The Washington state Capitol at Olympia.

See Also: Senate Dems Make Counter-Offer — Denied Majority Control, They Suggest Co-Chairs for All Committees

OLYMPIA, Dec. 17.—Last week, when a coalition of 23 Republicans and two Democrats announced they had the votes to take over the Senate and they offered to bring the remaining Senate Democrats into the loop, they kept using the word “unprecedented.”

And they were right about that. Nothing like it has ever taken place in the Washington state Senate. But that’s a little like saying Seattle’s Smith Tower holds the world’s record for being the tallest building east of Third Avenue, south of James Street and north of Yesler Way. The fact is, similar power-sharing arrangements have been put into place before, in not-exactly-exotic locales like Alaska and Texas and even in the Washington state Legislature. Lawmakers tell Washington State Wire that cross-party cooperation can work if lawmakers are willing to put squabbling aside, and bipartisanship might even do a better job of representing the interests of the public. You just need one thing – Republicans and Democrats who are willing to work together.

Color him skeptical: Senate Democratic leader Ed Murray.

It’s an important point, when you consider what is going on right now in the Washington state Senate. Democrats haven’t said whether they will accept the power-sharing arrangement that is being proposed by the new Majority Coalition Caucus. But you might get the impression that they are looking for excuses to say no. Senate Democratic leader Ed Murray, D-Seattle, told the Seattle Times editorial board the coalition is shoving a “take-it-or-leave it” offer down the throats of the Democrats who rightly ought to control the Senate, just as they will control the House and the governor’s office next year. He appeared to suggest that the Senate Democrats might prefer to sit in the corner. “I think it would be healthier for the institution if 24 of us are a strong minority influencing the process as a minority,” he said. “I think it would make for a better product in the end.”

Certainly it would be easier for them to play it that way. But better?

Six Committee Chairmanships are Offered

State Sen. Rodney Tom, D-Bellevue, stands with fellow Democrat Tim Sheldon, D-Potlatch and Senate Republican Leader Mark Schoesler, R-Ritzville, at last week’s news conference announcing the formation of the Majority Coalition Caucus.

Technically, the Democrats hold the majority in the Senate – 26 of the chamber’s 49 seats. But Democrats are deeply divided on issues like taxation and support for the agenda of the state’s public-employee and teacher unions. Last March three Democrats crossed party lines and voted for a largely Republican-authored budget that didn’t shunt current expenses into future years, and they wound up  forcing controversial cost-saving reforms. Now two surviving members of that middle-of-the-road troika, state senators Rodney Tom, D-Bellevue, and Tim Sheldon, D-Potlatch, say they want to spare the state another end-of-the-session trauma – by voting with the Republicans when the Senate organizes for business on Jan. 14.

In the new Senate order, Tom will be majority leader. More important for the operations of the Senate, he and fellow Democrat Sheldon will have the deciding votes on the Senate Rules Committee, which decides what bills advance to the Senate floor. Under the proposal they have advanced, Republicans would get the chairmanships of six committees, the most powerful ones to be sure, including the budget, K-12 education and health care panels. Three committees would be chaired jointly by members of both parties. And if the Senate Democrats choose to accept the new arrangement, they would get six committees of their own.

“We’re there to make it work,” Tom said. “It is not going to be easy. But it is what the people expect of us. I just think that more and more people, especially with what is happening back in D.C., are more and more tired of politics dominating how we govern. Any time there is change to the status quo of an institution, there is a little rough spot, so I fully anticipate that, but in the end what the citizens of the state want is for us to get out of the political-machine mode and start governing.”

Lesson From the North

The Alaska state Capitol at Juneau.

Unusual, yes, but hardly without precedent. In the Washington state Legislature, a similar cross-party coalition ruled the state House during the 1963 legislative session.  Meanwhile in New York the state Senate is organizing a bipartisan working majority for its meeting next year. But perhaps more instructive for the state of Washington is the experience of two other legislatures where similar power-sharing arrangements have lasted for years. Alaska might be the best example.

For six years a bipartisan coalition ruled the Alaska Senate, starting in 2007. Voters elected 11 Republicans and nine Democrats to the 20-member body, and when the majority Republicans split on the election of a Senate president, those closest to the political center reached over to the other side and brought the Democrats aboard. All nine Democrats participated; four conservative Republicans sat out. The 2008 and 2010 elections gave the chamber an even split, 10 and 10, meaning that a coalition government was necessary in any case. The Majority Senate Bipartisan Working Group held together until this election, when redistricting gave Republicans a decisive 13-member majority.

“My personal belief is that for us a bipartisan coalition worked very well,” said Kodiak Republican Gary Stevens, who served as Senate president for the last four years. “When the public sends you to Juneau or Olympia, they expect you to go there and get things done. The general public, if they see both parties working together, is never upset by it.

“What we found is that we really decided that we would not be able to deal with the extreme issues of the Republican and Democrat parties. So we didn’t deal with things like abortion on the one hand or gay marriage on the other. We left those things on the table, and we dealt with only things we had a common interest in, and that is most of what we do in the Legislature. Most everything is somewhere in the middle.”

No Extreme Legislation

For the last few years, Washington Senate Republicans have been gazing wistfully at the webpage of the Alaska Senate Bipartisan Working Group.

And so members of both parties got the gavels of Senate committees, and lawmakers got down to work on the state’s central issues – an increase in the oil tax, education reform and public-safety legislation. Oil taxes remain controversial to be sure – at least a partial rollback is one of next year’s big issues.

But already Alaska lawmakers are looking back at the last six years as a golden era when both parties found a way to work together. “No one ever thought it would work, but it worked fantastically for six years,” says East Anchorage Democrat Bill Wielechowski. “People said it was like a breath of fresh air coming into the legislature – there was so much partisan fighting, and all that stopped.

“I think the big thing, and probably the most important thing from our perspective, is that you have touchstone legislation on both sides, the social legislation in particular. We basically agreed we weren’t going to go down that road, and once we did that, it really freed us to concentrate on what was good for Alaska. You know, no abortion legislation, no legislation on gay marriage, all that – it didn’t go anywhere. It was an agreement – legislation that really divides you, you have to keep it on the back burner.”

It’s not the first time it has happened. After the 1992 election, a similar organizational issue divided a Democratic majority in the Alaska state House. Members of the so-called “Bush Caucus,” upset that rural legislators were aced out of key committee assignments, crossed over and formed a majority coalition with Republicans. Washington state Sen. Ann Rivers, R-La Center, was working as an Alaska legislative aide at the time for Rep. Bill Williams, one of the Democrats who organized the coalition and who later switched parties. The rural Democrats got chairmanships, Republicans had numerical majorities on the committees. “It was a good check and balance; no one could run amuck and do what they wanted,” Rivers says. “The minority party, their feelings were hurt, but once they got over that, they started to focus on the business at hand. They admitted the reality and it became very cooperative – I didn’t see any tyranny, certainly, and some really good legislation came out of it.”

A Lone Star Tradition

The Texas state Capitol at Austin.

Meanwhile in Texas, bipartisanship is a matter of voluntary tradition. For the last four decades, the speaker of the House and the lieutenant governor in the Senate have appointed members of both parties as committee chairmen. Typically the majority party gets the most powerful committees, but the tradition of bipartisanship is so strong that when one lieutenant governor tried to break it and award chairmanships only to his fellow Democrats, members of the Senate made his life miserable with parliamentary maneuvers, says Texas Republican Sen. Jeff Wentworth of San Antonio. The lieutenant governor went back to the old way the next time the Senate organized for business.

One reason for Texas bipartisanship is that under the rules of the Senate it takes a two-thirds vote of the body to consider any bill. So extreme legislation is a non-starter, Wentworth says; about the only issues that are decided on party lines are redistricting and more recently, voter I.D. Another factor is that the Texas legislature meets only every two years, as Washington once did, meaning it has plenty of ground to cover. Explains Wentworth, “Most Texans, being common-sense guys and gals, when they get to Austin in the January of the regular session, they know we are going to be there for only four and one-half months, and they look at that mountain of 7,500 bills, and they say, you know what? We can’t thoughtfully go through all of those bills and also be petty partisan bickering politicians at the same time. So we better leave that partisan rhetoric on the front steps of the Capitol building and work as Texans to try to solve Texas’s problems regardless of our party affiliation.”

Has Happened Here

In this state, there are antecedents as well. In the state’s earliest years, one party or the other usually controlled the statehouse by a wide margin, Don Brazier observes in his epic-length “History of the Washington Legislature,” so there weren’t any opportunities for formal coalition building. Occasionally Republicans and Democrats put differences aside and built coalitions around specific issues, like breaking the power of railroads and denying Japanese and Chinese immigrants the right to own property.

But wasn’t until the numbers began to even up in the postwar era that anything like the current situation could occur. The 1963 session offers a rather close parallel: Democrats held a narrow majority in the House and insurgent Dems teamed with Republicans to dump then-House Speaker John L. O’Brien and install Democrat Bill Day as the presiding officer. The “regular Democrats” shunned the rebels. Then, as now, the majority coalition offered chairmanships to the Democratic caucus, but bitter Democrats voted as a whole to reject the deal. One Democrat accepted a gavel, Brazier writes, “but she became something of a pariah within the Democrat caucus.” Squabbling forced the session into overtime and no agreement was reached on redistricting, yet at least lawmakers passed nothing that gave offense to business or labor.

In 1951, Democrats held the majority in the Senate and conservative Dems voted with the Rs, but the power shift wasn’t as clear as today. Other episodes of power-sharing were forced by the voters — there was nothing voluntary about it. In 1947 they elected 23 Democrats and 23 Republicans to the Senate, and conservative Democrats tipped the leadership to the Rs.   Twice the state House was tied with a 49-49 split, in 1979-80, and again from 1999-2001. Those times the House was organized with co-speakers and committee chairmen were named by both parties – they presided on alternate days. Murray, a House member at the time, recalls it as a mess. But former House Speaker Clyde Ballard, Republican of East Wenatchee, has more positive memories: Grown-ups always can find ways to get along. Says Ballard, “If I compare it to being speaker all by myself, what would I choose? Well, hello, obviously I would choose being the speaker, because then we could run an agenda. Probably the best analogy is that it is like a marriage. You can tell your spouse, well I make the decisions here, and that is probably going to be a short marriage.

“Were there glitches? Sure. We had some dustups and some blazing debates. I will tell you it doesn’t work very well, but what really doesn’t work very well is having one party in control of the entire process for a long period of time, and representing 51 percent of the people.”

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