Undeterred, US. Rep. Derek Kilmer has high hopes for Congress
Friday morning, I was waiting for a call from U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer when his office dropped an email into my inbox. I planned to ask what next steps are after the House’s historic dethroning of the speaker.
Turns out Kilmer never broke his stride.
During a week when partisan vitriol was swirling around Capitol Hill, the news release announced the Gig Harbor Democrat was fraternizing with a Republican. Finding common ground, Reps. Kilmer and Don Bacon of Nebraska introduced the Mental Health Infrastructure Improvement Act, intending to increase access to mental health and substance use-disorder care in rural and under-resourced areas.
What gives?
Laughing, Kilmer said, “Our offices worked together on that this morning.”
Truth be told, I’m not surprised.
In editorial board conversations over the years, Kilmer doesn’t bite at chances to go full-on partisan or to make bitter complaints about Republicans. Friday, I accused him of being an optimist. He corrected me: “I’m hopeful.”
Kilmer long has been a member of the Bipartisan Working Group, a coalition of 12 House Dems and 12 Republicans who meet weekly during the session to discuss policy issues. Bacon is part of that group; so is Washington’s Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside.
Starting in January 2019, Kilmer spent four years as the chair of the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. ModCom, comprising six Democrats and six Republicans, studied and made recommendations for how to improve Congress, its functioning and rules. With a two-thirds approval requirement, ModCom made 202 recommendations in four years, 130 of which have been implemented.
With the GOP takeover of the House, that work continues in a subcommittee under the House Administration Committee, said Kilmer, who is now vice chair.
OK, sure. But is it really continuing in this Congress? After what happened last week?
Again, Kilmer, with the chiding correction: This, he said, is an opportunity.
“I think the appetite among members of Congress to have it function better is much more than it was before,” Kilmer said.
He allowed that the majority party’s dysfunction has interfered directly with getting important business done — and in petty ways that advance an extreme social issues agenda.
In June, as a Transportation and Urban Development appropriations bill was being marked up, the committee’s Republican majority targeted three housing projects related to the LGBTQ+ community.
“The bill had 2,300 community projects and (the GOP committee members) eliminated three of them,” Kilmer said. It was as if they hit “function f” (find) on their computer and typed in ‘LGBT.’ “
All that, plus the former speaker’s pandering to the extreme wing of his party, his broken promises to the president about spending and to the Democratic leadership that he wouldn’t greenlight impeachment hearings without a floor vote.
Too much. Kilmer voted with all of the other Democrats and the eight rogue Republicans to oust McCarthy.
Now, the optimistic congressman puts his fervent hopes in the reset he has been working for since elected to Congress in 2012.
Besides the ModCom and the Bipartisan Working Group, Kilmer is also policy vice chair of the New Dems, a group of almost 100 centrist and liberal Democrats, which is about half of the Democratic caucus. He is joined by five other Washington Democrats: Suzan DelBene, Rick Larsen, Kim Schrier, Adam Smith and Marilyn Strickland.
All of them have records of working constructively across the aisle.
Considering the number of Republican members of Congress who angrily were denouncing their extremist colleagues last week, maybe cooler heads will acknowledge that the U.S. has a divided government. That requires compromise.
“There are people who want to find — as Leader (Hakeem) Jeffries said — an enlightened path forward,” Kilmer said, referring to the Democratic House Leader.
In a Washington Post Op-Ed Friday, Jeffries made an overture to Republican colleagues suggesting that path:
” … What if they pursued a different path and confronted the extremism that has spread unchecked on the Republican side of the aisle? When that step has been taken in good faith, we can proceed together to reform the rules of the House in a manner that permits us to govern in a pragmatic fashion.”
Whatever the details, a more moderate speaker that sidelines extremists and leads from the middle, where most Americans live, seems like the right way to go.
The Republican caucus is expected to consider a new speaker early this week.
For the sake of the country, I hope Kilmer’s hopes are realized.
By: Kate Riley
Source: The Seattle Times