A slow-developing fight for House Speaker
Plus a boatload of recommended reading and viewing
Counting votes to depose the Speaker of the House is a common parlor game in and around legislatures all over the country. Somebody’s always cranky with the speaker, and every statehouse features folks who see themselves as better suited for the big office than its current occupant.
But it was surprising to see House Speaker Laurie Jinkins herself surface the brewing competition to oust her via Jerry Cornfield’s piece in the Washington State Standard, in which she disclosed a conversation with would-be ouster April Berg, the chair of the House Finance Committee.
While the leadership aspirations of Berg, D-Mill Creek, had been widely rumored (We floated said rumor ourselves in our Winners roundup at the end of the session; Berg jokingly blamed us for the current kerfuffle), Jinkins dragging them out pulls a contest that at least nominally won’t happen until late in the year into the present, at least for discussion purposes.
We got Berg on the horn and she reiterated that she’s focused — for now — on defending her seat in Snohomish County’s 44th Legislative District and that any discussion of the next Speaker should wait for at least the results of the August primary, if not the main event in November.
This is a little bit of an eye-roller. While the 44th has been purple or even red in living memory, it’s been solidly blue in recent cycles. Berg, first elected in 2020, shrugged off GOP challengers in 2022 and 2024, winning with more than 55 percent of the vote both times. It’s not clear that this year’s challenger, property manager and yoga/wellness coach Tonya Stadlman, is up to the task. Berg has a massive campaign cash advantage and the smart money on the right is on the sidelines for the moment in what looks like a Democratic year.
So let’s unpack the depose-the-speaker idea a bit:
Despite her embrace of the role of House architect of the state’s new income tax on its highest earners, it’s not really accurate to describe Berg as left of Jinkins. The caucus is full of overlapping ideological factions, which can shift depending on what issue they’re wrangling over.
The primary knock against Jinkins’ leadership is the chaotic way in which the House’s Democratic majority conducts business, especially when its collective back is against the wall at major procedural deadlines. We’ve been writing about this paradigm for years, including its endless closed-door caucus meetings, marathon midnight debates, and occasional collapses. Chaos breeds opportunities for minority Republicans and the business lobby to deploy clock-management strategies that ultimately lead to important-to-some legislation dying at those deadlines.
Jinkins empowered committee chairs rather than consolidating power in her own office, the latter of which was the hallmark of the late Speaker Frank Chopp, whose top-down style frequently frustrated his members in different ways. Exactly how the House gets to a better set of systems isn’t clear. Herding a caucus of nearly 60 members ain’t easy.
One issue we’re hearing about in that context is juvenile rehabilitation. Overcrowding and general chaos at juvenile institutions, especially Green Hill School, put wind in the sails of progressive lawmakers wanting to divert more kids away from lock up in the past two sessions. But the bills have generally died in Democratic caucus fights over the optics of a juvenile crime surge, with the arguments distilled by a regret-ridden Seattle Times op-ed by Rep. Lauren Davis, D-Shoreline, penned just before the 2026 session.
Some other issues likely to come into play:
Generational change:
Jinkins turns 62 just before the August primary. Berg is a decade younger. Rep. Liz Berry, D-Seattle, chair of the Labor & Workplace Standards Committee and another aspiring speaker, is another decade younger than that. Recent elections have ushered in a cadre of even younger Democrats who might chafe under graying leadership. Existing norms against challenging established incumbents are breaking down in general. Several members of the majority, including business-friendly moderate Amy Walen of Kirkland, and Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon in the West Seattle-centric 34th LD, face intraparty challengers.
A Speaker of Color?
Although Jinkins is the first openly lesbian Speaker, she’s still a middle-aged white person. Berg would be the first woman of color1 to ascend to the office. The caucus room has been getting more diverse with each election and the Members of Color caucus now comprises roughly half of the Democrats’ majority. Representation matters, as the saying goes, and this could play out similarly to the rise of U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, whose quest to be the first black Speaker of that House is outlined in this fine read in the latest edition of The New Yorker.
One dynamic to watch here is how much the actual people in the majority change. There could be many as new members in that organizational vote at the end of the year. That could spur a move for new leadership.
Or this could all turn out to be a collective navel-gazing exercise after which the House Democrats decide not to rebuild the airplane while it’s flying. In any case, expect some closed-door drama at the end of the year.
PQ
Recommended Reading and Viewing:
The war on rent gougers
Jake Goldstein-Street went deep into the weeds for the Washington State Standard to uncover just how many landlords bucked the state’s cap on yearly rent hikes. The few who did racked up some $800,000 in fines, which have yet to be collected in lieu of repeat offenses. Most of those fines stemmed from the owner of a Spokane RV park where tenants live under a tighter 5% rent cap per the law. Goldstein-Street reports he hiked the rent by over 16% in a single year (without so much as a headsup) on the basis he hadn’t even heard of the law. Landlords writ large are no doubt taking note should widespread litigation over the above be in the pipeline.
TG
Democracy dies in darkness
On TVW’s Inside Olympia show, Austin Jenkins’s deep-dive interview with Washington Coalition for Open Government president Mike Fancher raised some big questions about government transparency. WA COG, nonpartisan and nonprofit, has a new spring in its step with new funding and active board members, which has helped backfill gaps for advocacy for the open government community as legacy media has withered. As Fancher noted, the 11 original exemptions to the 1972 Public Records Act have metastasized to more than 700, with more each year, and routine requests for records are much slower now than they were pre-pandemic. WA COG produced a big report on public records losses and is getting ready for a likely Supreme Court argument on lawmakers’ creative invocation of a “legislative privilege” exemption to the public records act.
Jenkins asked Fancher, Jonathan’s former boss at The Seattle Times, about potential remedies for the drift toward darkness. One obvious fix is a return to the voters (the PRA was first passed by initiative). That would be an enormous lift, Fancher noted. That’s in part because the majority Democrats, especially in the House, have carved up the Public Records Act on behalf of unions, privacy advocates, and municipalities. Gov. Bob Ferguson hasn’t exactly been a model of transparency. One bright note: Attorney General Nick Brown has proposed changes to “model rules” – non-binding guidance for public agencies – that could help streamline some requests.
JM
Data center angle enters debate on pump storage project
Alex Baumhardt of the Oregon Capital Chronicle broke some news on the massive – and significantly controversial – pumped-hydro storage project near Goldedale in Klickitat County: The main customer for the plant could be a giant data center.
Pump storage is a theoretically attractive if Rube Goldberg-esque idea. You use cheap green energy – think abundant Columbia Gorge wind in this case – to pump water uphill into a reservoir. Then when the wind isn’t blowing or power demand spikes, you run water through a turbine into another reservoir to generate juice.
The problem with this idea is that it requires a big chunk of land, a reservoir full of water, and a new dam-turbine setup, all of which get you a series of regulatory fights if you want to build one of these things. In this case, the Yakama Nation – which has a long and unpleasant history with dams and hydropower (Go ahead and Google “Celilo Falls.”) – objects on the grounds that the land in question is a sacred tribal site.
One overarching theme in green power development in recent years is giant projects proposed in sparsely populated parts of Eastern Washington that don’t actually need more juice locally. Now add the bugaboo of power-hungry AI data centers to the mix.
PQ
Trans foster kid settlement
Carleen Johnson at The Center Square covered a settlement in a foster care-religious freedom lawsuit between the Department of Children, Youth & Families and a Christian couple who objected to the agency’s trans inclusivity policy for foster placements. The settlement, widely covered in the increasingly trans-fixated conservative media but skipped by the mainstream press, forces DCYF to tweak its so-called SOGIE (sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression) policy that had led to foster parents/plaintiffs Shane and Jennifer DeGross having their DCYF license get hung up.
Under the settlement, DCYF can no longer deny foster licenses based on religious beliefs regarding trans issues and can’t force foster parents to be hip to kids’ pronoun preferences. But foster parents must either connect a trans-identifying foster youth to resources or not get in the way of DCYF efforts to do so. Unlike most other DCYF settlements in this era of exploding tort liability, this one doesn’t carry a whopper price tag – just $250K for the DeGross’s legal fees. DYCF’s news release on the settlement has a split-the-baby tone, emphasizing it is solely in control of where foster kids are placed.
JM
A prominent conservative’s take on the passage and defense of the income tax
Trucking magnate Steve Gordon,2 known to Observer readers as one of the biggest players on the right in Washington politics, has been trying his hand at explanatory journalism on his Substack. Whether you applaud Gordon’s power plays – which include aggressive independent campaigns on behalf of Republican candidates and helping bankroll Let’s Go Washington’s ballot initiative machine – or recoil from a guy willing to spend boatloads of his own cash on conservative causes, he’s one of the most articulate voices on Washington’s badly outnumbered right.
The piece that caught our eye, dubbed “The Architect” argues that this year’s historic passage of the new income tax on high earners is the product of a long-term shift to the left in all three branches of government that adds up to a de facto conspiracy to overturn the nearly century-old constitutional precedent from the way-back Supremes that effectively bans income taxes.
With the caveat that one Washingtonian’s conspiracy is another’s long-overdue ideological shift, Gordon brings a pile of receipts to his argument.
PQ
Some Observer housekeeping
Observant Observer readers may have noticed that we published on Wednesday this week instead of Tuesday. For the next few months, we’re moving the regular free edition of the Observer from Tuesdays to Wednesdays and discontinuing the Friday paid edition in favor of occasional longer-form pieces about this year’s campaigns. We’re also working on some other projects to make the Observer better. Look for that work soon.
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A tiny felon to brighten your day
Poppy’s cuteness barely compensates for her destroying Jonathan’s Airpods, his sunglasses, and his reading glasses. And that’s just this month. Want to see your pet in this space? Drop us a photo and some caption material.
An earlier version of this story overlooked then-Rep. John Lovick’s brief tenure as Speaker, which covered the interim in 2019 after Frank Chopp stepped down and before Laurie Jinkins was elected.
Gordon might argue that he’s an ex-trucking magnate because his family sold Gordon Trucking a few years ago, but we’re sticking with it.