Tag: Reuven Carlyle

Democratic Party, Elections, Environment, legislature

Longtime Legislator Carlyle Says He’s Going Out on Top

www.senatedemocrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2021...

By John Stang

On Monday, longtime state Sen. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, announced that he won’t run for re-election. In an interview with PubliCola, Carlyle said he has “a deep sense of fulfillment” and is “taking the luxury of going out on top.”

He is the second Seattle state senator to announce that he won’t seek re-election, following Democratic Sen. David Frockt (D-46), who announced his retirement in October.

Seattle’s liberal legislators have gradually shifted further left over time, a trend that led to rumors that Carlyle would face a primary challenge from someone on the left. (As PubliCola reported Thursday, Rep. Noel Frame, D-36, has said she will seek the seat Carlyle is vacating.)

Carlyle said his party’s ongoing leftward tilt (at least in the Puget Sound region) had nothing to do with his decision to leave. Citing his margin of victory in 2018, when he won 89 percent of the vote, Carlyle said he wasn’t worried about reelection. As of Thursday, he had $135,000 remaining in his campaign account, according to state Public Disclosure Commission records.

Instead, Carlyle pointed to the 2021 passage of the Climate Commitment Act  as a crowning achievement of his legislative career. The Climate Commitment Act places a cap on greenhouse gas emissions while creating a program to auction off emissions allowances to large polluters. It took Carlyle several years to get the legislation passed, after first facing a hostile Republican-controlled Senate, then opposition from moderate Democrats in swing districts after his party took over the Senate in 2018.

Carlyle said his biggest unfulfilled wishes are eliminating the death penalty and bolstering the state’ data privacy laws — efforts that have passed the Senate, but stalled in the House.

“We won the Super Bowl of climate activities,”  he said.

The 2021 law requires the state Department of Ecology to create a system by 2023 capping the state’s annual industrial carbon emissions, a cap that slowly decreases over time—from almost 100 million tons in 2018 to 50 million by 2030 and 5 million by 2050.

The state will auction off parts of the overall annual limit to large polluters—those that emit 25,000 metric tons or more of greenhouse gases annually four times a year, and companies will be allowed to trade, buy and sell those allowances. The state estimates that about 100 companies produce that quantity of greenhouse gases, including the oil, cement, steel and power industries, and predicts that the auctions will raise about $500 million a year for projects aimed at reducing carbon emissions (and alleviating the impact of climate change) across the state.

Carlyle also sponsored a bill in 2019 that will phase out all coal-fired electricity in Washington by 2025 and eventually phase out natural-gas power as well. The new law sets a goal of 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2045. Over the past several years, Carlyle said, “we have passed the strongest suite of climate change legislation in United States history at the state level.” Continue reading “Longtime Legislator Carlyle Says He’s Going Out on Top” →

Democratic Party, Elections, legislature, Morning Fizz, race

Republican Files Anti-CRT Bill, State Senator Carlyle Bows Out, Rep. Frame to Run

UPDATE (to the second item): State Rep. Noel Frame announced this morning on twitter that she’ll be running for Sen. Reuven Carlyle’s open seat.

 

1. Like other conservative lawmakers around the country, Washington state Republicans have introduced a bill to score cheap political points off their constituents’ outrage over critical race theory. The bill would create a statewide mandatory curriculum for K-8 history classes and bar schools from including any material related to the New York Time’s 1619 Project, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist, and critical race theory in class curricula.

Critical race theory is a form of scholarly analysis of race, racism, and the law that is taught at the college and post-college level.  Over the past year, conservative activists have pushed CRT into the forefront of the culture war by claiming, falsely, that schools are using it to teach white children that they are both individually racist and responsible for systemic racism.

Now, Washington state Republican Jim Walsh (R-19, Aberdeen) is appealing to misinformed and outraged voters by proposing his own anti-CRT legislation. Walsh’s bill would require K-8 public schools to teach “age-appropriate” civics courses based on a list of 23 required reading materials that include the Federalist Papers, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations; the second of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government; the transcript of the first Lincoln-Douglas debate; and information about historical white supremacy and how it was “combatted through peaceful protest, civic engagement, and the American courts.”

Walsh said he came up with the list by consulting with his constituents rather than educational professionals: “I think the people of Washington are who we should listen to, not self-appointed experts.”

According to the ACLU of Washington’s Youth Policy Counsel, Kendrick Washington, the bill is “censorship, plain and simple,” as it prohibits teachers from discussing “issues of the most profound national importance, such as the impact of systemic racism in our society.” Washington said the bill would force all state public schools to continue teaching  “bland, average” U.S. history, , and make it difficult for schools to add diverse historical perspectives to their curricula. Although individual teachers could choose to add other reading material, such as the 1619 Project, to the list, teachers would be barred from “giving deference to any one perspective” on the additional reading material.

2. Longtime state Senator Reuven Carlyle (D-36, Seattle) announced Monday that he would not run for re-election this November when his term expires. While many of his colleagues in Olympia are looking back at Carlyle’s legacy as an environmental champion and as a stickler for tax fairness and budget transparency, we’re wondering who’ll take his place.

The district’s two  state representatives, Noel Frame and Liz Berry, are both poised for the position. Although Frame has seniority, serving in the House since 2016, she already plays a vital role for the Democrats as the House Finance Committee Chair and may not want to give up the role. Last year, Frame pushed the capital-gains tax through the legislature, something state Democrats had been trying to do for a decade. Berry, who was first elected in 2020, is vice chair of  the House Labor Committee.

Both Frame and Berry congratulated Carlyle on social media. On her Facebook page, Frame said she and Berry are “asking for a little bit of time to evaluate what move makes the most sense for advancing our shared values and moving forward a progressive policy agenda” in the legislature.

The process for replacing Carlyle, who may have been worried about an intra-party primary challenge similar to the one that gave moderate state Sen. Mark Mullet (D-5, East King County, Issaquah)  a scare, is not an anointment; as always, voters will make the final decision through the primary and general-election process this year.

—Leo Brine

 

legislature, State of Washington, Urbanism

GOP Proposed More than a Dozen Bills to Preempt Cities This Session
State preemption bills as of March 1, 2017

Conventional wisdom holds that Republicans are the party of “local control,” arguing that towns and counties, not big-government bureaucrats in state legislatures or the federal government, should be able to decide what rules and laws work best for them. Small-c conservatives feared overreach from distant authorities, and argued that top-down rules, like state minimum wage laws, could threaten local economies and communities in ways that legislators in faraway capital cities could never anticipate.

That orthodoxy has never been entirely true, of course—for most of the last century, the GOP has been the party that advocates for regulating women’s bodies and peeking into couples’ bedrooms—but the shift has been especially pronounced in the Washington State Legislature in the past few years, as a newly emboldened clique of rural and exurban Republicans have proposed dozens of preemption bills aimed at stopping progressive laws in liberal cities like Seattle.

This past year, according to Seattle’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations, legislators proposed 16 bills that would preempt local authority. Most are aimed at local Seattle laws or proposals that frustrate the business community—such as SB 5149, sponsored by Sen. Joe Fain of Auburn, which would put the kibosh on Seattle City Council members’ efforts to require paid family leave, or SB 5620, from Sen. Curtis King of Yakima, which would bar Seattle from regulating transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft.

Others are aimed at stopping Seattle from passing socially liberal legislation, such as two bills by Sen. Mark Miloscia, from Federal Way, to prevent Seattle from opening supervised drug consumption sites (SB 5223) and authorizing homeless encampments (SB 5656). Still others take aim at local anti-discrimination laws, like the one in Seattle prohibiting landlords from refusing to rent to tenants using Section 8 vouchers or other nontraditional income sources.

“We’re a home rule state here in Washington, but if there are jurisdictions that have an idea and want to proceed with something that bothers [legislators], especially if it’s in the business arena—because there are businesses that work across jurisdictional lines—that can create tensions and conflicts,” says Seattle Democratic Sen. Reuven Carlyle, who recently wrote a blog post panning the preemption trend. But the larger fear, Carlyle says, isn’t just businesses will have to navigate a complicated web of overlapping rules—it’s that once progressive ideas take hold in one place, they tend to spread across the state.

“Once you start to see some of these policies get some momentum at the local level—and, worst of all, actually start to work—people in other towns and cities say, ‘Hey, maybe I’d like to make a higher minimum wage too,’ and it takes off,” Carlyle says. (So far, three cities—Seattle, SeaTac, and Tacoma—have passed local minimum wages that are higher than the statewide minimum, prompting legislators to propose a bill last year that would have preempted local minimum wage laws). “That’s the fear.”

The trend isn’t just taking place in Washington; as the New York Times reported in 2015, “So-called pre-emption laws, passed in states across the country, have barred cities from regulating landlords, building municipal broadband systems and raising the minimum wage.” Many of the bills are backed or drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a national group that provides model legislation to conservative state legislators. The Times noted that the states where such bills have actually passed—as opposed to bubbling up perennially but never quite making it through both houses, as they do in Washington—are Republican-controlled states like Texas and Arkansas.

With the state legislature split by the slimmest of margins (Republicans hold an effective 25-24 majority in the senate and Democrats control the house 50-48, it’s still hard for any of these local preemption bills to get through. But that could change, if Republicans manage to take control of both houses. “We’re one vote away from those types of bills passing,” Carlyle says. “If the Republicans took over, they would very quickly raise preemption to the top tier of legislative priorities.”

Then again, would the Democrats behave any differently if the tables were turned? Dave Williams, government relations director for the Association of Washington Cities, says both parties tend to favor preemption once they get in power. “Our experience is that the things we have to defend against are different depending on who’s in charge,” Williams says. For example, Williams says Carlyle himself “was problematic in the past about how we deal with some of the issues relating to marijuana revenues.” (Carlyle opposed past efforts to give cities a greater share of tax revenues from recreational marijuana sales).

“It goes back and forth—it’s not a one-party deal,” Williams says. “It just so happens that right now, especially on some business issues, the Republicans want to preempt” cities like Seattle. When Democrats had more power, “We tended to get mandates on environmental regulations without the money to support enforcing them.”

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