U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA, 1) stopped by the Cola offices today for a sprawling interview. (We’ll have a full post about our interview on Monday). For now, here’s a quote sampler. Among other things, we talked about:
1) The election results (“There was all this talk that there was going to be this tsunami [of opposition to the Democrats]. In my case, that didn’t happen, but we’re going to be prepared, because now under this Supreme Court decision [allowing corporations to contribute directly to independent expenditure campaigns for and against candidates], a big energy company can come in and dump in $1 billion and call themselves Americans for Mother’s Milk and no one will ever no where the money came from.”);
2) The recession (“The stimulus bill stopped us from falling into the Grand Canyon. It kept cops on the streets and teachers in schools.”);
3) The stalled climate change bill (“The Senate is frozen in a block of ice while the rest of us are melting.”);
4) The war in Afghanistan (“We have all these Republicans talking about cutting federal spending. Well, if you want to cut federal spending, there’s about $30 billion a year we could cut.”);
5) The big banks bailout bill, which he voted against, but which Sen. Patty Murray voted for (“I defend Patty Murray [against Dino Rossi] because it would be criminally negligent to repeal the Wall Street reform bill.”);
6) Earmarks (“This whole idea that if we got rid of earmarks we’d reduce the federal deficit just isn’t true … It’s the budget and it would be a federal bureaucrat deciding where that Army Corps of Engineers’ money went rather than Patty Murray”);
7) And of course, his longtime and suddenly high-profile cause, net neutrality (“If we don’t take action, I believe over the next decade we will see the Internet become more like cable, where they aggregate content. We have to find some way to maintain a system where the consumer is the aggregator.”
