In a political era that now feels as far away as the Pleistocene Epoch, there were once Republican elected officials in Washington state who governed with intelligence, pragmatism and an openness to bipartisan alliances.
Dan Evans, Joel Pritchard, Slade Gorton, John Spellman, John Miller, Jennifer Dunn, Rod Chandler, Sid Morrison — Republican leaders such as these had successful careers in public service because they reflected the state electorate’s general rejection of ideologues and extremists.
Even earlier this year, with our politics deeply polarized and the GOP devolved into an aggressively purist conservatism, two of Washington’s three Republican members of Congress, Dan Newhouse and Jaime Herrera Beutler, bravely resisted demands for party loyalty and stood on principle to vote in favor of impeaching former President Donald Trump for his betrayals during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
It would go against this long tradition of rational Republicanism if voters in this state were to ever elect someone to Congress as out of the mainstream as Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon cultist, conspiracy monger and ally of white nationalist militants. Nevertheless, we might soon send our own MAGA Republican bomb thrower to the other Washington if Joe Kent wins in the 3rd Congressional District in the state’s southwest corner.
Kent defeated Herrera Beutler in the primary, having gotten a big boost from right-wing media. His views are just as out there as Greene’s paranoid beliefs. Not surprisingly, he subscribes to Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Kent wants Dr. Anthony Fauci, who guided the nation’s COVID-19 response, to be arrested for murder. To him, banning even legal immigration is a great idea. And, like Greene, Kent does not mind hanging out with White nationalists.
Some prominent Republicans in the district are refusing to support Kent. Among them is Julie Olson, a Republican member of the Clark County Council, who has endorsed the Democratic candidate, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, in the race because of what she describes as Kent’s “inability to connect with reality” and his apparent intent to go to Congress, “not just to be a disrupter, but to be a destroyer.”
But the Republican defectors appear to be few and Kent has a good chance of winning. If he does come out on top, sensible people in our state will have to cope, not just with the embarrassment of sending a Taylor Greene clone to Congress, but with the reality that many of our fellow Washingtonians believe that is a perfectly sane thing to do.
See more of David Horsey’s cartoons at: st.news/davidhorsey
View other syndicated cartoonists at: st.news/cartoons
