McMorris Rodgers reflected region

NEWPORT – I’ve always liked Cathy McMorris Rodgers. I’ve never voted for her.

Regarding voting, I’ve been in the minority by far. Pend Oreille County voters have overwhelmingly supported the Republican through her many years in politics, first in the state house, then two decades as a U.S Representative. She’s never really been seriously challenged, even though she’s been up for election every two years since she entered politics 30 years ago.

After being appointed to the state seat in 1994 after her boss, then 7th District state Rep. Bob Morton, stepped down to run for state senate, she won a special election for the position later that year with 68% of the vote. She served in the state House of Representatives through 2004, when she was elected to the U.S. House.

As a U.S. Representative, the closest anyone has come was in 2018 when former Democratic state Sen. Lisa Brown challenged her. McMorris Rodgers won with 55% of the votes. The only other time an opponent got more than 40% of the vote was in her second Congressional race when Peter J. Goldmark garnered 43.6% of the vote.

You can’t say voters didn’t have a chance to vote her out, as they did former Speaker of the House, Democrat Tom Foley, the first sitting Speaker to lose his election at home.

As far as liking her, I certainly wasn’t alone, although in my own family, I was in the minority. My late mother, not particularly political, detested McMorris Rogers’ style of giving less than informative answers to tough political questions.

McMorris Rodgers worked to meet with her constituents. She appeared in person numerous times for interviews with The Miner when she was running for office. She continued to hold town hall meetings where she fielded constituents’ questions, usually friendly questions, but occasionally not so friendly ones. Many of her Congressional colleagues discontinued these events but McMorris Rodgers often held events like that in Pend Oreille County.

McMorris Rodgers, a Christian conservative, has been pro military, staunchly anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ throughout her career, opposing gay marriage at the state and federal levels. That’s certainly been the position of many of her voters in both the 7th Legislative District that she represented in the state House, as well as the 5th Congressional District she represented in Washington D.C.

Both districts are geographically huge, especially the 5th, which encompasses all of Eastern Washington.

As the wife of retired Navy commander Brian Rodgers and with Fairchild Air Force Base being one of the largest employers in Spokane County, her pro military positions are certainly understandable.

McMorris Rodgers has had her share of detractors. She is the topic of frequent critical letters to the editor, in this paper and others.

It wasn’t that Democrats didn’t try to unseat her, they just never came up with candidates that could beat her.

First holding state office at age 25, McMorris Rodgers rose to become the state House minority leader by 2002.

Highlights of her state legislative career included sponsoring legislation to have the state reimburse rural hospitals for caring for Medicaid patients. She also bucked the state GOP to help pass legislation to raise the gas tax to fund transportation improvements.

That laid the groundwork for her to gain a Seattle Times endorsement in 2005 for her first run for Congress. She ran for the open seat vacated by another Republican, George Nethercutt, who stepped down to unsuccessfully run for the Senate. Whether the Seattle Times endorsement helped her or not she easily defeated Don Barbieri.

Once elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, McMorris Rodgers’ championed hydro-power, timber and limited government. She is also known for her work for the disabled, including one of her biggest legislative accomplishments, the Achieving a Better Life Experience (ABLE) Act in 2014. The bill lets people with disabilities open tax-exempt savings accounts to pay for education, housing and other expenses without losing eligibility for federal benefits, The Spokesman-Review reported in a lengthy story about her Sunday.

Some of her positions were no doubt influenced by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a shadowy group known for working with major industries in writing model legislation and then encouraging their introduction – through their legislative partners – in statehouses nationwide, according to the Brooking Institute, a center left non-profit.

McMorris Rodgers was one of those legislative partners.

I wasn’t in the area when George Nethercutt served but I did get a chance to meet Tom Foley. Foley had a number of legislative accomplishments which directly affected Pend Oreille County, not the least of which is the four-way highway connecting Spokane and Pend Oreille counties.

But comparing her to Foley really isn’t fair. Foley served in a time when Democrats had control of the House for 40 years, from 1955-1995.

McMorris Rodgers, like all mainstream Republicans, has had to walk a tightrope in the Trump era. She hasn’t said so, but it’s always been pretty apparent to me that she didn’t support the president elect personally when he first appeared on the national political scene.

But she did, like most other Republicans, end up voting for most of his proposals.

She even said she would object to the certification of Electoral College results of the 2020 presidential election in a joint session of Congress. She changed her position after the storming of the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6, voting to accept the results.

McMorris Rodgers also gave the Republican on air rebuttal to then-President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech in 2014. Compared to today’s Republican Party, it was amazingly civil.

I have hopes for her replacement, Michael Baumgartner, to be equally civil but as an unpredictable and often combative President Trump prepares to take office, it seems like it could be an uphill battle.