As my career in the Washington State Legislature wrapped up this month, I have spent time reflecting on what it was like when I arrived in Olympia as a newly minted state representative and political novice 14 years ago. One of my most enduring memories was a conflicting but overwhelming feeling that the Legislature was both more partisan — and more bipartisan — than I expected. Let me explain.
It is more partisan than I expected because we conduct so much of our business within our caucuses. There are four caucuses (Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans, House Democrats and House Republicans). Each caucus has a leadership team and a dedicated staff of very smart people to help with both policy and communications.
In many ways, working in the Legislature is a team sport, and your caucus is your team. We obviously share similar values, so it makes sense that we would work together, but I did not understand the extent to which we would be together. The caucuses spend hours and hours together getting briefed on bills, debating strategy and trying to figure out the best path forward. Each legislator certainly has the freedom to vote how they want — with the majority of the caucus or go their own way — but the organizational structure is by party.
That party/caucus team aspect of the Legislature was a surprise. So too was the extent to which we worked together with members of the other party, especially in the Senate where there is a tradition of working across the aisle. Working in a bipartisan manner was always the first and most preferred way to work.
We would work together across the aisle on crafting bills, passing amendments and general planning. If you ever watch the Senate floor when in session, you'll see a constant movement of Senators of both parties going from desk to desk or chatting in the back of the chamber, working on amendments, discussing bills or just catching up.
This bipartisanship is so prevalent that it is fair to say that party-line votes are a rare exception. This may be a surprise to many, but 96% of the bills we passed in the 2024 session had some kind of bipartisanship and over 80% were significantly bipartisan. Only 16 of the 381 sent to Gov. Jay Inslee's desk from the Legislature were party-line.
While bipartisanship is standard operating procedure, that does not mean that we would forgo our values and priorities just for the sake of bipartisanship. The people of Washington had elected a Democratic majority, and we were not going to stop working on issues that we knew the overwhelming majority of Washingtonians wanted us to address, even if we could not garner bipartisan support. This was particularly true on issues like reproductive rights, climate action and gun violence prevention.
I credit the founders of our state for coming up with a highly productive partisan system. The system is designed for friction and, when all is working well, that friction serves an important purpose of creating new ideas and compromise. The system breaks down if each side retreats to its corners and never comes together to try to find a middle ground. But, in the majority of cases, the system of friction and bipartisanship functions as designed and leads to bills that benefit the people of our state.
One of the biggest bills we passed in recent years was the legislation that reinstated drug possession laws after the state Supreme Court struck down the long-standing previous law. Immediately after the court's decision in 2022, the Legislature passed a quick fix to try to address the situation. We were pressed for time because of the timing of the court decision, and I think everyone agreed that stop-gap bill was not adequate.
So we came back in the 2023 session with the passage of a "Blake Bill" (so named because the Blake Supreme Court case that triggered this crisis) as a "must-do" before we adjourned for the year. We all knew that the Blake Bill was the biggest bill of the session. This bill would impact every community in our state, and it would be hard to find a version of the bill that could capture that magical 50-25-1 (50 votes in the House, 25 votes in the Senate and one signature from the governor) minimum support required for a bill to become a law.
We spent all session trying to find a solution. We were losing the far right who wanted the toughest possible penalties for drug possession, and we were losing the far left who wanted to focus all on treatment without criminalization of drug possession. If we didn't pass a bill, the stop-gap bill from the prior year would expire and all drug possession would be legal.
We needed to find a path in the middle.
As the regular session came to close, the Senate passed a middle-ground bill with 14 Democratic and 14 Republican votes (as bipartisan as you can get), but it died in the House on the last day of the session. We were headed to a special session. On the day after the regular session, I stopped by my office just off the Senate floor to pick up a few items before driving home to Spokane for a few days. As I walked by the Senate floor, I saw my Republican counterpart, Minority Leader John Braun, walking by on the other side. We connected on the floor, just the two of us in an otherwise empty Senate chamber and both dressed in our drive-home clothes (he lives outside Centralia).
Sen. Braun and I lamented that the Blake Bill had died. Right there we hammered out what a Blake Bill that the two of us and a majority of the full Legislature could support. We spent the next few weeks working on the details of the plan and getting valuable input from the House and Senate committee chairs, other legislators and various stakeholders like drug treatment professionals and law enforcement.
When we reconvened for the vote in special session, Sen. Braun and I met on the Senate floor just before the final bill was to be briefed in each caucus. He asked, "How many votes do you need from me?" I thought we had at least 18 Democrats, so we would need at least seven Republicans, but I hoped there would be at least 10 so we could show strong bipartisanship. After caucus, we reconnected just before the bill was headed to the floor for a vote, and we both thought we would have enough votes. Indeed, it passed 42-6, with both Republicans and Democrats on both sides of the vote tally.
The Blake Bill was particularly bipartisan, but in some form, bipartisanship exists on most days in the Washington State Legislature. And, whatever may be happening in the other Washington, I am optimistic about Washington state's future because we continue to collaborate as we work on behalf of the people of this state. ♦
Andy Billig represented the 3rd District, covering much of Spokane, in the Washington State Legislature starting in 2011 as a state representative. He became a state senator in 2013 and Senate majority leader in 2018; he did not run for reelection in 2024. Billig is the CEO of Brett Sports.
