In working on next week’s Washington Weekly Briefing, we ran across this from the “1 year ago” file …

The Washington State Republican Party, meeting at Bellevue, for an annual dinner on May 6, ran a straw poll to assess the support there for the various presidential contenders.
357 ballots came in, and split deeply among 17 named candidates (and nine “others”). The “winner” with 54 votes – 15.1% of the total – was businessman Herman Cain, outpacing former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney by two votes.
The next two highest finishers included one person who might or might not right (Mitch Daniels, Indiana governor) and one who has flatly said he will not (Chris Christie, New Jersey governor).

Remember that the next time a presidential cycle comes around.

Floyd McKay has in Crosscut a detailed look at the emerging – and it does continue to emerge – race in the new Washington 1st district, the part of northwestern Washington located roughly well east of I-5 and west of the Cascades.

He focuses on two key points (well, three if you could the lunacy of a prospective Dennis Kucinich campaign in the 1st).

One is that Republican John Koster, who came within a sliver in 2010 of ousting Democratic Representative Rick Larsen, has the Republican nomination sewn up and will be strong in the general election. He has lots of pluses, starting with having run strongly in much of this territory before, and strong organization and traditionally strong fundraising. We’d give him about even odds in the general right now.

The second is that the Democratic side is far from settled, and not yet even at the point where a front-runner can be easily discerned. The five Democratic contenders are all serious candidates with real advantages. Three (Suzan DelBene, Darcy Burner and Laura Ruderman) all have strong Microsoft backgrounds and have raised comparable amounts of money (some of it from that source), and all three have run for major office before (DelBene and Burner for the U.S. House, in the 8th district, and Ruderman for secretary of state, as well as election three times to the state House from King County’s east side). DelBene got a vice of confidence in an endorsement from Governor Chris Gregoire, but none so far look to be pulling far out ahead. And the two men in the race, businessman Darshan Rauniyar and legislator Steve Hobbs, are also running highly serious campaigns. This one has yet to be won by anybody.

One of the most interesting contests in the Northwest this year.

Thought this was settled.

After losing a primary election in his home turf of Ohio, Representative Dennis Kucinich seemed to have bowed to the inevitable, and didn’t bring back up the talk of running for Congress from somewhere else in the country. Like Washington, where some months back he seemed to be semi-campaigning.

But now, here it is again. There’s a web site, Washington Citizens for Kucinich, hosting a petition asking him to run and a survey on the question of whether he should. All of this is aimed specifically at getting him on the ballot in this state where he does not and never has lived.

And seems not to be much wanted, to judge from comments by state Democratic Chair Dwight Pelz: “Dennis Kucinich has to decide what his legacy is going to be. Will he be remembered as a principled member of Congress or the narcissist who lost two Congressional races in two states the same year?”

Kucinich’s interest in the Evergreen State seems to be drawn mostly by its possession of three congressional districts, all strongly or semi-amenable to Democratic candidates, where no incumbent is running this year. Never mind that experienced in-state candidates already have surfaced and gotten to work in all three of them, and that all three would be iffy matches with Kucinich’s kind of politics. (All three are better fits for more moderate Democrats.)

In truth, Kucinich might be a decent fit philosophically for one Washington district – the 7th, based at Seattle. But good luck trying to convince people to vote for a guy who’s never even lived in the home district before campaign season. At all.

Crying out for a study: Do the “emphasis areas” on drugs and prostitution (and sometimes other things, like alcohol offenses work? Or is this one of those intuitively-sensible ideas that go nowhere on closer inspection?

The idea is to identify areas where a negative activity is taking place – 82nd Street in Portland, say – and bust up some of the aggregative activity by banning people convicted of the offense from going there.

King County Council member Reagan Dunn (who is, not to make a perjorative out of this, running for attorney general) points out in a recent release that “In 2011, there were 802 gang-related incidents reported in King County. According to the King County Sheriff’s Office, there has been a 165 percent increase in gang-related crime since 2005. Judges currently have the ability to restrict individuals convicted of drug or prostitution-related offenses from entering specially designated areas.”

Dunn’s thought is to extend the principle to gang activity.

It has the sound of a reasonable idea, especially since – more than most of the other kinds of activity where this has been tried – gang activity tends to be geography-based.

But does it work? We’ve not seen much by way of comprehensive studies providing an indicator, one way or the other. This could be a useful tool, especially for gang enforcement, if it does work. Maybe someone should get a clearer answer to whether it does.

Here’s the background to the public records case, in the endlessly perverse Michael Gendler v. John Batiste, out of the Washington Supreme Court today:

Michael Gendler is an attorney who was bicycling across Montlake Bridge in Seattle one day when his front wheel caught in the bridge’s grating. He was thrown from the bicycle, hit his back and neck, and has been quadriplegic since. Wondering if the same sort of accident had happened to others, he started to research, found that some had, and asked the Washington State Patrol for accident reports on the bridge to find out more. After some back-and-forth, the WSP said it could provide a historic list of accidents on the bridge; Gendler would have to fill out and sign a form to request it. When the attorney in him looked at what he was being asked to sign, he found this: “I hereby affirm that I am not requesting this collision data for use in any current, pending or anticipated litigation against a state, tribal or local government involving a collision at the location(s) mentioned in the data.”

In other words, if he signed and got the information, he wouldn’t be able to use it in the meaningful way. (Of course, if he hadn’t been a lawyer, he might have signed away his right to legal action without knowing he had done so.)

Gendler said this was no fair, and took the WSP to court. The state patrol has fought him all the way up, from trial court to the court of appeals and the Washington Supreme Court Court where, today, it lost for the third time in a row.

The legal resolution of the case was actually fairly complex, because the patrol said the records were gathered in part for federal highway safety purposes which it said have a limitation on legal liability.

That the Patrol failed in this argument probably saved it from some high perversity: Keeping secret records gathered for the purpose of fostering road safety, from a man injured in a road accident seeking the records specifically to press for greater road safety.

Someone in Washington government really ought to start thinking through this kind of thing.

Anyone who continues to wallow in – or even remembers – Watergate, will be fascinated to read a piece just up on Crosscut, a short memoir (adaptation of a speech) by William Ruckelshaus, the first director of the Enmvironmental Protection Agency under Richard Nixon, and briefly a central figure in the Watergate scandal. Ruckelshaus, though, was one of the small number involved in it to emerge with his reputation intact. He may be best known today for his decision to quit a high position in the federal government rather than take an action he believe was wrong; he fair mark of actual integrity.

Ruckelshaus has lived and practiced law in Seattle since the mid-70s.

The article is a little long but well worth the read.

While the legal battles go on, the second year mark after passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare?) is also only about halfway through the process of its rollout.

Washington Insurance Commissioner Mike Kriedler had this comment on it, worth running here at length:

The Affordable Care Act’s most controversial component – the mandate requiring everyone to have health insurance – is two years out. But two years after the law’s enactment, many Washington consumers are benefitting from less contentious reforms.

“The Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate gets most of the attention, but it shouldn’t overshadow the success stories of the early reforms,” said Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler. “By far the most popular benefit of health reform that we hear about is the ability for parents to keep their adult kids on their health plans – especially in today’s economy – and there are many more.”

Washington consumers benefitting from the Affordable Care Act’s early reforms include:

More than 2.4 million people who no longer face lifetime caps on their health benefits.
More than 52,000 young adults up to age 26 who have stayed on their parents’ health plans.
More than 1.2 million people who now have coverage for preventive care with no co-pays or deductibles.
More than 60,000 people in Medicare who have saved hundreds on their prescription drugs.
Other reforms in force thanks to federal funds available under the Affordable Care Act include:

Creating public access to health insurance rate requests.
Establishing a new marketplace in Washington state for health insurance in 2014 – called an exchange – where people can shop for health plans, compare their options and apply for subsidies.
“If the opponents of health reform succeed in overturning the new law, what will they say to the nearly one million people in Washington without health insurance who get up every day hoping they don’t have a medical emergency?” said Kreidler. “The Affordable Care Act is not perfect, but it moves us in the right direction and is the only meaningful health reform that’s passed in decades.”

Kreidler added that most people in our state – 85 percent – already have health insurance and won’t be impacted by the individual mandate. And of those who are uninsured, 85 percent will qualify for either Medicaid or subsidies to purchase coverage in the new health exchange.

Additional reforms taking effect later this year:

Beginning Aug. 1, all health plans must cover free well visits, contraceptives, and other preventive services for women.
After Sept. 23, all health plans must provide consumers with easy to understand description of their coverage including deductibles, co-pays, as well as costs for using in-network and out-of-network medical services.

Washington has three open – meaning no incumbent running – U.S. House seats this year. (Could be more, theoretically, but probably not.) In one, the 1st district north and east of Seattle to Canada, lively primaries seem to be developing in both parties for what looks like a competitive congressional district.

In the other two, early indications are that one contender in each, Derek Kilmer in the sixth district and Denny Heck in the new 10th, both Democrats, may become slam dunks and start rehearsing their swearing-ins.

Businessman and TVW co-founder Heck, ironically, was defeated in 2010 running in the third district, an Olympia Democrat running in a districts where the political weight was in Clark County to the south. This year, Heck is running in a new district weighted around Olympia, a district so favorable for him he could almost have drawn it himself.

The new sixth district is not so terribly different from the old one as to be a preclusive lock for a candidate. But Kilmer, a state senator with a solid electoral track record in a marginal legislative district, seems to be emerging as the one major candidate to replace retiring Democrat Norm Dicks, the northwest’s most senior member of Congress. And many cycles have passed since Dicks has been seriously challenged.

Tacoma News Tribune columnist Peter Callaghan, while not criticizing Kilmer at all, put some finer points on this in today’s column. He points out that since 1932, when the district was created, it has been “open” just twice, most recently 36 years ago. On that occasion, he writes, “Democrats picked from six candidates and Republicans from three. The fixers probably see that primary as a case study for what not to do because voters, not insiders, made the choice. But that’s the kind of thinking that has left Washington voters with an uninspiring primary this year. So far we have an open state governor race with no primary on either side and an open state attorney general race with no primary on the Democrat side and a marginal one on the Republican side.”

Sometimes even open seats aren’t really all that open.

One tendency in the ever-strange Republican presidential primary season has been this: When the words goes forth that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is “inevitable” as the Republican nominee, he tends to win. When something comes along and punctures that, even if briefly, he tends to lose.

Just ahead of Super Tuesday, Romney’s timing looks pretty good. He won, decisively, the caucuses in Washington state, and that wouldn’t necessarily have been a foregone conclusion. Those caucuses have gone for Mike Huckabee and Pat Robertson in times past. And other candidates, notably Ron Paul, have a significant presence in the state. But since the Michigan and Arizona primaries, there’s been a steady drumbeat that yes, really, we mean it this time, Romney will be the guy. And that may have helped him in Washington.

Speculation here is that this will spill over into Idaho tomorrow. Romney does have natural advantages in Idaho. Nearly all of the state’s Republican establishment, from the governor and senators on down, is in his camp, and the large portion of Idaho Republicans who are Mormon will largely be there too. (There’s even a small thread of Romney’s family history in southeast Idaho.) Substantial as all that is, it’s not necessarily enough.

But the environment is favorable too. Idaho Republicans heading to caucus – a new event for them in the Gem State – will be well aware of the national situation and, especially in northern Idaho, of Washington state’s too. A strong Romney win in Idaho looks like the probable outcome.

Will they fool us again?

Among the regulatory items showing up in Monday’s edition of the Washington Weekly Briefing:

This bit of rule changing by the Washington Secretary of State’s office: “Documents received by fax are of poor quality, difficult to read, and must often be rejected due to illegibility, causing a delay in filing. Given that many more options exist today, such as e-mail, on-line submission, and overnight mail, the fax machine will be phased out of use.”

No argument here. We only rarely use ours any more (though it’s still connected). Just wondering how long it’ll be before nearly all governments do the same?

For more about the Briefing (or its Oregon and Idaho counterparts), see the box to the right.

Norm Dicks

Norm Dicks is the senior Northwest member of Congress, in either chamber. Through, that is, the end of this year: He said this morning, in something of a surprise, that he will retire after that.

So, fairly late in the cycle, the newly-redistricted Washington 6th district seat comes open.

Dicks was trained in the Warren Magnuson shop, and very much comes from a time of greater civilty in Congress, and also out of the bringing-home-the-bacon era. The area around Tacoma and Kitsap County may not see so much bacon, much of it in the form of military developments, again for a long stretch.

A description in this morning’s Roll Call e-mail report: “Dicks, 71, has represented the Olympic Peninsula of Washington since 1977. He is one of the most powerful and influential military hawks in his party and has had the top Democratic seat on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee since Jack Murtha died. Like so many others who are retiring this year, he comes from an era when collegiality and bipartisanship were viewed as congressional virtues — not dangerous or disingenuous. In a statement, Dicks summed up his 18-term career by declaring that he was proud of his ability to bridge “the ideological and party lines that tend to separate us, and I have always believed that we can achieve greater results if we leave politics aside when the election season and the floor debates are over.””

Dicks would have had an easy re-election; he has not had a close contest in a very long time. The new 6th House district generally covers the Olympic peninsula and Kitsap County, plus Gig Harbor and a slice of central Tacoma. Under most conditions, this will be a Democratic district. But there are Republican bases here, and substantial competitive areas – Kitsap is politically marginal, and much of what is Democratic is on the conservative side of Democratic – quite some distance from Seattle Democratic. (In that, Dicks was a realistic mirror of the district.)

Will be highly interesting to see who enters the races, as serious candidates are going to have to do quickly.

What, specifically, was the motivation for the massive planned undertaking of rebuilding the Interstate 5 Columbia River bridge? Was the heavy traffic that periodically jams up (but actually is lighter than it was some years back)? Was it bridge deterioration (though other bridges around the region, ad eve in Portland, are in worse shape)?

Willamette Week points out something that most readers (us, unfortunately, among them) of the Oregon Supreme Court’s recent decision on the bridge missed: The original motivation for the whole billion-dollar project seems to have been extending light rail from Portland to Vancouver.

In the article “The $2.5 billion bridge,” the paper notes, “The massive Interstate 5 bridge and freeway project is a “political necessity” to persuade Clark County residents to accept something they previously didn’t want—a MAX light-rail line from Portland to Vancouver.”

Or, from the Court’s decision: “It was politically impossible for the light rail project to proceed without also building new interstate bridges across the Columbia River … Or as Metro later summarized it: ‘There is no light rail without the freeway bridge[s] being replaced.’”