Rep. Adam Smith is running as a solidly Democratic incumbent in the solidly blue Ninth Congressional District against Doug Bazler, a die-hard Trump supporter who has tried and failed to unseat Smith five times already. If reelected, Smith will enter his seventh term in Congress. In that time, he’s risen to be the chair of the powerful Armed Services Committee, where he has direct input on military deployments and spending.
The son of a union ramp serviceman who grew up in SeaTac, he still believes in the blue collar American dream: good jobs, advancement through education and easily accessible home ownership. However, he’s come a long way from Tyee High School, and he’s had his hand on the levers of power for over a decade now. What does he want to do with them going forward?
“I want to do everything I can to improve the quality of life for the people in our area,” he said. The key to doing that, he believes, is turning back income inequality with a return to those blue collar basics of higher wages and home ownership. He recently introduced a bill that would make community and technical colleges tuition-free.
However, while it’s easy to get on board with all of that — Pew Research found that 63 percent of Americans were at least somewhat behind tuition-free public college and university in 2021 — we also asked about some votes that may not have aged as well with his constituents. And before you even ask, yes, he regrets giving George W. Bush the go ahead in Iraq.
Do you have aspirations for other higher offices?
I do not.
Moving back to talking about this office, what makes you better for this job than Basler?
Yeah, it's a long list, but I think it starts with my experience and my commitment to the community. I think I'm in a much better position to deliver for the people of this district because I know how government works, and I work with a broad group of people. I work with conservatives, liberals, right wing, left wing. He has a more narrow, right-wing perspective. I think he would struggle mightily to work with people who didn't see the world exactly the same that he does, number one. And also, I think he has bought into the right wing Trump line that basically takes us down the road to destroying our representative democracy.
You've talked a lot about your tenure and that being a strength. One of the first bills you sponsored was to limit terms. How's your thinking changed on that?
That was for a congressional term limit of six terms, I think 12 years. I believe in competition. I think you should have a fair competition between two people, or however many people you want, and then you get to an outcome. And at the time when I was in office, incumbents had an enormous advantage because of the money they could raise, the connections they had, the access to voters, and that has fundamentally changed. We've seen it, starting in 2006. Record numbers of incumbents are being defeated in a bunch of different elections. And the reason for that is the playing field has, in fact, been leveled. This is one benefit of social media and the internet. Candidates are able to raise money much more quickly than they used to be able to. And also they were able to get their message out. The barriers to entry are vastly lower than they used to be because of social media and the internet.
What votes are you most proud of, and which ones do you most regret over your career?
The vote that I am most proud of is, obviously, the Affordable Care Act. That was an extraordinarily difficult setting. This was when the town hall meetings started, and the Tea Party was up and coming out and [we had] a couple of thousand people showing up and yelling at me with all manner of threatening signs. Then there were a lot of other folks who didn't think the bill had gone far enough. You know, “This is a sell out. We didn't do single payer, blah blah blah.” Thirty million people over the course of the last 10 to12 years now have health insurance because we did that, because we took the vote. We got it done. It really made a difference in people's lives.
And the one you most regret?
Clearly the vote that I most think I made a mistake on was the Iraq war authorization from 2000. And I know exactly why. First of all, we weren't voting to go to war. The 2002 vote on authorization of use of force in Iraq, the vote was to use that threat to force coercive [weapons] inspections on Saddam [Hussein]. Well, about a month after we took that vote, he agreed to coercive inspections and passed a very aggressive [inspections] approach, and we went to war anyway.
Now, obviously you had to know that George W. Bush wasn't being sincere about that, but I was six years into my time in Congress. 9/11 had just happened. I think a lot of people today who weren't there, who didn't live and didn't experience that… This is where a lot of folks on the left lose their minds: “Saddam Hussein didn't have anything to do with 9/11.” He didn't, 100 percent did not. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is how could our country hold together to stand up against the very obvious threat that had been brought home on 9/11? And I had a desire to be supportive of the president, if possible. I didn't want our ability to defend our country and our ability to come together as a nation to be determined by the fact that the president happened to be of a different party than mine.
You are the chair of the Armed Services Committee, you've made these votes in the past and, like you said, you've updated your thinking. What is your current philosophy on the proper use of force abroad? What do you think our role is in the world?
Well, I think it should be an extraordinarily limited option, and what I believe more passionately than anything is the U.S. needs to play an active, positive role in the world. I know a lot of people see the challenges and difficulties and the mistakes that we have made in Iraq and Afghanistan in what used to be called the “global war on terror.” And there's a desire to have us retreat from the world. But, when I look at the world, the role that the U.S. plays is crucial and has been since World War II. I want us to be actively engaged in trying to build a more peaceful and prosperous world. But I want force to be a last resort. We need to work on diplomacy and alliances crucially to build on the rules-based international order that we've tried to help put in place.
I'm a big fan of development. I think we need to do as much foreign aid as possible to help those parts of the world that are struggling the most. That level of instability [that] we see in Latin America where people can't eat and can't be safe from violence, it just causes chaos globally. And we've seen that in, gosh, you know, Ethiopia. But let's try to be actively engaged in the world. And I think we should have an adequate deterrent. I think deterrence is important, but we were overly reliant on the military post 9/11, 100 percent. We need to be more focused on using diplomacy and development and alliances as a way to build a more secure and peaceful world and not be as reliant on the military going forward.
With the yearly budget hovering around $800 billion for the Department of Defense, do you think that is a justified number? Do you think that's a good number? What does it really cost to have that option of deterrence without necessarily having an oversized military?
Yeah, it's difficult. It costs a lot, is the honest answer. But I think what has really shifted in the last five or six years is [Vladimir] Putin, Russia and China. Putin attacked Ukraine for really one reason. He thought he could get away with it and he thought he could take it. Okay? He is less willing to attack NATO-aligned countries because he thinks he would lose. That's the value of deterrence. And when you're dealing with someone like Putin and Xi [Jinping], if you don't have an adequate military, they will take whatever they can take. They don't believe in a rules-based international order. They believe might makes right, and that they have rightful claims on a whole lot of territory that currently — and inconveniently for them — belongs to other people. So having an adequate military is part of a deterrence strategy.
Now, what does that cost? It's not as cheap as some people would like to believe, but we also need to focus on greater efficiency and effectiveness within the military. I also feel that we need to adequately meet our needs here at home, which is why I supported the [Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security] Act, the American Recovery Act, the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act and most recently, the Inflation Reduction Act. [Note: These pieces of legislation supported relief from the coronavirus pandemic, economic recovery from the 2008 financial collapse, investments in infrastructure, semiconductor research and investments to reduce consumer costs, respectively.]
Over the course of the last three years, two years, two-and-a-half years, the federal government has spent almost $7 trillion over and above what's just in the regular budget on those domestic needs. Of that $7 trillion, none of it went to defense. It went to roads and bridges and health care and education and schools and a lot of things that I think we should spend money on. And I'm 100 percent in favor of that. I was most excited about the Inflation Reduction Act, that it actually had a corporate minimum tax in there and it actually raised revenue so that we could cover those costs. So I certainly support the domestic priorities as well.
That makes me want to skip ahead to our question on homelessness because you’ve started touching on those domestic issues. Why is homelessness a growing issue in your district?
I think there's a variety of different reasons for that, but number one, with a bullet, is affordable housing. If people were to ask me out of all the issues that are impacting your constituents, what is the one that is most concerning to them and most needs to be addressed? Affordable housing, number one. No doubt about it. Certainly it has an impact on people who are homeless, but also has an impact just on people trying to make it. I generally subscribe to the Housing First approach. I think that needs to be the first and most important step going forward.
Specifically for homeless people, getting homeless people inside?
Absolutely, yes. A hundred percent. There's a lot going on on this front, as I'm sure you're aware, and I've visited a lot of the projects out there. Just on the Eastside — in Bellevue, in the East Lake area Plymouth Housing is building 100 units of permanent supportive housing. There's also an emergency shelter going in right there. And then there's another nonprofit that's building 400 units of affordable housing on the Eastside. Compass Point is a group I work with closely. They have a veteran's housing area in Renton, in my district, that is affordable housing for veterans and also supportive of them to then move them out of that into a permanent housing situation.
From where you sit on the federal side of things, what can Congress do to support these local projects? Like, what are some specific actions you can take in Congress to get the Housing First model funded?
The Low Income Housing Tax Credit — I think it is a huge factor in getting private sector and nonprofit folks to build affordable housing. So, support for that tax credit is crucial. And then the [Housing and Urban Development] programs and the Housing Authority programs, they're really good. The voucher program, Section 8 housing. It's just that there's not enough of them. I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel there, I just think we need to support those programs more, which is part of what we did over the course of the last couple of years through these various bills that funded that. So that's a big part of what the federal government can do.
The final thing that I'm doing on this: We brought back congressionally directed spending, or earmarks, if you prefer. That makes more sense. We've chosen to call it “congressionally directed.” It's a rebranding thing. It's like when Kentucky Fried Chicken went to KFC. But what I've been able to do, those projects that I've mentioned, I can direct some amount of money — we had like $10 million last year that, through the appropriations process, I was able to direct [to] a variety of different projects. Just a couple of examples: Africatown, that K. Wyking Garrett is working on. We got $2 million and two separate $1 million dollar grants to help with the affordable housing and community centers that they're talking about building there. El Centro de la Raza is now trying to expand. Well, they did do more affordable housing, by the way. They built a senior housing unit right next to their place in Southeast Seattle. But they're now looking to Federal Way, and they've got a property down there that they've acquired part of it. They're trying to acquire the rest of it, and they want to build a community center and affordable housing. We have asked for an earmark to help them. I forget how much. I think it was a million dollars to help support that. So I am aggressively looking for projects that are supporting affordable housing and trying to drive those earmark dollars that I'm able to drive out to them.
Is there any kind of silver bullet type thing that can address what I would say is the gulf between what's being built and what the need is? What I see when I'm out reporting is just a ballooning of homelessness that I think is out of scale with our "best intentions" projects. And I'm kind of curious, is there anything you can think of that we could just do totally different to ramp up to meet that need?
Honestly, I don't think so. I don't think there is a silver bullet solution in this case. I [do] think investments in behavioral health can be enormously helpful as well, because people find themselves in a situation where they can't make their life work, you get to a little bit of a “chicken and egg” situation. Well, which came first? Did I have a behavioral health problem or did I go, “Oh my God, my life is out of control,” and it gave me one?
The other piece of it, as I said, and I do this a lot, is to try to drive up wages, try to create situations where you have more jobs that will pay a living wage. You know, politics is about stories to some extent, but my father, he made like $16 an hour, full benefits. Health care was a lot more affordable back in the early 80s. And six weeks of vacation, by the way, which is a cool deal. The house that we lived in, he had purchased in 1971 for $15,000. You're not going to find anything in South King County [at that price]. Now fast forward today, that same house that I grew up in — and we made modest improvements on it over a couple of decades — but it's listed on Zillow for [$500,000]. So you can do the math. A ramp serviceman's job, the job that he had, if you're lucky now pays maybe $27, $28 an hour. So the wage hasn't doubled, and the cost of housing is what? Thirty times higher?
Yes, absolutely.
That's the problem right there. So let's start paying people more money. And, oh, by the way, it's not like the economy hasn't grown, productivity hasn't grown. That wealth has simply become concentrated in the hands of shareholders and executives. That is what our economy has chosen to reward. One of the great things about the Inflation Reduction Act was a tax on stock buybacks. Okay? That's one small step, and if it wasn't for [Sen.] Kyrsten Sinema, we could have made even bigger steps in all of these issues and areas. But the single biggest thing that has changed is in the last 50 years, we have moved the money from workers to shareholders and executives.
So you see a direct causal link between the rising inequality, corporate profits and phenomena like increased homelessness? Those things are related to you?
Absolutely. There is no doubt about it. Again, and this is where I tend to get into a little trouble with some of my folks on the left. I'm conservative in terms of personal accountability and personal choice and the impact that has on your station in life. I went to college. I studied philosophy. I had the Jesuits talking to me. And I understand the whole argument about, do we really control our lives? I get that. You can have a fascinating conversation about what individual choice you have. Past a certain point I don't agree with that. You do make personal choices that impact your life.
Now, can you make a series of personal choices that guarantee you that something out of your control isn't going to smack you upside the head? Hell, no. All right? It's always a percentage. But I think we also need to educate people to make those choices, because the second you tell people that their individual choices don't matter, that they cannot be accountable for that, you're just never going to get there. So that has an impact on it, certainly. But what has driven us to this point is the concentration of wealth and the sheer number of people who no longer can live up to that Horatio Alger mantle of “Work hard, live by the rules and you can have a decent life.” That is increasingly not the case because of the concentration of wealth.
Yeah. If we're talking about choices, sometimes people just don't have the resources to make the right choice. It's not a choice. They just don't have money. [Moving on], Doug Basler has talked a lot about public safety and has made that a huge issue. We just want to ask if you feel that your district is safe or unsafe for yourself and your constituents?
I think we have a public safety problem. I think crime is a problem and I think that the people in my district feel less safe than they have for some time because of the rising problem with crime. And I don't think that's debatable. But part of the reason we're trying to change our public safety system is because the old model of incarceration without any help destroyed countless lives unnecessarily, and it ought to be reformed. We ought to give better options to people who make those bad choices in life so that they don't have to basically have their entire life ruined by those bad choices.
There's a ton of things we can do better, without question. And, also, the current crime challenge that we have grows mostly out of the pandemic and all the problems that that has created. Now that we're getting to the other side of the pandemic, I think we can begin to help deal with some of those issues. People were put in bad economic circumstances. They were stressed out. Our criminal justice system in King County — it's an overstatement to say it shut down for two years, but it's not that much of an overstatement. We have like a 5,000 case backlog of felonies in King County, in large part driven by all the shutdowns that happened during the pandemic.
And then stemming from that, what do you think the police's role in promoting public safety is or isn't?
Yeah, I think we need police, and we need people to enforce the rules. The way we chose to do policing over the course of the last 50 years is extraordinarily problematic. I believe much more in community policing as opposed to the hyper-aggressive harassment policing that was promoted for so many years through things like “stop and frisk” and pretext stops. The idea that you flood a zone where crime is and you harass as many people as possible to make sure that they don't commit crime I think has a huge downside that we began to learn. I think we don't have to do that in order to have public safety.
Now, what I don't think is clear yet, once you get through all that, can you do it with less police? I think it's quite possible that you can reform policing in a way that meets some of those concerns and still need about the same number of law enforcement officers in order to make sure [you have] security. Just have them doing different things differently. Reform the way they perform their jobs not to be as hyper-aggressive as it is. And also, long before George Floyd, I worked on the Deescalate Washington campaign with Andre Taylor. You know, be accountable. If police commit crimes, if police harm people unlawfully, there needs to be some mechanism for holding them accountable, and that just was gone. Okay? And we still need that accountability.
So you do all of that, you still have law enforcement. And then, the last big piece of this is: What should the police be doing? I think the police are brought into situations that they don't need to be brought into, and then you're bringing in police to these difficult situations, and they're being brought in with their "escalate to deescalate" mentality... There is much that needs to be done to reform our criminal justice system and to reform how we deal with people who wind up in it. I support diversion programs. I support restorative practices. You can't take someone who stole one thing when they were 16 years old, [and] now they're in the system, and no one's paying attention to them anymore, and they're just a criminal. That's a recipe for disaster.
Real quick, do our fun question. What's your favorite place in your district?
Favorite place in my district?
It's a pretty big district.
Yeah, there's a lot going on, but just for old time's sake: The airport. It's where I grew up, and I have memories in my entire life in that airport and in that community. My personal favorite story is the billboard that a buddy of mine and I climbed up on when we were in high school and split a six pack of beer. So I would say that Sea-Tac, and specifically the airport community, is my favorite part of the district. You put me in a bad spot, though, because then I got all these other parts of the district that are like, ”What, you don't like us?”
I mean, climbing a billboard and splitting a six pack with your best friend is kind of one of the best memories you can have.
That's my view
Tobias Coughlin-Bogue is the associate editor at Real Change.
Read more of the Oct. 12-18, 2022 issue.