Part 1

Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) decision to support full marriage equality means that embattled statewide politicians can finally run toward marriage equality rather than away from it.

With his op-ed in the Meriden (Conn.) Record-Journal on Sunday, Dodd became the second U.S. Senator to change his mind in recent weeks, joining Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) who announced in May.

Nor should it be ignored that Rhode Island’s former Republican-turned independent Senator Lincoln Chafee also cast his vote for marriage equality with an op-ed in Bay Windows last week. Chafee was voted out of office in 2006–after a 16-point victory in his 2000 election–because Rhode Island voters couldn’t stomach the notion of having anyone associated with the Republican Party representing them in Washington. Now Chafee is positioning himself for a gubernatorial run.

It starts with a few states.

Part 2

Chris Dodd, with a strict emission standards and carbon tax proposal that won over the likes of Al Gore, had arguably the best energy plan out of the entire 2008 Democratic presidential field.

He was an early and forceful voice on FISA and has since discussed the idea of Bush administration torture trials. Plus he had the balls to endorse Ned Lamont over his long time colleague and King Rat Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) in 2006.

Now Dodd stands up for marriage equality in the middle of a re-election race that the Republicans are salivating all over.

He deserves more love from the left. If you know someone in Connecticut, where Dodd’s polling has been dismal all year, I suggest you call them.

Here is yet another reason to think about the structural budget issues that Goldy has explained at length to  incredulous and/or cynical activists and elected officials this year: federal monies.

I was reminded of it by this ECB Slog post about KC exec candidate Dow Constantine’s effort to boost King County infrastructure by funding a full-time county employee to coordinate stimulus grants to win money for the county. In this climate, it is as good a plan as any, if not better.

But turning to D.C. with palms facing up is not a solution that the state can ethically count on in the long run, especially after all that Bush-era war spending.

State Sen. Minority Leader Mike Hewitt (R-Walla Walla) makes this same point, though backwards, in an AP article today.

“This is a temporary fix,” Hewitt said of the federal stimulus money going toward the state budget. “I really don’t believe this is going to help us sustain for the next two to four years.”

It won’t, and that is the point. We need to do it our own selves, but not by slashing important services like the old skool contingent wants, but with a forward-thinking tax system.

Again, I’m not referring to current stimulus spending, which we should embrace, but rather the kind of federal grant and pork project cash that comes in to bail out states all over the union on a regular basis (putting added stress on relatively awesome states like Washington, btw).

Our national debt is spiraling out of control while governors across the country boast about balanced budgets to anyone who will listen. It isn’t because governors are inherently geniuses while presidents are stupid (even if the most frustratingly ignorant guvs are the ones who tend to seek a higher perch in D.C.). It is because state electeds can swindle voters into thinking they are fiscally responsible by sticking money into their front pockets (state budgets) while taking it from their back pockets (federal).

It’s NIMBY, baby, and it is all the more reason to make the changes necessary to create a solvent long term.

Personally, I don’t necessarily fall in line with the full-on income tax idea, but a federal grant/paltry sales tax/incomprehensible business tax/property tax/tourist tax scheme might hold some water, but it is as leaky as a pre-santorum asshole.

Like Goldy says, just think about it.

P.S. I first read, in a convincing way, about the federal/state discrepancy in an op-ed in the Times or something like that last year. Anyone able to find the link for that?

Rep. Brian Baird (D-Vancouver) is one of two congressmen currently taking a trip to the Gaza Strip. TPM has the story.

Joining Baird on the visit is Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), America’s first Muslim congressman. They will, according to a joint press release, meet with key officials from the Palestinian Authority and “view first-hand the destruction from recent Israeli air and ground attacks, and to meet with international and local relief agencies.”

It sounds bad, too.

“The amount of physical destruction and the depth of human suffering here is staggering,” Baird says in the release. “Entire neighborhoods have been destroyed, schools completely leveled, fundamental needs such as water, sewer, and electricity facilities have been hit and immobilized.”

The trip was not sanctioned by the Obama administration.

Of all the things I’ve read by The New Yorker‘s Hendrik Hertzberg, easily his most influential was a Talk of the Town piece from 2006 called “The ‘ic’ Factor” where he rips apart misuse of the word Democrat to describe things that are, in fact, Democratic by Republicans and lazy or misguided journalists.

For instance, Barack Obama is a Democrat, but he is also the Democratic president who was democratically elected by the American people.

The Washington state House of Representatives is mostly full of Democrats who make up a Democratic majority.

The word Democratic, as Hertzberg explains, is an adjective, and when Republicans use the noun Democrat in lieu of the adjective, it is a slur of sorts.

It is also just plain ignorant.

Now, with my my humble Stadium High School eduction and Wesleyan government degree, I am hardly a walking AP Style Guide, but I have sense enough to properly use the word Democratic when referring to the party that had the right mixture of substance and style to deter George W. Bush from its ranks.

With that said, I’ll be taking it upon myself to call out journalists who make the “ic” flub in the name of public notice. I invite HA readers to do the same.

Our inaugural offender is a wise and talented fellow Stadium grad, the Tacoma News-Tribune‘s Peter Callaghan who today referred to the “Democrat” majority on the King County Council.

Get it right, Pete.

Who’s next? Hopefully no one.

A number of the players who were heavily invested in last year’s gubernatorial rematch between Gov. Chris Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi subscribe to the notion that the beginning of the end for Rossi, who had appeared to have closed the gap on Gregoire in September polling, was the night he said, during a debate hosted by the Association of Washington Business in Blaine, that he was open to considering a scaling back of the minimum wage for teenagers in Washington state.

Two weeks later the Rossi campaign suffered an embarrassing setback when Kittitas County Republican Party Chair Matt Manweller, a CWU political science professor, unleashed a tirade outside of an Ellensburg campaign rally, calling supporters of Washington state’s minimum wage “dumber than a post.”

Well, even without their guy Rossi in the governor’s mansion, the good politicians of Central Washington aren’t giving up on it.

State Rep. Mike Armstrong (R-Wenatchee) introduced a bill today that would allow state employers to pay 15 year olds 85% of the Federal minimum wage. Today that wage is $6.55, which would make the Armstrong’s proposed 15-year old wage $5.57.

Washington state’s current minimum wage is $8.55, making this would-be $3.00 decrease even steeper than the $1.50 proposed by Rossi last fall.

“When I was a teenager, I worked in the orchards around Wenatchee picking apples, cherries and other fruit,” Armstrong said in a press release, recalling the halcyon days of the early 1970s. “A training wage would help to further expand these opportunities for your young people and be a savings to farmers struggling to pay for harvest and stay in business.”

In other words, think of the children!

The bill was referred to the House Commerce and Labor Commmittee, where one can assume it will die a slow death. Committee chair Rep. Steve Conway (D-Tacoma), whose House website lists his top legislative priority as “family wage jobs”, did not return a call seeking comment about the bill’s fate.

Ironically, this was only one of two bills introduced today regarding 15 year olds, whose political stock is at an all-time high on this Groundhog’s Day. Sen Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Seattle) brought a bill to the Senate floor that would ban children under the age of 16 from hunting in Washington state without adult accompaniment.

Poor kids.

If the Democrats get their way, they won’t be able to work or hunt. How will they ever feed their families? Good thing they can still get their contraceptives without much hassle, right?

Olympia – In front of a crowd of more than 30 legislators, supporters and families of same sex couples Wednesday afternoon, state Sen. Ed Murray (D-Seattle) announced the introduction of Senate and House bills that would expand full state marriage rights to domestic partners, but would stop short of calling the relationships marriages in the eyes of the state.

The House bill has 57 sponsors out of 98 total Representatives, including two Republicans, Maureen Walsh (R-College Place) and Norm Johnson (R-Yakima), and the Senate offering has 20 sponsors from the body’s 49 members.

No Republican Senators, however, found the cause worthy of sponsorship.

The pair of bills would add over 300 rights and obligations for domestic partnerships ranging from survivor and pension benefits to business license transfers, which Rep. Jamie Pederson (D-Seattle), the chief sponsor of the House bill, said would “make sure our families are treated exactly the same.”

Still, even if the state legislation passes, certain same sex couples will lack some Federal benefits until President Obama makes good on his promise to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.

Besides the usual measure of equality and long-time-coming, the legislators also took time today to frame the issue in terms of the sour economy.

“Families across this nation feel more and more insecure. If there was at theme for this session,” Murray said, “it would be family economic security.”

Extending crucial benefits to families of same-sex couples, the implication suggests, is even more important now than it was before. He said now is the time that there needs to be a conversation about the concrete ways that families of same sex couples are harmed because they lack the same benefits as heterosexual couples.

To help hammer home the need for domestic partnership benefit rights, four same-sex couples, half of them with young children in tow, spoke about their feelings of going through everyday life not only with the hardships that come from improper benefits, but the stigma that their families, especially their children, have from being excluded.

It was a regular all-American display, with one of the couples’ nine year old daughter doing her best Piper Palin turn, struggling to hold onto her baby sister as she stood beside her mother at the podium.

Another couple, both of whom hold PhDs from the University of Washington, informed the reporters that their elementary school aged daughter was “just coming to terms with the fact that our family doesn’t have the same recognition and rights that her friends’ families do, and it is confusing to her.”

Then there was the Tacoma police officer who grew emotional while reminding those gathered that she faces the same dangers on the streets each day as her straight co-workers, yet she is saddled with the additional stress of knowing that if anything happened to her, only now, with the help of this bill, would her partner receive the full spousal benefits she deserved.

Those blatant displays of humanity aside, Murray commented that one of the aspects most worthy of celebration with the announcement of these bills was the relative lack of fanfare from the other side.

“I would say the most remarkable thing about this bill is that it is unremarkable,” Murray mentioned, explaining that many of the fiercely fought battles that had been fought in the last few decades were inconspicuously absent from today’s atmosphere, even resulting in the aforementioned Republican sponsors of the House bill.

“Instead of culture wars,” Murray said, “we see a legislature that is mostly on board.”

But if the atmosphere is so good, and domestic partnerships are such a no-brainer these days, why not just go all in and join the ranks of Massachusetts and Connecticut, the two states who currently recognize gay marriage?

The lawmakers answered this question in part by passing the buck to a public that they said, outside of the greater Seattle area, was still coming to terms with gay rights.

“We are involved in a conversation with the people of this state,” Murray said. “It is still new to a lot of people in this state.”

Plus, there will be the matter of initiative battles like the recent Proposition 8 that rocked the civil rights world in California this past year.

“On a personal level, it is kind of amazing what the opposition is willing to do,” Murray said, implying that the supporters of gay marriage intend to swing with a knockout blow when they finally push for full equality. “We know that there will be an initiative at some point. We are preparing ourselves for that battle…We plan to win. We don’t plan to win and then lose.”

Despite this ongoing conversation, Rep. Jim Moeller (D-Vancouver) will be introducing a bill in the House this session, H.B. 1745, that would bring full civil marriage rights to same sex couples in common with their fellow heterosexual citizens.

“There is nothing more personal than the decision between two human beings who make the decision to be committed to one another,” Moeller said and compared the issue to private entities that know that “discrimination is no way to run a business. What we know is what we have always known for a long time, that separate is not equal.”

That bill has 40 sponsors already, including Republican Walsh, yet it won’t be considered in committee.

All part of the process, co-sponsor Rep. Marko Liias (D-Mukilteo) assured me later Wednesday afternoon.

“That’s where the conversation is centered right now,” Liias said, echoing Murray’s sentiment from earlier in the day. “Not everyone who needs to be part of the process is ready to go there right now. There isn’t quite the consensus we need.”

Liias also gave some recommendations for gay marriage’s staunch advocates.

“Get out there and start doing the community organization,” he advised, “and get folks to start writing in from all over the state. Those folks need to start speaking to their friends and neighbors.”

Even if the legislature stops short by simply adding domestic partnership benefits, Sen. Murray predicted today that it won’t be long.

“It will take some years,” he said, “but it will not take the 29 years that the civil rights bill took. It is a multi-year effort, but not a multi-decade effort.”

Given the state of our government’s budget situation, and the sense of urgency that our legislators are trying to display with their current round of budget freezes, it was eye-opening to see Brad Shannon’s report earlier this week that newly minted Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn had made an appearance in front of the citizen salary commission to, let’s be honest, whine about his salary.

Dorn gets paid $121,618 each year in his new post, and he told the commission that ranks him below his chief of staff, below the state Department of Early Learning head, and even below 121 district superintendents here in the state.

Adding some perspective, the 122nd largest school district in the state according to the 2000 census is located in lovely Coupeville, and a few other comparable in size include Elma, Naches Valley and Chimacum. Some of my favorite places all of them, but nothing one would equate with educational or cultural dominance.

It really begs the question, is Dorn grossly underpaid, or are these superintendents overpaid?

To be fair, Dorn didn’t ask for a raise, and he did acknowledge that he chose to run for the office knowing the pay grade in advance, but he basically made an official proclamation that, as the kids these days might put it, I’m just sayin’, is all.

Dorn added, according to Shannon, that he was more concerned that the most qualified administrators might not seek the post when they can make at least twice as much in any of the major school districts in the state.

Really, now?

Meanwhile, Dorn himself benefited from the lack of credible candidates in the race. When early favorite Richard Semler, the Richland superintendent, dropped out of the race because of a family health issue, it essentially became a two-person race between Dorn and incumbent Terry Bergeson, who obstinately stood by the WASL even when she couldn’t answer some of the test questions herself.

Still, to call attention to his comparatively low pay at a time when state salaries are frozen, unemployment is rising pretty much everywhere but Pittsburgh, and even just four days before the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act passes in the U.S. Senate shows a galling lack of tact.

Especially since this isn’t Dorn’s first money grab. Recall that back in May of last year, he tried to boost his pension by getting his old colleagues in the legislature to make his retirement benefits based on his cushy $137,705 salary as the head of the Public School Employees Union instead of the $57,720 he earned as principal of Eatonville High School.

Dorn came to the office by way of Eatonville, a small Pierce County town that is best known to some of us as the home of former national prep football record holder Bobby Lucht, but this recent meeting smacks of an entirely different former Northwest athletic hero.

But hey, at least he is taking on the WASL, and most of us can agree that is far, far more important than a few thousand bucks here or there for a government job.

Olympia – Senate Democratic leaders held a press conference today, joined by a few of their House colleagues, to announce their intention, as Josh mentioned earlier, to tighten the belt that holds up our state government’s proverbial pants.

Another way to describe the event would be to pose it as follows:

Q: How many times can a group of lawmakers use some variance of the phrase “belt-tightening” in a thirty minute press conference?

A: Considerably more than you would think.

Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown (D-Spokane), acting somewhat gubernatorial in her initiation of hard budget cuts, kicked off the afternoon presser by announcing the news that, in light of recent gloomy budget news, the state Senate would begin cutting operations in order to save money even before final cuts are made later on in the session.

Those cuts include reducing administrative budgets and freezing salaries, hiring, travel and major spending.

Brown emphasized repeatedly that the actions Democrats were taking had bipartisan support across the board, though Republicans used their position to talk some too-little-too-late smack, with state Sen. Joe Zarelli telling the Tacoma News-Tribune’s Joe Turner that “we moved from a 52-inch waist to a 51-inch waist and we desperately need to get down to a 32-inch waist.”

Zarelli also told Turner that the Senate’s plan to wait until late February or early March would further hurt the state’s ability to maximize budget savings. Brown, however, reiterated during the press conference that cuts for the sake of cuts were unwise, and that her caucus would be “deliberative as well as urgent.”

Sen. Rodney Tom (D-Mercer Island), who himself may seek greener pastures in the future, added that this move was more than just financially important, it was necessary to show the public that their elected officials have a real “sense of urgency” and that through across the board cuts the message they hoped to put across was that “we are all in this together.”

Tom also added, on multiple occasions, that the Senate plan goes above and beyond the governor’s call, citing a $78 million figure from the governor’s office compared with the $105 million that the state Senate aimed to cut.

House Democrats are also hoping to instigate some budget cuts, though they are taking the more traditional approach of calling for an early action budget bill.

“We appreciate what the Senate did in dropping an early action bill,” said House Ways & Means chair Rep. Kelli Linville (D-Bellingham), and added that the House was taking the more traditional route of creating a fast-tracked budget bill, evoking President Obama’s call for a line-by-line budget review.

“Everybody is going to share the pain,” she added.

Linville appeared tempted, but ultimately refused to give any examples of specific budget cuts prior to caucus meetings, which were set to take place after the conference. She did, however, say that they were hoping to save about $300 million from this budget, which would carry forward into $600 million during the next biennium.

Still, in spite of all the gloomy news for those on the wrong end of the budget machete, the day was not totally without cheer.

When the press conference opened up to questions from the gathered hacks, the politicians responded with the kind of comedy gold that tends to be glaringly absent from the political trail that we have been following for the last year and a half.

A couple of examples:

Asked who would be the watchdog for the coming budget cuts, Brown jokingly responded that it would have to be the seven or eight gathered journos, before immediately amending her answer to say that it would instead be the doomed P-I, which was greeted with equal amount of groans and chuckles.

Sen. Jim Hargrove (D-Hoquiam), meanwhile, did his best Dark Helmet impression when he stated that the Senate Dems would be working at, I kid you not, “ludicrous speed” in order to get the budget cuts rolling.

I suggest they go on a comedy tour with proceeds going toward paying down the budget deficit. Watch out, Paul Blart, Washington State Senate Democrats are gunning for you.