Council Rejects School Violence Prevention

Fractures Emerge in the Conservative Bloc

Wait, Wasn’t Violence in Schools Why Rivera Ran?

One of the many features—or bugs, as the case may be—of campaigning for office is that you hear your opponents’ stump speech, a lot.

I heard Maritza Rivera’s many times—she “had never expected to run for public office” –which was patently false; she had tried for the same position before–but she was motivated by a fatal shooting at her daughter’s school.

I was genuinely sympathetic to the latter part—I cannot imagine the anguish of such an experience. Still, the council has very little control over what happens in schools—that’s school board territory. There are just a few opportunities to directly impact schools or school violence.

But yesterday, a rare opportunity to do something about it came up on council. They were offered the chance to invest direct dollars in gun violence prevention in schools.

And Rivera voted against increasing gun violence prevention in schools.

Gun Violence in Schools Scrambles the Right

For a moment, let’s set aside for a second the obvious and infuriating tragedy of a council that deprioritizes safety in schools while dropping a couple million for twenty beds at a privately run prison with exceedingly high death rates, to house a tiny fraction of people accused but not yet convicted of misdemeanors for one and two night stays. 

This particular vote broke along unusual lines, and it seems as good a time as any to start to identify the emerging ideological blocs on this council.

The Conservatives

Rivera’s characteristically cringey move was what has started to look like classic Rivera– flippantly falsifying her past claims while following the conservative alphas into their kooky abyss. 

And yes, my use of the word conservative here is intentional and is correct. 

This group’s stances on pretty much every issue they have touched thus far are more conservative than anything found in the mainstream Democratic party platform in at least a decade. 

Calling it anything else belies either deep intellectual infirmity or ideological commitments that prevent a clear-eyed view of reality. 

These three, along with Rob Saka and Tanya Woo, have emerged as the stalwartly rightward-leaning block–almost always ready to weaken the rights of workers, protect police from accountability, fight to keep taxes for the rich low, or lay the groundwork for massive cuts to basic goods like libraries, affordable housing, or social services this coming budget season.

Whether this makes them hyper-conservative Democrats, independents, “DINOs”, secret Republicans lying to the public–or something else, I don’t know and I don’t pretend to know, despite the claims of some over the top commentators. 

What I’m clear on is that they are in no way mainstream Democrats and that this makes terms like “moderate” exceedingly misleading. 

It’s time to drop it from the lexicon when talking about these five.

A Progressive Three Centrists Walk Into The Chamber

That leaves us with the other four. 

Tammy Morales is the lone left-leaning Democrat or progressive, as most folks know. Her views tend to mirror those of Pramilla Jayapal, AOC, or Elizabeth Warren, to name a few prominent examples. These are mainstream Democrats, but on the progressive end of the party. 

The three remaining Democrats–Joy Hollingsworth, Cathy Moore, and Dan Strauss, are legitimately more centrist–appropriately called “center left” in the national discourse. Their views are also discernably Democratic–but hewing more toward the center of the national discourse. 

The reasons for their inclusion in this group differ are too complex to tackle here, in part because each one is so different from the other. While I’ll dive into the details another day–suffice it to say, they seem to be the emerging “moderate” or “centrist Dem” bloc. 

Gun Violence Prevention

As I mentioned, this vote scrambled some of the usual suspects. 

The lone progressive–Tammy Morales–voted for more funding for gun violence prevention in schools, surprising no one. She was joined by moderate Democrat Joy Hollingsworth, whose district also includes a school that has recently seen an ugly spike in school violence.

Three of the five conservatives–Sara Nelson, Bob Kettle, and Maritza Rivera–predictably voted against spending more money to prevent gun violence in schools. In an analog to Republicans at the federal level with defense funding, these folks are almost always ready to cut spending unless the money goes to police or jails–then they fork out public funds like drunk sailors on shore leave.

The more moderate Cathy Moore joined them–which isn’t super surprising–as she seems to oscillate between a somewhat recognizably Democratic economic policy, mixed up with a kind of hawkish three-strikes-your-out era vibe when it comes to matters of public safety. Anyway, her hawkishness showed here–she seems to think cracking down on prostitution is a better way to prevent gun violence than, I guess, investing in gun violence prevention.  

Dan Strauss characteristically dodged the issue by abstaining.

The surprise votes on this one were Rob Saka and Tanya Woo, the two remaining conservative councilmembers, who in an unusual move, crossed the aisle and joined Joy and Tammy on this moderate proposal. 

I can only guess why in this case. 

Both are people of color, and communities of color in the United States are disproportionately impacted by gun violence. The district Woo ran to represent last year has particularly struggled with gun violence. She also happens to be actively losing to a progressive in the current election, which could have something to do with this very surprising stance for her.

And Saka, to his credit, has at moments shown painfully modest potential for finding his way into brief overlaps with Democratic party policy. He did make the Mayor’s crappy transportation bill modestly better, for instance. I was genuinely pleased to see him come out on the right side of this one. 

While the council’s blocs are emerging, many of us, as Whitman said, contain multitudes, and these folks may keep surprising us every once in a while. And with the political pendulum in Seattle appearing to swing back toward the Democratic Platform–it is possible (though not looking very likely) we could see some of these folks support more Democratic party policy.