Lots of retiring politicians in the news the past two days. I’ll chalk it up to the economic rebound, but feel free to offer your own theory….
Rep. Norm Dicks (WA-6) just announced his retirement:
The 18-term representative, first elected in 1976, said he and his wife Suzie “have made the decision to change gears and enjoy life at a different pace.”
[…]Dicks is the ranking member on the powerful Appropriations Committee, and would become the panel’s chairman if Democrats won control of the House. […]
“Norm Dicks is a true Washington state institution,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a statement. “But more than that, he is my mentor, my friend, my advisor, my teammate, and my brother. He is our state’s quarterback here in Congress, and I can’t imagine our delegation without him.
Yesterday we also learned of the retirements of state Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-36) and state Rep. Phyllis Gutierrez-Kenney (D-46).
So who are considered the likely candidates for his seat?
What is the partisan lean of the new 6th?
Norm Dicks is 71. (He looks awfully good for a septuagenarian.) He’s smart to kick back and enjoy life while he still can.
I knew many humans who never got to retire: A friend who died of a heart attack at age 52, a co-worker who died one day after he retired, a lawyer I once replaced in a state job who died on the first day of a planned Hawaiian retirement vacation.
There’s more to life than working yourself to death in a job you hate to make money you don’t need to buy things you don’t want to impress people you don’t like.
Yay, no more Norm. Dicks brought a lot of cash and power to the 6th, but in the end I think it left the 6th trapped and time and dependent on congressional largess and made our place weaker not stronger.
@1
The 6th is a fairly moderate Dem place and most of the Republicans that have run against Dick have been far right crazies, so hopefully it wont be too hard to hold onto his seat.
I’ve heard Derek Kilmer and Josh Brown’s names get mentioned as replacements for Dicks, but really I think it’s wide open.
@2
My sister had stage 3 ovarian cancer at 49, which came damn close to killing her. Thanks to some amazing docs, she’s still around and doing great.
Er, septuagenarian congressional dudes with power and money don’t give it up. Not unless the are hearing footsteps, anyway.
Notable recent examples: Murtha and Teddy.
As is likely the case with Snowe, there’s something about Dicks we don’t know everything about just yet.
I was listening on the radio on my commute home last night, and the speaker (I never heard his name) talked about how the big forces behind the Republican Party have conducted a campaign for the last twenty years or so to build up their “back bench” so they could control State legislatures, grab and hold state governor’s seats, and keep Republican-friendly judges in local courts so they could win state Supreme Court election races.
Normally this included recruiting folks to gain experience running for school board and other local seats, selecting “favored” candidates with funding and discouraging others to ensure their election to non-partison seats, and finding alternate ways of “funding” to make sure they don’t personally suffer financially by running for public office. They menter them by introducing them to big Republican fundraisers and donars, and making them feel connected within the rather large and influential Republican party machine.
We are seeing the end result of that strategy being played out in a variety of places. Texas used to be reliably Democratic, but now it’s solid Republican in large part due to the off-year redistricting, election proceedures which effectively result in only 1/3 of the qualified electorate being registered and voting, and a cooperative state Supreme Court which rubber-stamps Republican strategies.
Then there’s Scott Walker, who came to office along with a Republican majority in the legislature and who’s first priority was to make sure the teacher’s unions were destroyed so they couldn’t raise money against them, and a cooperative Supreme Court which agreed that a hastily-called legislative session designed to prevent Democrats from attending was not a violation of the open-meetings laws or internal rules.
And, of course, the Florida state comptroller and the U.S. Supreme Court deciding it was okay to stop a re-count and declare a winner of the 2000 Presidential election in favor of the Republican candidate.
It’s been said that all politics is local, and we need to take that to heart. We need to develop good Democratic candidates, feeding our “farm team” constantly and pushing them upward into higher office at every level.
Continuing from 5 above, I note that the Politico piece linked to by Darryl points out that Dicks would have become the chair of the Appropriations Committee were the Dems to re-take the House in 2012.
I would respectfully suggest that every article we read about this possibility is bullshit. If Dicks had a clean shot at that post, no way he would be stepping down now. House will stay GOP – this is the clearest evidence yet of that outcome.
@6:
An argument can be made that the real success of the Tea Party in 2010 was on all of those down-ballot outcomes. All those state legislatures flipping (if I recall correctly Alabama was a huge win), state governorships changing hands, etc.
This is not dissimilar to the efforts by the left to gain control of as many secretary of state positions as they can. The SoS, after all, counts the votes. Stalin would be proud.
It also is why there are such huge fights over the likes of Miguel Estrada and Goodwin Liu.
Regarding the off-point blurb about FL 2000, don’t forget that the Supremes decided 7-2 that what the Florida supreme court was permitting was unconstitutional according to the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court declared no winner. They remanded.
Norm did good work in Congress for his district and for the state.
In the end walking away from a good position is always a personal decision, and powerful people often have things they worry about that they don’t want others to know.
That said, I wish him well and regret the loss of his ability to represent our interests.
I keep forgetting that Bainbridge Island (population 23K) in now part of the the 6th CD, which should help Dems out a bit.
From 3:
Yay, no more Norm. Dicks brought a lot of cash and power to the 6th, but in the end I think it left the 6th trapped and time and dependent on congressional largess and made our place weaker not stronger.
Maybe term limits are a good idea. Maybe Norm (and other Representatives) should have been limited to, say, no more than 6 terms. That’s lng enough for anyone to serve at that level.
@11
Maybe. But, I think we’d be better served by creating a culture where we had more voter participation and we had more people running for office and I think term limits might create an even more cynical and jaded approach to all things political than we already have and make things worse in the end.
@11, You’ve got term limits in any cycle you can muster the votes to unseat an incumbent.
Over the past thirty years or so, I’ve heard the term limits idea pushed a number of times. In most cases it is the Republicans pushing the idea, but only when it would benefit them (i.e., they are frustrated at being unable to prevent the re-election of senior House or Senate Democrats). I saw this in 1980, 1994, and 2010. Of course, the 1994 freshman GOP class all signed on to voluntarily accept term limits, but only a few of them (including Steve Largent) actually lived up to that promise, the rest just quietly “forgot” about it.
This year you still hear the idea floated a bit, especially by Tea Party groups who want to oust old-guard Republicans as well as Democrats. But the Republican leadership isn’t pushing the idea, because they now control the House and it would apply in spades to guys like Boener and McConnell.
In short, though, its not so much a hit at the guys in office, who could easily avoid the intent by rotating offices with one another. It’s really an attempt to impose an arbitrary restriction on who the voters can select.
I wouldn’t mind seeing Kilmer run – I went to school with him and his older brother here in Port Angeles. But I’d like my local Rep, Kevin Van De Wege, to explore the idea. Just not Jim Hargrove, dear God no. No DINO’s for me, thank you very much.
And on the other side, well….. how many kids did the Craswells have?
@15
I’d like to see a bunch of people run. Someone’s that familiar with DC, but outside of the local political spheres and would be grand.
I’m not sure Kilmer has the guts for DC right now.
No, no, & no. According to the TNT Brian Sonntag, Jim Hargrove, and Tim Sheldon are all looking at running for congress in the 6th.
http://blog.thenewstribune.com.....ckss-seat/
Sonntag I could live with. But I’d rather be banished to a tropical island with Ted Nugent for the rest of my days than have douchebags like Hargrove and ESPECIALLY Sheldon representing me.
@18
Sonntag’s a stodgy, constipated, old white guy who’s been in government since the beginning of time. To his credit Sonntag’s done an alright job of it, but we can do better and we can find someone that’s a better representation of the district.