David Postman has a critique of the Chopp story I published in the Stranger last week.
Postman’s got two basic points. 1) You can’t blame Speaker Chopp for all the progressive bills that got iced this session.
(My story reports that the Dem leadership in Olympia has gutted, tabled or thwarted a number of no-brainer legislative items this session: comprehensive family leave, a cap on payday-loan interest rates, a bill closing the gun-show loophole, a bill to keep tabs on corporate tax breaks by including those de facto expenditures in the budget, legislation preventing employers from holding “captive audience” anti-unionizing meetings, regulations requiring disclosure from pharmaceutical-industry lobbyists, an overall cap on CO2 emissions, tenant relocation assistance and a cap on condo conversions, legislation preventing strip-mining operations on Maury Island, protecting student free-speech rights, a homebuyers’ protection bill, full funding for health-care workers in nursing homes, and a cool follow-up to the infamous $3.2 billion tax break Boeing got in 2003, making the money contingent on a requirement that the company doesn’t engage in union busting.)
And #2, Postman says I actually didn’t get a lot of people to specifically criticize Chopp on the record.
Let’s start with Postman’s first point. Well, he’s right that Chopp isn’t to blame for everything on my list. For example, it was the Senate that nuked one of my favorite bills this session, the student press bill, which passed Chopp’s House. Additionally, Chopp has to play ball with his caucus. He can’t just ignore stubborn committee chairs nor the politics within his caucus.
(Although, as I did point out in my article, Chopp can control the landscape. He had longtime House Finance Chair, Rep. Jim McIntire, ousted because he didn’t agree with McIntire on tax reform. He also moved a tax break bill through committee even though he saw it didn’t have the votes. This is evidence that Chopp, obviously, has more power than most and should be held accountable for that extra power.
Still, Postman’s right that Chopp can’t be blamed for all the disappointments on the liberal side. And granted, that is what my headline said. Headlines though, as Postman well knows, are often beyond the control of the writer, and so, I’ll admit I wasn’t 100% happy with the headline. That said, I’m not backing away from the premise of the story, which is that Chopp remains weirdly risk averse when it comes to pushing a progressive agenda even though he has a commanding majority, and he has a unique and disproportionate amount of power within that super majority.
And so: He should also be held disproportionately accountable.
He’s the Speaker of the House. He sets priorities. It is not unreasonable to lay the failures (as progressives see them) at the feet of the leader—especially a leader who’s elected from the Dennis Kucinich 43rd. If Chopp can prioritize a tax break by yanking it out of a hostile committee, he can prioritize things like the pay day loans cap and yank them out of hostile committees? My story points out that he didn’t.
My story also points out that Chopp was on the receiving end of serious donations from the pay day loan industry, the building industry (with a targeted lobbying dinner too), and the Maury Island strip mining company, Glacier NW.
Postman’s second point is that I really didn’t have tons of people laying the blame on Chopp, specifically. (This critique grew out of a piece Public Radio reporter Austin Jenkins did where Jenkins reported how hard it is to get people to go on record criticizing Chopp. Jenkins went on to rehash an old story on Chopp’s centrist philosophy, which we all covered at the beginning of the session: the Dems made a lot of pick-ups in suburban swing districts in the 2006 landslide and didn’t want to “overreach” and lose those tentative seats. Leaders like Chopp believe that’s the blunder they made in 1994.)
Anyhow, Savage did a post yesterday showing that in fact, I had gotten several people to go on record about Chopp. Postman challenges that contention.
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