WA’s ‘town crier’ in DC is appealing to better angels no longer there

Patty Murray is pleading her case.

Except she’s pleading it to better angels that have long since left the building.

Multiple times per day now, when the U.S. Senate is in session, Murray, the senior senator from Washington, troops to a microphone at the Capitol to say that something the Donald Trump administration has done is abnormal, unethical, indefensible or downright illegal.

“This is some corrupt BS,” she said the other day — marking maybe the first time the former schoolteacher has resorted to public swearing, even in abbreviated form.

The issue that day was more that Trump had ransacked the congressional way of doing things. As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee for 32 years now, Murray is a fan of, and a gatekeeper for, the cross-party tradition of negotiating lists of needed projects around the country.

But Trump, as he does, had made his own list.

When Murray was chair of the committee last year, she and her GOP colleagues had agreed on how to spend about $2.5 billion this year for various Army Corps of Engineers flood control projects around the country.

The deal they struck was fair enough that it passed her committee by a 28-0 vote — not what you usually see in bitterly divided Washington.

About 48% of the dollars were earmarked to blue states (defined as states with two Democratic senators), 44% to red states and the remaining 8% to purple states.

But this month the Trump administration ripped up that plan and put in its own. Now two thirds of the money will go instead to red states, and just one-third to blue. As is his fashion, Trump really stuck it to California — all four projects planned there were stripped out. Washington state’s main project — revamping the Howard Hanson Dam out east of Enumclaw — was also zeroed out.

That money was redirected to projects in Florida, Tennessee and Texas.

“It looks like a war on the West Coast primarily,” one budget analyst summed up. “They definitely swiped away from blue states to fund red states.”

It also cuts maintenance money to the Seattle port by 16%, and Tacoma’s port by 28%, which Sen. Maria Cantwell dubbed a “blatantly political work plan.”

But at a news conference this past Thursday, the limitations confronting Democrats in the Trump era were on full display. Murray charged that a politics for the common good is breaking down and being replaced by a politics of personal venality.

But what can they do about it? Plead.

“It is really disheartening when this president takes what we have done in a bipartisan fashion and then says ‘forget what you have done, I am going to go after the blue states,’ ” she said. “Or to cancel projects that he has personally threatened somebody with, or whatever.”

But then she added what dedicated institutionalists always say: “I am committed to working with my Republican counterparts. … They need to tell the president that commitments are commitments, agreements are agreements, and bipartisan votes are bipartisan votes. We expect you to stand with us to enforce that.”

And there is the rub of it all.

I sympathize with the senator. I have also felt for years that it is Republicans, and only Republicans, who can truly rein in Trump’s craven impulses.

It wouldn’t even take very many, just a few in the Senate, to restore some semblance of sanity and balance to what’s going on.

But they aren’t going to do it. Murray’s plaintive request that “they need to tell the president that commitments are commitments” is a sad marker of the times. It simply isn’t going to happen.

Listen to how Republicans responded to Trump upending the flood projects deal that they themselves had once agreed to.

“Good for Republican states,” GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas said. “There is your incentive to be a Republican state. Better to be on the winning side than on the losing side.”

That’s Trumpian politics in a nutshell. Half the country are winners, the other half are losers.

When I covered Congress as a reporter eons ago in the 1990s, members of both parties were prickly about not ceding any authority to any president. This Congress, in contrast, is supine.

For example, a federal judge on Thursday blocked Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education. The argument was similar — it’s Congress that should be deciding whether the Department of Education lives or dies. The judge found though that Congress was being entirely ignored.

“There (is) no evidence that Defendants are pursuing a ‘legislative goal’ or otherwise working with Congress to reach a resolution,” the judge ruled.

What’s incredible is this marked the 87th time a court has partially or fully blocked the Trump administration, in just 122 days since he retook office. Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown has already had wins in seven such cases, with four more pending.

In almost all the cases, the gist has been that Trump is seizing powers that properly have been part of the congressional give-and-take — exactly what Murray talks about every time she’s up at the mic.

“He is going to keep trampling the powers of Congress,” she pleaded to Republicans this past week. “It may not be your state today, but what happens when your governor disagrees with the president?”

No answer. Few Republicans outwardly seem to care. Their response so far to losing 87 judicial decisions has not been to ponder whether their president might be out of control, but to attack the judiciary.

I counted it up, and Murray spoke out about this degradation of democracy 12 times this past week, and 15 times the week before.

Futile? That’s what many in the Democratic base think — that all these appeals to Republicans are a waste. It’s well past time for more filibuster fights, they argue.

But after 32 years in the place, Murray is ever the institutionalist. She has become like the town crier of the Capitol, echoing warnings through the halls that without intervention, the place could be going down.

It may be a noble cause, but bittersweet, appealing to better angels that are no longer there.

Danny Westneat: dwestneat@seattletimes.com. Danny Westneat takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region's news, people and politics.