Dear Neighbors,
I hope you had a wonderful summer and start of fall! I’ve spent time doing home chores, camping and road tripping around our beautiful country, connecting with family, and working hard to prepare bills for this coming legislative session.
Here’s an update on a few things I’ve heard are important to our district.
Immigration resources
The most frequent messages I receive from our district, by far, are concerns about how the federal government is implementing immigration policy. All across our state —from Tukwila and western Washington to central and eastern Washington — immigrants, green-card holders, and citizens alike have been lined up in shakedown lines, some kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and often brought to the Tukwila ICE field office here in our district, detained or incarcerated in the privately owned Tacoma Detention Facility, and some deported, all without due process.
The state has limited jurisdiction over these federal operations, but please know I will do whatever I can to support immigrants in our community, just as I would anyone, to ensure our constitutional rights are not violated. My office and others in the Legislature have been in communication with the Governor’s Office, Attorney General’s Office, and other state agencies to better understand and respond to the impacts of federal immigration policy here in Washington.
Despite the federal preemption issues, our state is doing what we can to protect all our residents. In 2019, I co-sponsored the Keep Washington Working Act (KWWA), legislation limiting how local law enforcement can work to enforce federal immigration laws. For years leading up to the KWWA legislation, I sponsored the Preservation of Liberty Act (SB 5511, 2013-14; SB 5742, 2015-16; SB 5176, 2017-18), which sought to prevent the use of federal troops and state agencies from collaborating to enforce unconstitutional actions in Washington state. (My interest in protecting civil liberties stems from my family and Japanese American community’s experience during WWII when they were all denied constitutional due process due to their ethnicity and incarcerated in U.S. concentration camps even though most were American citizens.)
This past session, I also sponsored SB 5104, which protects employees in the workplace from coercion based on immigration status. The law ensures employers cannot withhold pay, breaks, and other rights while threatening to report employees or their families to ICE. Employees can report violations to the Department of Labor and Industries. You can read more about this law here.
Gov. Bob Ferguson also signed HB 1131 into law, which incorporates my bill SB 5103. This bill includes my crucial language allowing expedited review of applications to the state Clemency and Pardons Board from petitioners with urgent needs, like detention and deportation by ICE. This will protect those who have made a mistake decades ago but have long since paid their debt to society and are now positive participating members of our community.
You can print your own red cards here. Red cards can help guide you on exercising your constitutional rights when confronted by ICE. You can get them in many different languages spoken in our district. Remember, you always have the right to remain silent and contact a lawyer; the right to due process and to have your case heard before a judge; the right to ask for a warrant and deny a search of yourself or your property if ICE does not have a warrant; and you can always ask ICE to leave the premises.
SNAP Resources:
The USDA announced they would not allocate SNAP benefits during the federal government shutdown. Courts struck down the decision, but benefits are still delayed. On Nov. 3, the federal government announced they will restart SNAP benefits but will only pay part of the normal amount and benefits will be late. This impacts 42 million Americans, and nearly one million Washingtonians lost access to their food benefits.
If you receive SNAP benefits, your existing funds will remain on your EBT card and stores continue to accept EBT payment. Washington State WIC (Women, Infants and Children program) can provide food benefits through mid to late November. There may be longer wait times with the Department of Social and Health Services.
You can find local resources at 211.org or by calling 211, or find food banks near you at FoodLifeline.org/find-food. Gov. Ferguson is directing additional state funds typically loaded onto EBT cards to food banks across the state.
A personal thought:
When I see what’s going on around us — indefinite detentions and deportations without due process, increasing militarization and antagonizing rhetoric, higher costs for consumers and higher profits for corporations and billionaires, drastic cuts to our social safety net and social needs, blatant gerrymandering, and divisiveness leading to power redistribution away from the people — it’s obvious we are living in a quickly changing and scary world. It reminds me of a poem written by German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) just after the end of WWII.
In the 1930s, Niemöller was a Hitler supporter and antisemite who then recognized the world around him was quickly changing — fueled by bigotry, hate, and all those negative antisocial consequences brought by the Nazis. Pastor Niemöller had an epiphany of conscience. He grew to oppose the Third Reich and was imprisoned in German concentration camps from 1938-1945, including Dachau (which was later liberated by the now famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated all-Japanese American unit that still holds the record as the most decorated combat team in U.S. Army history). Niemöller became a pacifist and anti-war activist. He expressed his “guilt by inaction” and wrote the following poem called “First They Came...”:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
Other work
I’m continuing my work on important issues like housing, universal health care, and establishing a publicly owned state bank in Washington. I held organizing meetings with leaders in the universal health care movement in September and October to build on our previous work and go full steam ahead on this pressing issue this coming session.
Here’s something for you to ponder and give me feedback on if you so wish:
The Background: Washington state has what is considered a part-time legislature since gaining statehood in 1889. The founders set it up that way under the noble theory that regular people with regular jobs can make laws and better understand their impacts on working families due to their lived experience. The Legislature convened in one legislative session per biennium — for 60 straight days in odd numbered years. Times changed, and in 1979, the people amended the state constitution to establish two legislative sessions per biennium — one for 105 straight days in odd numbered years and one for 60 days in even numbered years. The people felt the increase to 105 days was necessary to work on the increasingly complex biennial budget and policy, and the second session of 60 days was only necessary for “tweaks” to the budget and could focus on policy.
The Problem: Society is changing faster than our state laws can keep up with, leading to growing gaps in the law (loopholes, etc.), unaddressed issues, short-sighted and not fully considered policy, and multitudes of band-aid solutions to catch up with the outside world.
Money plays an oversized role in policymaking in many ways, but legislators also have a peculiar predicament: they must essentially work full-time and then some in order to best represent constituents yet are expected to still maintain their outside jobs and family relationships. What working class person can afford to do that these days? This leads to elected legislators who are either independently wealthy, employed by a corporation that’s willing to give them whatever time off they need, are retired, or have decided the work is worth the sacrifice. We have many legislators who have essentially made a value judgment to take a proverbial vow of poverty in this way.
Furthermore, in our current world, legislators have almost no time to think about and work toward a fully fleshed-out vision for the future Washington and the world our children and grandchildren will inherit and live in. Just keeping up is already a scramble. Last session, which was 105 days, almost 2,000 bills were introduced — 433 of these were passed into law (this is lower than average). It’s safe to say that no legislator read all 433 bills we voted on, which leads to party line votes and lobbyists’ influence being substituted for critical analysis of policy.
The founders’ original noble theory for a part-time legislature was created during agrarian times but has been strained well beyond the state’s ability to meet people’s needs in our quickly changing and information technology-driven world.
The Question: Is it time for the people to consider a governance change to a full-time legislature?
The Answer: I think the answer is yes, but what do you think? Please feel free to contact my office (information is at the end of this newsletter) with your opinion.
Welcoming guests
I recently met with the new Deputy Consul General of Japan in Seattle, Ms. Yoko Tsuge, to welcome her to our state. I’d previously met with the Honorable Makoto Iyori, who was posted here late last year as the new Consul General of Japan for our area. Consul General Iyori is the top official representative of the Japanese government in our area. High turnover is typical not just in leadership at the Consulate General for Japan in Seattle but is standard operating procedure in the foreign service. Most governments rotate their official representatives about every three years in all areas of the world. It’s a bittersweet standard, but that’s what seems to work best for world political affairs.
In case you didn’t know, Hyogo Prefecture in Japan is the sister state for Washington and the city of Kobe, in Hyogo Prefecture, is the sister city of Seattle.
Contact
Below are some great ways to contact and keep in touch with my office. We’re still here to serve you even when the Legislature isn’t in session!
Phone: 360-786-7616 (during regular business hours; 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.)
Email me at bob.hasegawa@leg.wa.gov.
If you’d like to schedule me to speak with your organization to talk about my important initiatives on public banking, social housing, universal health care, or other issues, please schedule something with my executive legislative office manager and scheduler, Sarah Ellerbrock, at sarah.ellerbrock@leg.wa.gov.
Thank you for reading and following along this session and trusting me in this role to represent our district.
Talk to you soon, and I hope you enjoy our wonderful fall season,
Bob