The Washington Legislative Season Starts Now!
This year, the WA legislature will be in session from Jan 12 to Mar 12. In that two-month period, legislators have well over 300 bills to consider. Most of those bills will never even get a hearing as they quickly narrow down to a much smaller set that have a chance of being passed.
This means that now is the time to involve yourself in this process. The most basic way is contacting your legislators. The common wisdom is that a call or handwritten letter to your legislator’s office has much more impact than an email or filling out a form. But there is another way to look at it as well: the absolutely most valuable communication is a personal story of how particular legislation impacts you or your community. The legislators love to get their hands on a good story. And the second most important thing is volume: if a lot of people call/write/email at once, that sends much bigger message than a few calls here or there. So if you have a good story: tell it. If you don’t: look for a campaign to join.
But with all those bills, and such a short timeline, how do you know where to direct your attention? The main way is to follow organizations that track issue areas you care about-they are the ones that create those campaigns. The actions we publish in our newsletter usually come from other organizations that NKI is following. If you want to get your own customized list, we highly recommend signing up for TAN (Take Action Network), which will let you follow many local organizations and/or issues and be notified when your action will have the most impact. Unlike some systems out there, TAN won’t spam you: you have complete control over what you want to notified about.
And in case you wondered, conservative activist groups got this down a long time ago. They typically have many more people calling/writing/testifying than the progressive side does. Righting that balance is important.
This year, some of the highest profile legislative activity will be around protecting Washingtonians from ICE overreach. But there are also bills impacting education, availability/affordability of medical care, voting rights, and addressing the shortage of public defenders in this state, amongst myriad other things. Contact us if you have particular questions or interests, and we’ll see what we can do to help.