Stokesbary on TVW: No new taxes, smarter spending, real school choice, and a fix for housing costs
House Republican Leader Drew Stokesbary joins TVW’s Austin Jenkins to discuss key legislative issues, budget debates, and Republican priorities for the session. In this in-depth interview, Stokesbary shares his perspective on a variety of topics, including:
- How minority Republicans are influencing policy and public opinion
- Governor Bob Ferguson’s approach to bipartisan cooperation and budget negotiations
- The ongoing debate over taxes, spending, and efforts to balance the state budget
- Proposed solutions for housing affordability and education reform
- The impact of state policies on economic growth and job creation
Stokesbary also weighs in on state revenue trends, Democratic property tax proposals, and whether Washington state should adopt a zero-based budgeting approach.
Full transcript:
TVW host Austin Jenkins: How are minority Republicans in the Washington House trying to influence the policy debate this year, and what are their priorities? Joining me now is House Republican Leader Drew Stokesbary. Welcome to the program. Good to see you.
House Republican Leader Drew Stokesbary: Yeah, great to see you, Austin.
Jenkins: So the initial bill cutoff out of the house of origin has passed. You’re coming up on fiscal cutoff at the end of this week. What’s your top-line, 30,000-foot view assessment so far of the first third of the session?
Stokesbary: You know, so far the session’s going as well as you could expect for Republicans, conditioned on the fact that we’re in the minority. Obviously, I think we would like to have some more Republicans in the Legislature to restore more balance, but given the margins of what they are, I think we’ve been as successful as we can be. As the minority, our job is as much to influence legislation as it is to influence in the court of public opinion, and I think we’re doing a tremendous job there, talking about our priorities to the people of Washington. I think they largely agree with the topics that we’ve been talking about.
Jenkins: So we’ll talk about some of those issues, or several of those issues in a moment. I want to remain at a higher level here and kind of go back to the beginning of the legislative session when Governor Bob Ferguson was inaugurated and gave a speech that included specific callouts to Republican legislators, talked about specific pieces of legislation he wanted to help get across the finish line. What has happened since then in terms of interactions with, conversations with, the new governor and minority Republicans, at least on the House side?
Stokesbary: Yeah, the governor’s office and House and Senate Republican leaders have a biweekly meeting set up. So I think we’ve met three times so far, which is about three times more often than I met with his predecessor during my entire first session as House Republican Leader. You know, I gotta say it’s a breath of fresh air. There’s gonna be plenty of things that we disagree with, but there’s some things that we do agree on, and we’re working on those, and the governor’s been a great partner to try to get those things done. It’s great to have a governor who lives on the same planet as the rest of us. For example, you mentioned that in his inaugural address he called out some specific policy areas, and for some context, one of the ones he called out was to help make sure that the state is actually delivering on the promise of exempting fuel for agricultural purposes from the fees associated with the Climate Commitment Act. When I met with former Governor Inslee my first week or second week in session as Republican Leader, this was the very first topic I brought up to him, and his answer was, “Well, I’m told that Department of Ecology has already solved this problem, so I don’t think you need to worry about it anymore. Next question, please.” So to go from that attitude, denying the problem exists, to a year later having the new governor admit the problem exists and promising to solve the problem is a tremendous breath of fresh air. Four years from now, the ultimate test will be, did he accomplish what he promised? But you know, he’s still in his first month on the job, and I’ll take a guy that can admit problems and promise solutions over a guy denying problems any day of the week.
Jenkins: This kind of leads me to wonder about the budget, which is obviously a huge issue this year because the state is facing fewer revenues, less revenue, than it has historically been bringing in. So there is a gap there, and it was interesting again to see the early signals the governor sent about revenue options versus scrubbing the budget, and clearly there was some daylight there, maybe still is, between majority Democrats in the Legislature and this new governor, at least as he gets up to speed on the budget. What is your sense so far in the conversation? I’m pretty sure I know where you stand on a lot of these tax issues, and we’ll ask about them in a moment, but what’s your sense right now of, in these conversations with the governor, where he’s coming from and to what extent that aligns with what you guys want to do?
Stokesbary: Great question. You know, first I need to clarify that we actually aren’t collecting less revenue. Our revenue growth is not as high as we want—it’s not growing as fast as it was going to be—but we’re still moving along. Instead of going 60 miles an hour, we’re going 50 miles an hour now. We’re still driving down the highway pretty good. I think that’s an important distinction because, by definition, when we get down the road and we’re talking about passing a budget, you don’t actually have to reduce spending to below where it was. If we spent money in this upcoming 25-27 biennium at the same levels we spent in the 23-25 biennium, we’d have a billion dollar surplus. We have more money coming in this year than last year and more money coming in next year than this year. So I think that’s important to know, but beyond that, in terms of talking with the governor, they’ve been serious conversations, very policy-focused. I do think he is genuine in wanting to find ways to make our budgets more sustainable. You know, like I said in the context of his inaugural address, it was a breath of fresh air. He is talking about some of the things that Republicans have been talking about for several years. I have been able to dust off a few bills that I have proposed when I was ranking member on the Appropriations Committee and point to those as some potential medium- and long-term solutions for getting our budget, structural budget challenges under control. When I was the lead Republican on budget stuff, I was always looking for ways we could save money or solve some of the structural problems. One of the challenges you run into, you know, and it’s by constitutional design, the Legislature passes laws, including the budget, and the executive implements it. So in some ways, it doesn’t matter how many votes in the Legislature there might be for more efficient and effective government if the governor isn’t willing to execute in a more lean and efficient fashion—you’re banging your head against the wall. And again, it’s a month into the job. Ultimately, I think me and my constituents are gonna judge him over what he does over a four-year period, but at this point in time, every conversation I’ve had with him suggests he’s incredibly serious about making government work more efficiently and more effectively in solving some of these long-term budget challenges that have plagued us for the past couple cycles.
Jenkins: Is there an example or two you could give us of ideas you’re dusting off? Is there any indication yet, specifically from the governor, on something that he might take a look at?
Stokesbary: Yeah, you know, I don’t want to put words in the governor’s mouth—he can certainly address which of these ideas he likes and doesn’t like—but one idea that I have proposed in the past was to try to shift us away from our maintenance level approach to budgeting to a more zero-based budget approach. I suppose if you’re watching this program, there’s probably a good chance, better than average chance, you know what those terms mean, but the way we traditionally do budgets around here is we look at what we spent last year. And for the most part, the Legislature assumes that everything we’ve done before is a good idea, and we spend most of our bandwidth talking about what changes to make from there, and it almost always results in just adding new programs to the mix. Very rarely do we ever go out of our way to examine whether something’s actually working well and talk about getting rid of it. A zero-based approach, more often, you’re going through everything top to bottom with a fine-tooth comb, and just because you did it a year ago or five years ago doesn’t automatically mean you keep doing it. A challenge that we have with implementing that is the budget has grown in the last decade from $30 billion a biennium to $70-75 billion dollars a biennium. Just from a mechanical standpoint, that’s a lot of programs and line items to go through every year. We’re a part-time Legislature; we have a relatively limited staff. So one way I’ve tried to suggest we square the circle is you divide the budget into, say, four or five buckets, and every two years you zero-base one of those buckets, and that way, over a 10-year period, you’ve been zero-basing everything and revisiting everything, but you’re not trying to do all of that work year in, year out. This is a more manageable way to solve the problem. Another bill I had, which actually the governor began to do even without needing a bill, is this idea of asking agencies what are things that you would cut if you needed to. Again, the agencies are the ones that are executing the bills that the Legislature has passed. They’re the ones out there delivering services. They know better than most part-time legislators where parts of their budget could be pared back, because contrary to what most Democrats will tell you, Republicans don’t want to cut services that people depend on. We don’t want to hurt Washington’s most vulnerable. So when we look for budget savings, we are looking for savings that can be realized without harming people, and the agencies know what those are better than almost anybody else. So you gotta work with the agencies to identify those, and to his credit, even without a bill having been passed, the governor has already asked the agencies to go through that exercise and come up with, you know, either 3 or 6% depending on what kind of agency you are, savings options.
Jenkins: Do you—and there are a lot of Republican-led states that are doing state-level DOGEs, kind of borrowing directly from what President Trump is doing and what Elon Musk is in the midst of—if you were in power, if there was a Republican in the governor’s office, would you want something along those lines?
Stokesbary: Oh, I mean, I think if Republicans were in the executive office, yeah, I mean, we would absolutely be looking at not just where you could realize savings in the budget, but where you could realize savings at the agency level even without a reduction in appropriations. And I think we’d be taking a much more critical eye as well to where the agency—what sort of private entities the agencies have been issuing, you know, grants and things like that to. Oftentimes, if you’re only looking at the budget, which is what we as legislators usually do, something will show up as $10 million to Department of X to deliver grants that do Y and Z, and that per se isn’t necessarily bad. Oftentimes, the problem isn’t that we’ve given X dollars to Y agency; the problem is that Y agency has given a grant to Z organization to do some silly, off-the-wall thing with that money. So the Legislature doesn’t have a lot of control over that, whereas the governor and agency directors would. And I definitely think that, you know, Republicans sitting in that office would take a really, really close eye to where that money’s going.
Jenkins: What about just the number of state employees? I know that the governor has imposed some hiring freezes and slowing the pace of spending because of the budget situation, but again, if Republicans were in charge, would there be an effort, as we’re seeing at the federal level now, to reduce census?
Stokesbary: You know, again, I think that gets back to the point I made earlier about the best judge of that is gonna be the agencies. To the extent that the agency can continue to provide the services that are important to Washingtonians with fewer headcount, fewer employees, then yeah, absolutely, we shouldn’t be hiring employees that serve no purpose, that aren’t adding value to the agency, to state government. But to the extent that state personnel really are necessary to deliver those services, then yeah, absolutely, we want to make sure that effective services can be delivered to Washingtonians.
Jenkins: So you have articulated the idea that revenues are growing, just not as fast as they have been over the last several years, and that you could essentially spend what you did in the current biennium in the next biennium and, I think you said, have $1 billion left over. Democrats are telling a very different story. They are saying that a no-revenue budget would mean catastrophic cuts to Medicaid and health care, cuts to human services and early learning programs, cuts to higher education, cuts for long-term care and developmental disabilities in the billions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of cuts to corrections and behavioral health. I mean, these are two very different narratives, but they’re giving numbers and saying these will be devastating cuts.
Stokesbary: Well, they’re giving numbers in the aggregate. First of all, they’re not identifying specific programs. They’re saying, “Oh, $3 billion will be cut from Department of Corrections.” You know, does that mean that violent offenders are gonna get released early?
Jenkins: I think they said, in that case, $376 million. It was $3.5 billion for health care.
Stokesbary: Okay, but the principle’s the same. Pick whatever number. The irony is, you know, sometimes Republicans will frame it as, “Hey, you know, let’s just make a blanket across-the-board cut,” and you know, hand wave it all away, and Democrats, not inaccurately, criticize that as, “You know, hey, that’s an abstract idea, that’s an abstract process. You gotta talk about, identify actual programs that you would cut.” Here we have Democrats essentially doing everything that they’ve complained about Republicans talking about for years. They’ve picked some numbers, picked some subject areas, but haven’t identified what actually would be cut. You know, also, their exercise sort of takes us through a worst-case scenario. Yeah, you absolutely could cut $10 billion from the state budget and hurt people if that’s what you wanted to do, but that’s not what Republicans want to do. Republicans are looking for $10 billion in savings that would not impact the public.
Jenkins: Is that the number you’re using?
Stokesbary: That’s a somewhat arbitrary number—
Jenkins: I know that we’re talking about a potential $10-12 billion shortfall over four—Is it over two years or over four years?
Stokesbary: Since we have to balance the budget over four years, I try to talk about what savings and spending need in four-year total numbers.
Jenkins: So let me just challenge the premise, I guess. You are saying you believe that you could cut 10 billion dollars out of this $70 billion budget and not have—they use the term “catastrophic,” but even bad consequences, to use a milder word. That’s a chunk of money.
Stokesbary: Yeah, I—well, I believe that you could pass a budget that balances over the two- and four-year period that doesn’t raise taxes and doesn’t harm Washingtonians that depend on state services, absolutely.
Jenkins: So what should, in the minority—and I know that there’s more of a tradition, or at least recently, of Republicans being in the room on the Senate side as budgets are crafted, so let’s maybe start there—what, and I should have noted, although you alluded to it—before you were the House Republican Leader, you were the ranking Republican on the Appropriations and the Budget Committee, so the budget stuff is very familiar to you—but are Republicans in the door for the meetings? What’s that relationship look like with the majority on the budget-writing side?
Stokesbary: You know, for the most part, no. And probably the good comparison here is the capital budget, which has, for the most part, a necessary tradition of bipartisanship because the capital budget is funded by issuing bonds, and constitutionally, you need a three-fifths vote to approve bonds. Almost always, one party or the other has a majority but not a three-fifths majority, so by necessity, the budget becomes bipartisan because there’s the implicit threat that the minority won’t vote for the bond bill unless they’re part of the spending side of the equation. So what’s happening this year is actually a good illustration of what’s possible and what our choice is being made by the majority party. Even though the Democrats—House Democrats—now have just over a three-fifths majority, they have one—just by one vote, they’ve got enough to pass a bond bill without Republicans, they are continuing to engage in that budget on a good-faith, bipartisan basis with Republicans in the room on the same equal footing that they’ve always been. That could be done on the operating budget, but for whatever reason, Democrats don’t want to do that. I think the state’s in much worse shape. Had Republicans been brought in the room three, four budget cycles earlier, maybe we would still have some deficit—we certainly wouldn’t have the, you know, $10 or $15 billion that a lot of Democrats are talking about now. And so, unfortunately, majority Democrats still do view that budget as a very partisan one. I know that Chair Ormsby and Ranking Member Travis Couture have a friendly working relationship. They might be talking in very abstract terms about some very high-level ideas—there might be a little bit of a conversation there—but Republicans are not in the quote-unquote room. They’re not part of a line-by-line process deciding if things ought to be in or out of a budget proposal.
Jenkins: You have made the case for a no-new-taxes budget, but why not—what we usually and often see is a mix of cuts when the state has to balance a budget because revenues are not coming in like they used to, it’s usually a combination of cuts and taxes. Why not sort of embrace that going in and say, “Hey, Democrats, we’re not gonna want as many taxes as you, but we won’t say no to all taxes, but we would like to be in the room. We’ll work with you, and we think we can come up with a budget that does mix the two”?
Stokesbary: Well, I certainly think you’ve got individual Republicans out there trying to do just that and find Democrats they’re willing to come up with some sort of more reasonable middle-ground compromise. I think there’s an important difference here, though. We’re not in a recession. No serious economist thinks we are. The argument is, if the economy is doing pretty good overall—or great overall—and like I said a minute ago, revenue is not down, it just isn’t quite growing as quickly, and if you take a broader view of budget growth over, say, the past five or 10 years, revenue growth has already been outpacing inflation and population growth, so I think for Republicans, it’s not that taxes are a middle-ground compromise and the compromise is just smaller taxes—it’s that we don’t need them at all because, because of the state’s robust economic growth has already been phenomenal, and we have more than enough resources to meet all the demands and ensure that there are services for Washington’s vulnerable population, ensure that education is properly funded, but aren’t raising more taxes beyond the amount of revenue that’s already been coming into state coffers.
Jenkins: I don’t want to spend, given your position, a lot of time litigating specific tax proposals since I think you’ve made it clear you’re not gonna like any of them, but it does seem like Governor Ferguson took the wealth tax off the table or at least downgraded it in some of his early comments. There are other proposals, including a B&O surcharge on large, the largest businesses in the state, and then there’s a whole bunch of other ideas that are out there that have sort of been floated or people are kind of testing the waters, I guess, on. But if—so maybe the way to ask you the question is this: what is the least offensive, if they’re gonna go down this road and they have the votes, what would be the least, from your perspective, damaging, harmful, or offensive tax?
Stokesbary: I haven’t seen it yet, Austin. You know, the Democrats have called it a wealth tax—it’s really a tax on innovation. You know, for every Rockefeller heir that is born with a $100 million spoon in his mouth, there’s 10 Jeff Bezoses and Bill Gateses that build some world-changing product that allows them to build that kind of wealth. And they do that through innovation, and because of what a great state we have, people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have chosen Washington to be the place where they build their businesses, and that’s allowed us to grow state revenue significantly and provide a lot of services. One of the proposals is a jobs tax—you know, the same party that said—
Jenkins: Yeah, and I think it’s focused on businesses of a certain size.
Stokesbary: Yeah, you know, but the idea here is that the same folks that proposed the Climate Commitment Act, which says we want less carbon, so therefore we’re gonna put a price on emitting carbon and that will lead to less emission of it—that exact same model would apply to jobs. If you want fewer jobs, then make it more expensive to hire somebody. That’s exactly what this proposal would do, and it doesn’t have to be theoretical. We’ve seen it play out in Seattle, where companies like Amazon, following Seattle’s jobs tax, have moved all of their new hires across the lake over to Bellevue. One of the other proposals is a real estate excise tax. We’ve got a huge housing affordability crisis—you can’t make housing more affordable by making it more expensive.
Jenkins: But this is on more expensive houses, you know, over—I can’t remember what the threshold is—is it $3 million?
Stokesbary: Correct, but you know, first of all, it’s all about supply. So even a really expensive house—somebody’s gonna move into that, and they’re gonna vacate a slightly less expensive house, which will allow somebody to move into that, and eventually there’s, somewhere, there’s a new housing unit made available for somebody, even if they can’t afford a $3 million house. Eventually, a house that they can afford becomes available. Second of all, multi-family housing complexes, you know, once you get past two or four units, are always gonna be on the upper end of that spectrum. So, you know, I don’t think we want to make multi-family housing—where we’re improving density and creating more affordable housing—more expensive either. And then the last one I’ll mention is the B&O tax—
One of the things that we hear often from folks in the Democratic caucus is how regressive Washington’s tax code is. If you run down the study that they cite and run down why they reach that conclusion about Washington, it is in part because this Public Policy Institute has viewed Washington’s business tax as the most regressive business tax of any state in the entire country. That’s because we’re the only state that taxes gross receipts. So even if you graduate it and apply it to businesses with a large amount of gross receipts, the incidence of that tax still falls, for the most part, on regular people who are buying the products that companies like Amazon and Microsoft and grocery stores are selling. So again, if we want to solve this regressive nature of the state—
Jenkins: Why isn’t there a bipartisan effort—and there have been plenty of work groups and task forces on this—but why don’t Democrats and Republicans come together to replace the B&O tax if it’s so regressive and not helpful?
Stokesbary: You know, I’ve been asking that question myself as well. I think there are some folks on both sides of the aisle that would like to do it—if you’re restructuring it to make it a little more fair, that means that there could end up being folks that benefit, but it would also mean there’s folks that would end up paying more under the new system, even if it is more fair, and that’s the political challenge that you quickly run into trying to fix that problem.
Jenkins: Well, let’s move on to some other issues. I do want to briefly ask about the 1% cap on property tax increases. I know local governments are pushing for that to be lifted. You know, inflation is 3% at best, maybe 7% some years—why would we maintain that cap?
Stokesbary: Well, first of all, like I said with regard to the real estate excise tax, you can’t make housing more affordable by making it more expensive. Allowing the rate of property tax growth to triple will definitely make housing more expensive. If you own your house and pay property taxes directly or through an escrow account, you’re gonna be bearing that cost yourself. But even if you rent and you don’t—you’re not actually paying property taxes to somebody—that gets rolled up into your rental cost, and you pay that as a tenant at some point. And I will—
Jenkins: Are we not just starving local government by restricting, by putting that throttle?
Stokesbary: You know, I’ve not been elected to local government. Obviously, they’ve got a different budget situation than us. They have different revenue sources; they have different spending obligations. You know, but I will note that the area I live in, in South King County, East Pierce County, is suffering from the consequences of land-use decisions made by the state and the city of Seattle, and so we are sort of the last refuge of affordable housing that you can live in and still maybe sort of, kind of hope to have a job somewhere in Seattle or Bellevue and do that daily commute. So while most cities statewide might be supporting this change, some of the cities in my neck of the woods are actually telling me no, they don’t want to do this change because they know what it will do to housing costs in their community—in our community. So that’s what Republicans have been saying all along and said, you know, we gotta care not just about funding local government services, which is important to be sure, but also making sure that people can afford to buy homes and stay in their homes, and if their property taxes are growing a lot more rapidly, that’ll really threaten the housing affordability issue that we need to solve.
Jenkins: Let me ask you about the other side of the ledger, and that’s the spending ledger. I believe I read recently that Senator Wellman, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, wants to put $1 billion more in education. There’s always pressure on legislators to do that, certainly generally for schools, also for special ed. We know there are schools who are struggling around the state—school closures have been on the docket. What is your interest in, and what do you think the capacity is, to actually increase K-12 spending?
Stokesbary: Republicans want to fund public schools, but we want more than that. We want to do more than just send money to public schools—we want public schools to produce better outcomes. I got elected in 2014, which was about partway through the Legislature’s dealing with the McCleary lawsuit and related issues, and since then, the amount of money spent on, you know, kind of however you want to aggregate K-12 spending—as a percentage of the state budget, on a per-pupil average basis, anyway you want to do it—it went up from 2014 to about 2018, 2019, and on a per-pupil basis, it’s continuing to go up. But if you look at outcomes and results over that same period, we’re going in the wrong direction. So I think Republicans are not at all opposed to investing in public schools to make sure we have top-notch teachers that are giving world-class education to kids regardless of their zip code, but we want to make sure we’re getting results from that, and simply sending more money to schools without demanding any sort of accountability or results in return is just gonna continue to repeat the same problems that have confronted us for the last decade. So if we want to spend more money into the K-12 system, we gotta also get serious about making sure that there’s something to show for all that—that we have kids with better literacy rates, better graduation rates, better test scores.
Jenkins: What would that mechanism be? With these dollars comes what?
Stokesbary: Well, I think there’s a lot of different ways you could do it, but I think that one of the challenges that you run into is the influence of the state teachers’ union, who are very interested in the first part of that equation—the more money coming to the door—but a lot less interested in the second part, which is the accountability. You could, you know, there’s been ideas that are floating around—you can have accountability on a classroom or school building basis, you have accountability on a district basis. You know, there’s some really radical but perhaps increasingly needed solutions around school vouchers—
Jenkins: Very popular in a lot of Republican-led states.
I got a message from somebody that Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal was on this show and apparently accused me of wanting to privatize schools, which I didn’t think that I did until I pulled out the statistics that his office publishes and looked at the trend of test scores since he became superintendent of public instruction and suddenly realized, “Hey, maybe we should start talking about this.”
Jenkins: But doesn’t just taking money out of public schools and letting families take it to private or parochial schools—doesn’t that just starve the public schools?
Stokesbary: No, I don’t think so. I think it empowers the parent to make the choice that’s best for their student, best for their child. You know, I send my kids to public school—that makes sense for us. They go to a great public school in the Auburn School District, and they’ve got wonderful teachers. But not everybody is as blessed to live in the same community that I am. Not everybody is blessed with a really good, strong public school district or school near them, and you know, I don’t think they ought to be punished because of that.
Jenkins: Just ‘cause we’re running out of time here, I do—I know housing affordability—you’ve referenced it as a top priority for you and for legislators across, I think, the aisle. Is there—Republicans recently rolled out a batch of proposals for how to address this issue—do you see any kind of bipartisan alignment this year on one or two ideas?
Stokesbary: You know, I do. There’s been some increasing bipartisanship on the idea of supply-side solutions to the problem. You know, ways to get more building—turns out that the laws of supply and demand aren’t this, like, right-wing University of Chicago economist fever dream. They really do describe how the world works, and you know, if you want to make something cheaper, you can either make people want it less, or you can make more of it. It’s kind of hard to drive the demand for housing down, so the only real solution is increase the supply of housing. We are really far behind—we have the fewest number of housing units per household of any state in the country, so we’ve got our work cut out for us. There probably isn’t a single silver-bullet solution—we need more housing of all kinds in all areas. The Legislature has made some strides in the last couple of years on that. There’s still plenty of more things we can do around the margins. A couple bills this year are to allow—make it easier to build ADUs and, you know, second homes in rural areas, to allow homeowners to divide their lot into two, to build an extra housing unit on the new lot. So there’s some ideas out there, and I think that’ll get some bipartisan support.
Jenkins: Just lastly and briefly, how concerned are you about the Trump administration’s policies, especially as they might affect the federal workers in the state and the state budget?
Stokesbary: Yeah, you know, we’re keeping an eye on it, but it’s early in the administration. There’s a lot going on, there’s a lot of commotion. I was elected to solve Washington’s problems, not the country’s problems, so, you know, I’m gonna be prioritizing that, and to the extent decisions out of the federal government make it harder to solve Washington’s problems, you know, I won’t hesitate to speak out, but I’m also not gonna light my hair on fire every time that, you know, somebody sends a tweet, whether it’s the president or one of the president’s critics. I’m gonna wait to find out what the facts are and what’s real and what’s not. The courts are gonna get a chance to weigh in on things that aren’t legal, and we’ve got a great system of government—we’ve got a process to work all this out. When the time comes to protect Washingtonians, I’ll be there, but I’m not gonna dive into a panic either.
Jenkins: Okay, I’m gonna stop you there. House Republican Leader Drew Stokesbary, thanks for the interview.
