Here’s a fun quote Heck had from today’s Columbian:

“I’m the only practicing capitalist in this race. Nobody has to teach me that 70 percent of jobs are created by small businesses. I’ve done that.”

Practicing capitalist? What does that even mean?

I’ve always maintained that capitalism is the one true religion in this country, so maybe Heck is onto something. It sure seems like the Democratic establishment in this state is looking to impose their religion on those of us down here. Good luck with that, BTW. We always just love having Puget Sound folks decide our fate.

Heck is supported in Clark County by a bunch of old guard Democrats, and that’s just a fact. These people are not progressive and never were. It’s a motley assortment of BIAW-Scoop Jackson types, to put it simply. Plus they are all really, really old, not that there’s anything wrong with that. It beats the alternative. Here’s how long it’s been since Heck ran for office.

However, it sounds like most of us would like Heck personally if we ever saw him, plus his wife once taught Craig Pridemore when he was in middle school. That’s kind of charming, actually.

Heck also has some small personal fortune and has pledged an initial $100,000 to his campaign. Must be nice. Just what we need, another corporate Democrat. Maybe we can reform the bankruptcy laws and turn forest destruction into a good thing. Oh wait, I was thinking of Brian Baird, not Denny Heck, my bad.

Pridemore, my pick, has been a Clark County commissioner and has a proven track record as both a progressive and a winner. He got an earned income tax credit bill passed a few years back, although it wound up not getting funded due to legislative wrangling. Pridemore first scored a political victory in 1998 by beating Republican county commissioner Mel Gordon here in Clark County, and then beat entrenched incumbent state senator Don Carlson to win his state senate seat.

Those who would dismiss Pridemore because of Heck’s money don’t understand Pridemore’s tenacity nor the retail nature of politics down here. Nothing is a lock in politics, but you put your money on the solid horse, and Pridemore is as solid as they come.

What about a TV blitz by Heck’s money? That’s why nothing is a lock. Pridemore is an adept fundraiser, but I’d have to admit it will be a challenge to keep pace with a self-funder. Thus this post, regular folks who care need to know they can play a part in fighting against the corporate Democrats.

As for Rodriguez-Salazar, at the December meeting of the Clark County Democrats she first tripped and broke her shoe, and then announced that she is a Blue Dog. Oh well.

Crist has run before and you can google her. Heart in right place, no chance.

Larry Phillips legislative aide, Leah Zoppi, emailed me to thank me for my earlier post, but also to correct a factual error:

Thanks for your post about Larry’s decision to support Councilmember Drago as a caretaker for the 8th District seat.  However, I need to let you know it contains a factual inaccuracy.  The decision would not have reverted to Governor Gregoire.  That’s only the case for partisan positions, not non partisan positions as voters made the County Council.  There is NO tiebreaker currently in place for filling County Council vacancies.  Which means, if the Council remained deadlocked on the issue of filling this vacancies, the Council would have remained 4-4, with neither side having a majority and District 8 residents having no representative.  This would have impacted the Council conducting business like reorg and passing legislation, and it would have left the people in District 8 with no one to turn to for advocacy on their behalf.

My bad.

Even the most casual observer of Washington state politics is acutely aware of the Cascade Curtain, the physical and cultural barrier that separates East from West, right from left, and Republicans from Democrats. This pathological East/West divide is the cause of much of the dysfunction that plagues our state political system, yet if you ask an elected official how we might bridge this gap, don’t expect to elicit much more than tired platitudes or a roll of the eyes.

But I wonder if one of the ways to bring the two sides of the state closer together both politically and culturally is to close the physical distance between them… namely, by building high-speed rail from Seattle to Spokane.

That’s exactly what’s happening in Spain, where an ambitious new high-speed rail network is binding historically separate and distinctive regions together into a much more cohesive nation:

Spain opened its first Alta Velocidad Española, or AVE, high-speed train route in 1992, between Madrid and Seville. The network has grown to nearly 2,000 kilometers and stretches from Malaga on the south coast to Barcelona, which is north and east.

Supporters say the AVE has begun to transform the country, binding remote and sometimes restive regions to Madrid and leading traditionally homebound Spaniards to move around for work or leisure.

“Spaniards have rediscovered the train,” said Iñaki Barrón de Angoiti, director of high-speed rail at the International Union of Railways in Paris. “The AVE has changed the way people live, the way they do business. Spaniards don’t move around a lot, but the AVE is even changing that.”

By slashing the time it takes to travel from one city to another, high-speed rail in Spain and elsewhere has increased tourism, altered housing patterns, and lured millions of travelers out of airplanes and cars. According to the International Union of Railways, a high-speed train can carry eight times as many passengers as an airplane over an equal distance, using the the same amount of energy, while emitting a quarter of the CO2 per person. It also creates economic opportunities outside the traditional urban cores that never before existed.

For example, previous studies have suggested that high-speed rail could connect downtown Seattle to Moses Lake in under an hour, with Spokane only another half hour away. That’s downtown Seattle to downtown Spokane in less time than one typically spends at the airport before departure. Such a rail line could instantly transform Moses Lake into a viable international airport, while creating the freedom to live and work anywhere near a station.

Live in Spokane and work in Seattle, or vice versa? That’s a shorter commute, time-wise, than between some parts of Long Island and Manhatten. And just think of the economic opportunity this would create in the half dozen or so counties through which a high-speed line would pass.

When we tie the people and economies of Washington state closer together, when prosperity in King County directly generates prosperity in Kittitas and Grant counties too, that’s when the politics of this state will become less divisive. And as has been proven in other parts of the world, high-speed rail can put us on the fast track toward achieving that goal.

I know a lot of Democrats who are pretty pissed off at King County Councilman Larry Phillips for crossing the aisle and joining Republicans in appointing Jan Drago to fill Dow Constantine’s seat, but I’m not one of them. Yeah, I generally hail from the “Democrats are pussies” camp, routinely berating my own party for failing to play political hardball in the face of the nearly intractable, partisan discipline practiced by their Republican opponents, but well, sometimes reality is reality.

The refusal of the four Republicans on the council to honor the will of Eighth District Democrats by appointing state Sen. Joe McDermott to the seat, was breach of protocol and tradition that I hope comes back to bite them in the ass the next time the council is asked to fill a Republican vacancy, but this was political gambit from which they had little incentive to budge. Had McDermott gained the appointment, his incumbency would have made him such an overwhelming favorite in November that it likely would have dissuaded other serious contenders from waging a challenge. But with an open seat up for grabs, the race could attract several sitting elected officials, thus sowing disruption through the Democratic ranks, and spreading their financial resources ever thinner.

For example, if both McDermott and state Rep. Zack Hudgins run for the council, that will leave both of their otherwise safe legislative seats open in November. But more importantly, it would tie up the surpluses in both of their campaign coffers from being transferred to more competitive districts. That’s just smart politics on the part of the Republican council members, if totally irresponsible when comes to actual governance.

Think I’m giving the goopers too much credit? Then explain to me why they briefly offered Hudgins the council appointment, but only if he agreed, like Drago, to serve only as a caretaker. When Hudgins surprised them by accepting these terms, they asked if Hudgins would run again for his vacated House seat in November, and when he said yes, they withdrew the offer.

Maximum disruption of Democratic legislative races, that’s what the Republicans were shooting for, and perhaps, that’s what they’ll get. So why aren’t I pissed at Phillips for caving to their demands, especially considering that the appointment would have fallen to Gov. Gregoire had the council post remained vacant for another 30 days? Because the cost of waiting another month was simply too high.

Had Phillips and the Democrats waited for Gregoire to appoint McDermott, as she surely would have, it would have meant two legislative seats changing hands in the middle of a crucial short session. First McDermott’s seat would have to be filled, and then Sen. Fred Jarrett’s, whose replacement would have almost surely waited until after Democrats had regained their council majority. Now, with Drago in place, McDermott can continue to prepare for the session, while Randy Gordon’s appointment is little more than a formality.

Combine that with the fact that the biggest knock against Drago is that she’s not McDermott, and it just didn’t make sense to drag out this four-four deadlock any longer… at least if your primary concern is governance. We needed to settle this before the start of the session, even if it meant caving to the Republicans’ irresponsible and petty demands. So in my opinion, Phillips probably did the right thing in breaking ranks.

That said, I hope we can count on him for demanding political payback, when payback is ultimately due.

UPDATE:
Apparently, the governor cannot break a deadlock over a nonpartisan seat. So I guess I was wrong. It’s been known to happen.