This can be a stomach-churning time for lawmakers trying to shepherd pet bills over the finish line. If you need any evidence of that, ask Rep. Kevin Parker, R-Spokane.

Parker, a freshman who narrowly ousted Democrat Don Barlow in November, was one of the first out of the gate this year when he introduced House Bill 1001. He filed it Dec. 8, standing in the rain on the capitol lawn to meet a handful of veterans who supported it.

The bill would allow the state Department of Veterans Affairs to claim human remains sitting unclaimed or abandoned by family members at funeral homes across the state.

Parker badly wants his bill to become law. And yet it’s parked in a Senate committee, where it will soon die.*

“Being that it was the second bill (introduced) this session, and the day after Pearl Harbor Day, you’d think there could have been a hearing by now,” Parker complained the other day. So he went to see the committee chairwoman, Sen. Darlene Fairley.

At this point, the two versions of what happened diverge.

Parker says he waited patiently for Fairley, and finally got a moment with her to urge her to move the bill ahead.

Fairley has a somewhat different take on what happened. She said, in essence, that Parker accosted her as she was trying to get somewhere on her electric scooter. She repeatedly described him as a “bully,” and said that Parker threatened to complain loudly to the press.

Fairley says there’s a simple reason she didn’t hold a hearing or vote on the bill: there’s a similar version from Sen. Chris Marr, D-Spokane.

“Marr’s bill is alive and well,” she said. “It does the same thing. The House sent me millions of bills. I can only hear so many. We’re going with Marr’s bill.”

UPDATE: But wait, there’s more: Republicans have apparently launched an effort to horse-trade and save Parker’s bill. It ain’t over yet.

Whoops — forgot to post this earlier. From the print paper:

With state child care subsidies well below the actual cost of caring for enrolled kids, some Spokane-area workers and lawmakers say it’s time to give the industry more clout.

How? By unionizing the child care workers and letting them collectively bargain with Olympia for higher rates, paid training and other improvements.

“In this environment, you have to be able to provide some leverage for us to act on a priority,” said state Sen. Chris Marr, D-Spokane. He said the normal state budget process, which is essentially a tug of war among lawmakers and interest groups, has let child care rates lag well behind costs.

“We’ve let that model work for a long time,” Marr said. “The fact is that it doesn’t work.”

“It’s basically to give us a voice,” said Marci McLaughlin, owner of a Spokane Valley child care center.

The union structure would be unusual, McLaughlin said, with both workers and child care owners teaming up to bargain with the state. Under the plan, the state would deduct a yet-to-be-determined “representation fee” from payments to child care centers and pay it directly to the union.

Other lawmakers and child care centers say the simplest fix is just to increase the rates.

“If we really want to get money to child care centers, let’s get it to them,” says state Sen. Brian Hatfield, D-Raymond. He’s backing a bill, SB 5506, that would boost rates to 75 percent of actual cost.

That simpler plan “bypasses a very expensive and unnecessary middleman,” said Tom Emery, a Puyallup child care center owner. He’s the spokesman for the Washington Child Care Alliance, which includes dozens of centers opposed to the collective bargaining plan.

Some emotional speeches this morning in the House and Senate, which honored Japanese-American war veterans and the roughly 12,000 Japanese-American citizens who were rounded up and herded into internment camps in 1942 under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066.

The House passed House Resolution 2009-4617 this morning on the 67th anniversary of Roosevelt’s signing the internment order. The resolution honors the veterans’ and internees’ “patience, heroism, sacrifice and patriotic loyalty.” Watching from the gallery were Japanese-American veterans who served as translators in the Pacific and infantrymen in Europe, as well as people who spent the war behind barbed wire in camps like Idaho’s Minidoka.

Decades later, Congress declared that there was no military or security reason for uprooting the thousands of Japanese families from their farms, homes and businesses. The move, Congress said, could be attributed to bigotry, war hysteria “and a failure of political leadership.”

Sen. Chris Marr, D-Spokane, noted that some neighbors and friends stood by the immigrants, sending books for children in the camps, or writing regularly to the interned families, or keeping pets and property for their return several years later. Still, he said, the internment of U.S. citizens “serves to diminish us all as Americans.”

Sen. Steve Hobbs, who like Marr is Japanese-American, said it was absurd for 70-year-old grandmothers and 10-year-old girls to be considered enemies of the state. And he praised the heroism of Japanese-American military intelligence specialists and the Army’s famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up of Japanese-American soldiers, many recruited from the internment camps. (Among the veterans of the latter unit: Spokane’s Fred Shiosaki.)

From the Seattle Times, March 30, 1942, front page: “Tears, Smiles Mingle as Japs Bid Bainbridge Farewell”:

There were mothers with babies in arms, aged patriarchs with faltering steps, high school boys and girls, and some children, too young to realize the full import of the occasion. The youngsters frolicked about, treating the evacuation as a happy excursion.

What we’re reading:

-This analysis, by a private think tank called the Washington State Budget and Policy Center, of the differences between House Democrats’ recent cost-cutting plan and a similar proposal from Gov. Chris Gregoire. Researcher Jeff Chapman concludes that the House would reduce the budget by $172 million more than the governor, largely because its plan ignores “maintenance level” changes like counting the 1,700 more students than expected who are enrolling in schools.

-This article in The New Yorker, detailing the views of the worst-case-scenario crowd. Among them: a Russian emigre who sold his Boston apartment and moved onto a sailboat, the better to flee (and trade commodities like apples) in the coming financial apocalypse. The story includes peak-oil folks, fans of gold bullion, Vermont secessionists and an upstate New York author who argues that postwar suburban sprawl will prove a massive national mistake.

-This post, by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Joel Connelly, who argues that the recent election of Spokane’s Sharon Smith as vice chair of the state Democratic Party “signals an increasing presence for Eastern Washington’s Democrats.”

Connelly doesn’t mention the fact that the previous vice chair, Eileen Macoll, lives in Pullman. But he points to two other big Democratic victories east of the Cascades recently: November’s victory for Okanogan’s Peter Goldmark as lands commissioner and, two years earlier, Sen. Chris Marr’s ousting a Republican in a largely suburban Spokane district.