News Releases

Dear friends and neighbors, Less than a week remains in the 2022 legislative session, and we have been spending long days on the Senate floor passing legislation to improve lives in our state. I will report on our progress when the session concludes next week. For now, I wanted to share a few thoughts on the crisis unfolding in Ukraine. During college ...

Dear friends and neighbors -- The Legislature is approaching the halfway point of this year’s short 60-day session. The pace has been brisk and will only accelerate. Over the next week, we will be considering dozens of new policies before the February 15 deadline to pass bills out of the Senate for consideration in the House. You can watch all the ...

Last week marked the beginning of the 2022 legislative session, and with it another opportunity to improve the lives of people in our state and here in the 43^rd Legislative District. This is a short, 60-day session, mostly focused on making improvements to the two-year budgets and major policies that we enacted in 2021. I am honored to continue representing you in that work. Following public health guidance given the community spread of the Omicron variant, the Legislature is ...

Dear friends and neighbors, The passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Legislature’s quick action to expand Medicaid eligibility has allowed more than 650,000 Washingtonians to gain health care coverage over the last decade. As a result, our state’s uninsured rate has plummeted to single digits. Just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act for ...

Dear friends and neighbors, Since Democrats regained the majority in the Washington State Senate in 2018, addressing systemic racial disparities in our criminal justice system and ending the era of mass incarceration have been high on our priority list. Over the last three years, we have worked to end the practice of locking up minors for non-criminal offenses, created a program ...

Dear friends and neighbors, Happy Pride 2021! There is much to celebrate this Pride Month as we emerge from the pandemic and collectively reflect on progress the LGBTQ community has made in the fight for equality. Next week we will also celebrate Juneteenth (June 19), the day in 1865 on which the last slaves in the U.S. learned that they had been ...

Dear friends and neighbors: When the Legislature convened in January, we were prepared to act swiftly to support the thousands of workers and small businesses suffering due to the pandemic. For many of our neighbors, the last year has been filled with financial anxiety and hardship. In the first month of session, we passed a $2.2 billion relief package to help ...

Dear friends and neighbors, Washington has led the nation with smart policy at the state level on many issues over the years, but tax fairness isn’t one of them. For decades, tax policy experts have reported that our state has the most regressive tax structure in the United States. The state’s lowest-income residents pay six times more in state and local ...

Dear friends and neighbors, The housing and homelessness crisis is among the most urgent challenges our region faces. In the past year, we’ve again learned valuable lessons about how essential affordable housing is, since during the pandemic your home became the only safe place for you to be. When the 2021 legislative session wrapped up a few weeks ago, I was ...