Darcy Burner, who is currently duking it out with freshman republican incumbent Dave Reichert to represent the 8th Congressional District, answers slog readers’ questions! Read and enjoy:

Where is Burner on efforts to protect Puget Sound from oil spills, protect ANWR, protect the national forests, etc?

BURNER: We must protect our environment, and I will fight hard to do so.
Clean water, clean air, healthy ecosystems, and strongly protected federal parks, forests, and wildlife refuges are an important legacy we must leave for our children. There has been an unfortunate tendency in recent years to allow some companies to do things which are greatly profitable to them but which all of the rest of us pay for in environmental impact. When we allow companies to ignore their impact on these things, it means that we pay the environmental costs while those companies reap the profits.
I would fight to:
—protect Puget Sound from oil spills;
—protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from drilling; and
—protect all national parks, national forests, and wildlife refuges from development, mining, and environmentally-destructive resource extraction, as was intended by designating them protected lands.

This stands in stark contrast to my opponent, who was rated at 28% on his environmental record by the non-partisan League of Conservation Voters. As a few examples:
—he cast the deciding vote on H.R. 4241, which allows privatization of public lands, including national forest and national park lands;
—he cast the deciding vote on H.R. 3893, which gutted a number of environmental safeguards affecting the oil industry;
—he voted for H.R. 6 (the Energy Bill), which also decreased environmental safeguards related to the oil industry and shielded manufacturers of MBTE from lawsuits, despite its presence in much of America’s drinking water and its links to cancer; and
—despite his high-profile claims about opposing drilling in the Arctic, he has in fact voted several times to allow such drilling.
I expect, by contrast, to be as strong an advocate for the environment as Congressman Jay Inslee, who scored a 100% on the LCV scorecard.

Washington citizens bear a huge tax burden that should be lessened. Do you agree or do you think taxes should be increased?

BURNER: I approach this the same way I have approached managing finances in my role as a businesswoman or in my household: balance the budget while making the best investments possible.
I find it unconscionable that the Bush administration wants to pile their debt onto our children, while slashing the investments in education, infrastructure, and technology development that would secure a better future for everyone. It is especially awful to do it in order to pad the nests of profitable corporations and the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.
Our current tax system places an unfair burden on middle class and working families — and the Bush administration and Republican Congress have made it worse. The President’s tax policies are bankrupting future generations for the short-term benefit of those who need it the least.
Bush and his allies in Congress have riddled the tax code with new loopholes and subsidies that benefit special-interests and the very wealthy. By doing so, they have created a tax code that undermines the value of work and shifted more of the tax burden onto the middle class.
Under Bush, the middle-class share of the tax burden has risen while the wealthiest Americans’ share has dropped. The corporate picture is, in many cases, even worse, with companies like Exxon Mobil receiving billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies — at the same time they post the largest quarterly profits of any company in the history of the planet.
The tax system must be changed to ease the burden on the middle class and small businesses and ensure that large corporations and the very wealthy pay their fair share. This must be done in conjunction with balancing the federal budget and making smart investments in our national priorities.

Aside, obviously, from getting comfortable… what is your first major goal as WA District 8’s Congressional representative? Name your highest priorities.

BURNER: First, I’m going to find my office. Then I’m going to pay a visit to each member of the Washington Congressional Delegation and ask their advice about how I can be most effective in my first term. Then I’ll see about my committee assignments — probably by following up on the conversation I had last week with Congressman Steny Hoyer, who will likely be the new House Majority Leader if the Democrats take the fifteen seats they need.
Then I’ll vote in favor of the five votes that will happen in the first five days the Democrats control the House, which will establish the country’s national priorities. These are:

A bill to make college as universal in the 21st century as high school was in the 20th;
A bill to create a National Institute of Science and Engineering, like the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
A bill to promote energy independence;
A bill ensuring that everyone who has a job has healthcare;
A bill to organize a bipartisan summit on the budget — and then balance it.

The alternative minimum tax is starting to hit middle class American families - should the law be changed to stop that or should those taxes be allowed to hurt working families too?

BURNER: I will work to reform the tax code to make it both simpler and fairer. As part of this, we must reform the alternative minimum tax, to eliminate its spillover onto middle class American families.

Will she push for full us withdrawal from Iraq in the near future (including ALL US military bases)?

BURNER: This war is not an abstraction for me: it is family. My brother is in the 101st Airborne. He has served one tour in Iraq, and we cannot be certain he will not be required to serve another. He and I talk regularly about the soldiers' view of the facts on the ground — and about what Congress could do to make things better.
While I believe the Bush Administration misled the American people about the intelligence and the motivation for the war, I firmly believe we need to focus on a forward-looking policy that secures Iraq without an indefinite commitment of our troops and their families.
I want to be clear about something: our troops have done everything we have asked them to do, and they have done it with courage and a willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the greater good that puts nearly all of the rest of us to shame in comparison.
We asked them to topple a brutal dictatorship, and they did it faster than anyone believed possible.
We asked them to secure the nation and make sure there were no weapons of mass destruction, and they did that.
We asked them to keep the peace while the Iraqis formed an interim government and negotiated a constitution, and they did that.
We asked them to hold back an increasingly violent insurgency while Iraqis held another election, and they did that.
And now, they are there waiting while the politicians in Washington D.C. fail to figure out what's next and how we give Iraq back to the Iraqis and bring our brave soldiers home. We owe it to them to have clear benchmarks to measure success. We owe it to them to ask the tough questions and hold this administration accountable. Unfortunately, the Republican Congress has been little more than a rubber stamp for George Bush — and my opponent is one of them.
The best thing we could do for our troops is to establish clear benchmarks in the key areas of security, governance, reconstruction, and internationalization. I am also committed to bringing our troops home as soon as possible. Responsible and pragmatic foreign and national security policy should also deal with more than just Iraq. While the Republicans have been waging war in Iraq, they have failed to make smart decisions about other global threats. For instance:
Iran has restarted development of nuclear weapons and North Korea stands poised to follow. Yet, the Republicans pulled the U.S. out of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and refused increased funding to buy nuclear material from former Soviet-block countries.
In Afghanistan, more American troops were killed in 2005 than in any previous year and the insurgency is growing. Yet, the Republican Congress cut funding for reconstruction this year by almost 50%.
The terrorists responsible for September 11th are still at large.

Pragmatic leadership can solve these problems — we just have to elect leaders who will ask the tough questions and hold this administration accountable.

I would ask Burner if she has any ideas about health care costs that have gone up 78% over the past five years, and are increasing every year at a rate higher than that.

BURNER: America's healthcare system is incredibly inefficient. More than half of all of the money we spend on healthcare in this country goes towards overhead — a large amount of it shuffling paper between doctors, insurance companies, hospitals, pharmacies, etc.
We can start by quickly achieving dramatic decreases in healthcare cost increases through substantial investments in health care information technology. Strategic investments can help us realize improvements in the quality of care, increase effectiveness and efficiency and reduce overall health care costs.
The use of information technology in health care lags behind information technology advancements in every other major sector. We can give doctors and nurses the opportunity to provide a higher quality of care by dramatically increasing productivity and breaking down barriers to information.
This is, by the way, a bipartisan view: Congressman Adam Smith (D-WA) and Congresswoman Cathy McMorris (R-WA) have been working together on just such proposals.

What are Burner's thoughts on the No Child Left Behind program?

BURNER: We must invest aggressively in education at every level — and we must do it in ways that get the results we want. As No Child Left Behind is currently implemented, it fails on both counts.

First, because NCLB is terribly underfunded, it diverts money from teaching (and anything else that is directly beneficial to individual students). There is broad-based agreement that the programs have been underfunded by between $6 billion and $10 billion per year, with a cumulative impact of between $30 billion and $45 billion since the legislation was passed. Without adequate funding, money that could be used to directly benefit students is instead diverted to the administrative requirements of NCLB.

Second, because of flaws in the way success is measured by NCLB, it undermines the result we seek: universally well-educated Americans. We should strive to have the most effective workforce in the world coupled with universal access to opportunity for every child who is willing to work hard.

One of the most egregious ways in which NCLB fails is by providing perverse incentives to schools to have their poorest-testing students drop out, rather than seek or receive the help they need. If a student remains enrolled, their poor performance on tests threatens the school's results and therefore funding. If, on the other hand, those students drop out, then the overall performance of the school is viewed as having increased. The students who have dropped out are not counted against the school, despite the fact that the system has then utterly failed and left behind some the students most in need of educational help.

Certainly one of my early priorities in Congress will be to work to fix the things that are broken in No Child Left Behind.

How would you propose to control the borders? Should we? What do you propose we do with the millions that are here?

BURNER: We need comprehensive immigration reform. It should include increased border security, tough sanctions on employers who hire illegally and an immigration process that is safe, legal and orderly. The plans put forth by the President and the Republican House fall woefully short.
Any reform must include a realistic plan for the 11 million undocumented immigrants already here. We should create a system in which illegal immigrants can come forward and register, pay an appropriate fine, and receive a temporary worker permit which provides them with a multi-year path to citizenship, if they meet certain requirements and contribute to our society by living crime free, working hard and paying taxes.

Would Burner have voted for the Patriot Act Renewal as is? Would she have supported changes to it?

BURNER: While I firmly believe that we must work aggressively to make Americans safer, the ways we do that must be consistent with this country's core values. We decided long ago that a free society requires limits on government's intrusion into the lives of its citizens and strong safeguards to protect them from arbitrary abuse of governmental power.
The Patriot Act has several flawed provisions. For instance, the provisions related to National Security Letters (NSLs) provide almost unfettered power to the FBI to demand a wide range of sensitive and constitutionally protected information (such as what books you've checked out from the library) without obtaining prior judicial approval, without demonstrating a compelling need, and without any means for the recipient of an NSL to contest it. Because the Patriot Act also removes any requirement of individualized suspicion, NSLs may be used to demand information about entirely innocent people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. In addition, recipients of NSLs are forbidden from telling anyone they've received them.
These are likely violations of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the United States Constitution — the same Constitution I will swear to uphold if elected (and I take that oath very, very seriously).

What are her thoughts on Global Warming and what proposals does she have to halt it?

BURNER: Global warming is a real and present threat, and we must act now to prevent whatever damage to the environment it is still possible to prevent, and to mitigate the damage we have caused. That process begins by honestly dealing with our addiction to oil, which is at the root of our problems.
I recently wrote a piece for the Seattle Times about energy policy, which is one of the most critical pieces of addressing global warming. We have an opportunity to innovate solutions to this problem, to address the environmental, national security, and economic problems created by our current policies and addiction to oil. But we must make the choice to invest — and the current administration has paid it no more than lip service.
Even if we had enough domestic oil to meet our needs (and we do not), drilling would not address these issues. As long as Americans demand huge quantities of oil, authoritarian governments will continue to benefit from global prices kept high by our demand, the environment will continue to suffer, and the economy will remain vulnerable. Furthermore, American industry will fall further behind more innovative foreign competitors who are serious about developing alternatives. The only answer to these issues is to get serious about reducing our demand for oil.
So let's innovate. We Americans are good at that, especially when we have a clear goal. But instead of lip service, we need a real plan to mobilize the creativity of our nation and forge a new path. In the process, we will open the door to a vibrant new economy. Investments in alternative-energy technologies will produce new industries and family-wage jobs, and there are many ways to build on existing strengths right here in the Northwest. For example:
--Create incentives for our local heavy-truck industry to design more-efficient vehicles.
--Guarantee local biofuels entrepreneurs access to existing fuel-distribution channels.
--Apply local manufacturing expertise to wind turbines. (Twenty years ago, Boeing built the world's largest wind turbine right here in Washington. Since then, while our country was cutting funding for alternative-energy research, other nations pressed forward and today's largest wind turbine manufacturers are in Europe, the leading producer of the world's fastest-growing power technology.)
--Capitalize on the confluence of our software industry, innovative local utilities, world-class universities and top-notch research labs to design "smart grid� technologies to run electrical grids more efficiently, operate our traffic arteries more smoothly, and design and operate green buildings that will cut fossil fuel dependence without compromising quality of life.
Energy independence merits more than a throwaway line in a speech. It is America's rightful destiny and a real opportunity to create a brighter future for ourselves, our children and our planet.
To get there we need leaders who will ask the American people to engage, commit and even to sacrifice. It is clear that this president and the Republican leadership in Congress are not up to that challenge. It is time to replace them with leaders who are.

Right now there's a national debate going on over one of the hottest cultural issues — how should we teach evolution? I'd like to know if you think students should learn both the evidence for and against Darwin's theory? Not intelligent design or anything else, just the evidence for, but also against, Darwin's theory.

BURNER: The teaching of science (and everything else) should be as accurate as possible. This includes teaching students about levels of certainty and uncertainty in science.
We know, for instance, that gravity exists, and that it exerts its influence in very measurable ways. We do not know, however, why gravity exists, which means that there is much about how it works that we don't yet understand — like its relationship (if any) to magnetism, or the ways in which it could be reversed. Heck, we don't even know why time seems to flow only in one direction. Nonetheless, gravity, unidirectional time, and evolution are the best explanations we have for the behaviors and patterns we see, and in science (as in all things) we go with the best explanation we have until we find a better one.
I suspect that much of the problem we are having regarding the teaching of evolution, by the way, is because we don't do enough of teaching uncertainty and describing why things are the best explanations we have. If people understood how many things are only partially understood, they'd be a lot less spooked by the fact that the progress of life on earth is only partially understood (and better understood, in terms of the underlying mechanics, than many of the things we take utterly for granted — like, say, gravity).