Hominid Views

So I am working at my computer yesterday evening and a phone call comes in:

Me: Hello…Hello?

Rob McKenna: I’m Attorney Rob McKenna urging you to vote to reelect Luke Esser.

[stuff deleted]

Senator Esser’s opponent, Rep. Rod Tom, missed voting 94 times in a 105 day session. The worst record of any east-side legislator. Then Rodney Tom filed expense reports and took tax dollars for days he missed work.

Integrity matters and we need a Senator who will work hard to get results.

This is Attorney General Rob McKenna and I hope you’ll cast your vote for Senator Luke Esser.

Paid for by Esser for Senator, GOP.

Wow…so now Rob McKenna is stooping to making highly misleading statements on behalf of Luke Esser. He is, in essence, lying for Esser!

Did you catch the lie? We are, apparently, supposed to believe that Rodney Tom missed a huge number of days in a 105 day session. In fact, he didn’t:

I contacted Rep. Tom’s legislative office to ask about this. I learned that he missed no votes in the 2006 session, and his calendar showed him there for all days of the session. But I also learned that attendance records are not kept, as such. In order to assert that Tom had the worse record, one would need to go through, by hand, voting records of every legislator and check for days that they did not vote. I sincerely doubt anyone has done that, but I started doing that for Tom, and see he only missed votes on about 6 days since 2002—an average of 1.5 days per session.)

Apparently, Rob McKenna is discussing the 2005 legislative session, not the 2006 session. In 2005, Tom missed multiple votes on days 60, 94, 95, 96, and 97 of the session. At worse he missed 5 days of one 105 day session, but missed almost no other days in the other 3 years. And that 94 votes missed is out of 1,642 votes taken in 2005!

Was Tom sick on those days? Did he have a relative in the hospital? Was he on a State-sponsored mission to bring new Businesses to Washington? I don’t know…I didn’t bother to ask when I talked to Tom’s legislative assistant. You see, I suspect that Tom missed days for legitimate reasons. I assume that if Tom was playing hooky to, say, play the casinos, Esser would have made a big deal about that. Since Esser is not making a big deal about anything but 5 days of absence (although misleadingly suggesting that it was most of the session), I must conclude Tom’s absences were on the up and up.

But don’t just take my word for it. When this issue came up before, Rep. Toby Nixon (R-WA-45) weighed in on the issue. Here is what he had to say:

I note that in your posting you said that it was tough to find out how many votes people had missed. It’s really not that hard if you have the database of votes (which I do on my computer at home). To make it easier, WashingtonVotes.org has it readily available at http://www.washingtonvotes.org/MissedVotes.aspx. I took their listing for the 2005-2006 biennium and sorted it by number of votes missed. The sorted list appears below. Note that Rep. Tom is 22nd out of 147 legislators. There are explanations and stories for just about every one of these high missed-vote counts – either the member was ill (in some cases very seriously so), or a family member was ill, or their spouse was delivering a baby, or they’re in leadership and spending a lot of time negotiating budgets and such with the governor. One cannot assume that missing a bunch of votes means one was slacking off, playing golf or in the company of swine. In my case, the three votes I missed in 2005 (the only three votes I’ve missed in five years in the legislature) were on a very rare Sunday morning session of the legislature,; I absolutely had to be present in church that morning, and got down to Olympia shortly after noon.

The per diem charge is absurd. Do they expect Tom to sublet his house for the few days he cannot be in Olympia? Rep. Nixon weighs in on the issue this way:

The legislature recognizes that legislators who are paying extra to maintain a second household in Olympia during the legislative session do not get to stop paying for their rent or utilities or other expenses just because they’re out sick or a family member is in the hospital or even if its just the weekend. It is very common practice to accept per diem for every day of the session – virtually every legislator does it except those who live within easy commuting distance of the capitol.

Finally, Rep. Nixon blows apart Esser disingenuous claims about Rep. Tom stealing taxpayer money this way:

I asked the Chief Clerk of the House to give me a list of all the members of the House and the number of per-diem days claimed during the 2006 legislative session. The 2006 session was 59 days long. I’ve left this list in alphabetical order. I bolded only the members who did NOT take the full 59 per diem days. Somebody might want to do this for the Senate, too.

Almost every member of the House took 59 days of per diem.

Luke Esser is willfully distorting the truth in representing this issue. The fact is that Tom’s overall attendence record is excellent over the 4 years he has been a member of the House. Furthermore there is nothing whatsoever unusual about his per diem requests.

I suppose we have to expect this kind of negative campaigning from a desperate candidate. But what is Rob McKenna’s excuse for participating in the lying? I suppose McKenna is counting on people forgetting about this when he decides to run for another office.

Umm…I don’t think so, Rob.