Entry tags:
Luke Esser: Threat or Menace?
Josh Marshall and his crew at Talking Points Memo have been doing a great job of covering the continuing train wreck that has been the Washington state GOP caucuses. (examples here and here.)
This is the email I sent him as a comment:
*^*^*^*
Josh:
Before Esser was State chairman for the GOP, he was a state Senator. I lived in his district.
A number of years back -- say, 2002, or so -- I went on a "meet your representatives" kind of trip to the state capital, Olympia. It was guided by Nancy Amidei, of the U Wash. School of Social Work, who does a great deal of work regarding citizen involvement.
In Washington, any given legislative district has two members of the Assembly, and one Senator. So I looked all three up, and decided to look at the bills they were sponsoring, to see where their interests were, before trying to meet them.
Rodney Tom (who would later defeat Esser for that Senate seat) is a real estate guy, and his bills were sufficiently boring that I can't remember today what they were.
Ross Hunter was an ex-Microsoft employee who had, among other bills, a "sense of the state" kind of thing calling attention to the dangers of the infringements of civil liberties in the Federal PATRIOT Act. I took along a signed copy of Bruce Schneier's Beyond Fear, and was able to give it to him. We've spoken once or twice since -- great guy.
Esser... Well, this was where it got weird. Every single one of Esser's bills were of the "in paragraph (1), sub section (ii), strike 'and' and replace with 'or..." variety. Always decontextualized from what the effect of such language would be. At the time, Esser was the minority floor leader for the Republican Party, and it struck me as odd that his legislation didn't seem to reflect a) constituent work, b) personal passions, or c) mutual back-scratching. No, it was always of the sort that is extremely opaque, and difficult to discern the intent.
I took a printout of one of Esser's bills, and showed it to a friend of Professor Amidei's who was a professional lobbyist. I asked, "Can you figure out what this does?" He looked at it, a little bit of a frown appeared, and he said, "No. But that's Luke."
I've been suspicious of Esser ever since. When he lost to Tom, he got the state chairman job as a consolation prize (since that had worked so well at the Federal level with Ashcroft {cough}), and the Republicans have been losing ever since in this state.
I think this time around, he decided he could once again be too clever by half, since no one has ever called him on it. It's backfired, tremendously. I have no idea whether he supports any particular candidate -- but my experience is, he just wants to screw around with the system in his own inscrutable, private ways.
I thank you for keeping this issue alive. Good work, and a great public service.
Sincerely,
-- Hal O'Brien
This is the email I sent him as a comment:
*^*^*^*
Josh:
Before Esser was State chairman for the GOP, he was a state Senator. I lived in his district.
A number of years back -- say, 2002, or so -- I went on a "meet your representatives" kind of trip to the state capital, Olympia. It was guided by Nancy Amidei, of the U Wash. School of Social Work, who does a great deal of work regarding citizen involvement.
In Washington, any given legislative district has two members of the Assembly, and one Senator. So I looked all three up, and decided to look at the bills they were sponsoring, to see where their interests were, before trying to meet them.
Rodney Tom (who would later defeat Esser for that Senate seat) is a real estate guy, and his bills were sufficiently boring that I can't remember today what they were.
Ross Hunter was an ex-Microsoft employee who had, among other bills, a "sense of the state" kind of thing calling attention to the dangers of the infringements of civil liberties in the Federal PATRIOT Act. I took along a signed copy of Bruce Schneier's Beyond Fear, and was able to give it to him. We've spoken once or twice since -- great guy.
Esser... Well, this was where it got weird. Every single one of Esser's bills were of the "in paragraph (1), sub section (ii), strike 'and' and replace with 'or..." variety. Always decontextualized from what the effect of such language would be. At the time, Esser was the minority floor leader for the Republican Party, and it struck me as odd that his legislation didn't seem to reflect a) constituent work, b) personal passions, or c) mutual back-scratching. No, it was always of the sort that is extremely opaque, and difficult to discern the intent.
I took a printout of one of Esser's bills, and showed it to a friend of Professor Amidei's who was a professional lobbyist. I asked, "Can you figure out what this does?" He looked at it, a little bit of a frown appeared, and he said, "No. But that's Luke."
I've been suspicious of Esser ever since. When he lost to Tom, he got the state chairman job as a consolation prize (since that had worked so well at the Federal level with Ashcroft {cough}), and the Republicans have been losing ever since in this state.
I think this time around, he decided he could once again be too clever by half, since no one has ever called him on it. It's backfired, tremendously. I have no idea whether he supports any particular candidate -- but my experience is, he just wants to screw around with the system in his own inscrutable, private ways.
I thank you for keeping this issue alive. Good work, and a great public service.
Sincerely,
-- Hal O'Brien