Dear friends and neighbors,
I’ve heard from many of you over the past few weeks, through emails and phone calls, about the chaos in the Trump administration and the potential harm to our state and communities. What we’re seeing is scary, and you’re right to be concerned.
Day after day, we’re seeing new stories about federal employees being laid off, funding for essential services like early learning and cancer research being suddenly halted, attacks on the civil rights of people of color and our LGBTQ+ friends, family and neighbors, and more. Planes are quite literally crashing out of the sky while the president lays off traffic controllers.
This can all feel overwhelming. It’s an intentional tactic from Trump and his allies to “flood the zone” with as many attacks as possible, all at once — they know they won’t all succeed, but their goal is to overwhelm, demoralize, and prevent us from defending our shared values.
I want to assure you — I will continue fighting every day to protect our values and pursue every legal and legislative avenue to stop the attacks that Trump and Elon Musk are making against Washington state.
I’m glad to be working with our attorney general, Nick Brown, to support the lawsuits against the federal government’s lawless actions. I’m proud we’ve had early success in our lawsuits regarding the 14th amendment of the constitution and birthright citizenship, federal funding for health care, education, law enforcement, and more, and gender-affirming health care. We just joined a new lawsuit against Elon Musk’s unconstitutional attempts to unravel the federal government, and I know there are more yet to come. We can’t declare early victory on any of these before we’ve been to the Supreme Court, but know we are doing everything in the legal system we can.
I’m working hard to pass good legislation and a responsible budget to defend Washingtonians here at home as well. We already passed legislation like the Keep Washington Working Act and civil legal aid for undocumented workers to help protect immigrants in Washington. We’ve also passed strong state-level protections in our schools and health care system for people of all races, genders, and sexual orientations.
The uncertainty in federal funding for schools, health care, transportation, and more reinforces the importance of us passing a state budget that funds the services Washingtonians rely on. If the federal government steps back on the services Washingtonians need, we must step up. I see the chaos and layoffs happening for federal employees, and I’m committed to protecting our state employees from the same.
I wish I could tell you there was something simple we could do at the state level to protect us all from everything happening in the Trump administration, but that would be a lie. Their agenda of cutting education and health care funding, tearing apart families with deportation, illegally rolling back consumer protections, and attacking the human and civil rights of women, LGBTQ+ people and people of color will cause tremendous harm. But we haven’t backed down from doing what’s right, and we won’t start now.
Please feel free to reach out to me and my office with specific concerns — I’m at Jessica.Bateman@leg.wa.gov. I also hope you’ll stay in touch with the members of our federal delegation, Sen. Patty Murray, Sen. Maria Cantwell, and Rep. Marilyn Strickland — they are closest to the problem, and we will need their leadership. In these chaotic and scary times, we have to rely on each other for support. Thanks for being with me.
– Jess
