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Westneat: ‘Legislative privilege’ debate cause for concern
By Danny Westneat
Published: February 13, 2023, 6:03am
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At the Statehouse in Olympia, they are embroiled in what seems like a silly little scandal. It involves lawmakers invoking an obscure doctrine called “legislative privilege” as a dodge to keep their official emails and texts secret.
We inherited this notion of legislative privilege from the British. It holds that a politician is immune to being sued or, worse yet, locked up because of something they said while legislating.
I have now looked through 2,647 pages of documents released last week that were previously kept hidden under “legislative privilege.” OK, so I skimmed a bit. But I got the gist enough that I can testify: What’s going on in Olympia is hardly the stuff of kings and queens.
What’s in there that was so delicate it was marked as privileged?
Stuff like:
“How much longer are we going to caucus? Should we grab sandwiches or lunch while we are meeting?”
“Just making sure everyone is aware that it is beef day. They should be set up on the front steps.”
“We should ask Ford lobbyist Becky to drive up the new electric pick up for us to take pictures on.”
I am not making this up — these were among the communiqués that your public servants felt were too controversial for you to hear.
“My college friend’s parents had that same paneling in their basement, along with a bathroom with floor to ceiling shag carpeting,” one senator said in a previously undisclosed Microsoft Teams chat session.
Now it wasn’t all this trivial or inane. One document dump involved a bill regulating pet adoptions. Another that consumed hundreds of redacted pages was a debate about whether to honor Chinese history month during January or May. Another concerned a proposal to designate “The Evergreen State” as the state’s official nickname.
Noted that previously secret memo: “Graham voted no … because ‘this isn’t the highest priority right now.’ ”
You called it, Graham: The Pentagon Papers this is not.
All of these pages of records were posted online by Jamie Nixon, an open government advocate who worked as a spokesperson for the commission that did political redistricting.
It’s good that they’re all up for everyone to read. It makes it more obvious than ever that state legislators should simply end this convoluted legal dance they’re doing to try to hide their work. It’s making them look ridiculous, for one. For another, it’s wrong, whether technically legal or no.
Rep. Gerry Pollet, D-Seattle, is a unique animal in Olympia. He’s both a cog in the political machine and on the board of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, which is constantly poking at that machine.
I asked him: Why hide stuff that’s so mundane? Pollet responded with a term that was bandied around a lot during the Trump era: “normalizing.”
“I think the reason that you redact records like this, records that are just silly to redact in the first place, it’s about normalizing the blacking out of records,” he said. “Why do people hide things? Sometimes you hide things so it will be normal when you really have something to hide.”
The biggest story in American politics in the past decade was how our standards slipped. It started slowly, with a trickle, but then once it got going it gushed like a fire hose. Before we knew it, democracy itself was caught up in a flash flood.
Maybe this is just a silly little scandal down in Olympia. A runaround that will be reversed as we in the press keep flogging away at chastened politicos.
But any normalizing of lower government standards at this point — no matter how small — seems like another step down toward something big.
