Snyder Will Miss The People, Not The Battles
It had been building for weeks.
Senate Democratic Leader Sid Snyder, the Legislature’s main guardian of proper procedure, was growing increasingly restive over the way the majority Republicans were running the railroad, seeming to create new rules as they went along and leaving the minority in the dust.
On Saturday night, after yet another of his impassioned protests was ignored, he did the only thing he felt he could do. He quit his beloved Senate.
It was no light decision - though he did make it quickly - and he considers it irreversible.
Now 70, Snyder has been an institution, serving as a senator or staffer for nearly half of statehood. He arrived 48 years ago as an elevator operator at a Capitol that was little more than 20 years old. Eventually he became chief administrator of the Senate and finally leader of the Senate Democrats.
Snyder, a millionaire grocer, banker and utility investor from Long Beach, has long been one of the Senate’s most beloved members, a raconteur with a ready quip or joke, a gentle floor speech or a hands-across-the-aisle olive branch and, always, a deft understanding of parliamentary procedure, the rules of the game.
But this session, with Republicans firmly in control of both the House and Senate, he became increasingly vocal about what he sees as GOP attempts to selectively ignore time-honored rules of procedure and protection of the rights of the minority.
Snyder abruptly resigned after he had lost a floor battle over how the Republicans were pushing through the budget without following the established rules. He said he had decided a day earlier that he would leave but had told almost no one.
“It was the last straw,” he said Sunday as he packed up his office belongings, including memorabilia from his half-century in the Capitol.
He said he’s at peace with his decision, even if nobody else understands the depth of his passion about the rules of the Legislature.
Although friends and Democratic Gov. Gary Locke tried to talk him out of his decision, Snyder said it’s irrevocable.
“I think my credibility would be ruined if I took my decision back,” he said.
He wept shamelessly several times during an hour-long interview with The Associated Press in his cluttered office just off the Senate floor.
“I’m going to miss the people but not the battles,” he said as tears rolled down his cheeks. “Everybody has been so kind. I loved this place, and they have partially destroyed it. … I can’t stand to stay around this place anymore.”
Bette, his wife of 46 years, said, “It has been his whole life.” Turning to her husband, she said softly, “With your principles, you can’t stay.”
Snyder dismissed Republicans’ claims that he had intended to quit after the session anyway and was grandstanding. He said he’s in great shape for a man of 70, except for a pair of hip-replacement operations he’ll have this summer, and had planned to complete the more than three years left in his current four-year term.
“I had no intention of resigning” until Friday when Republicans made it clear they were going to pass their version of the budget in violation of the longstanding prohibition against reconsidering a bill more than once, he said.
Republicans twice failed to get the necessary 25 votes for their $19 billion plan after GOP Sen. Pam Roach of Auburn and then GOP Sen. Bob McCaslin of Spokane refused to vote for it.
The rule, one of the fundamentals set forth more than 100 years ago by one of parliamentary procedure’s godfathers, Thomas Reed, is designed to head off endless voting and bring about some finality. Under this rule, if the majority party can’t pass a bill in two tries, the bill is dead and a new bill must be presented, with a committee hearing at which amendments are allowed.
Republicans said their negotiators already had hammered out the budget agreement and the old rule was thwarting the will of the majority. So they pushed through a rule change that says the budget can be voted on an unlimited number of times.
The Senate’s presiding officer, Democratic Lt. Gov. Brad Owen, was powerless to stop the change. He called it a retroactive change of the rules, just as if an extra quarter suddenly were added to a football game.
“I call it the Tonya Harding approach - if you can’t win, you break their kneecap,” Owen said.
After the budget had failed twice, Snyder said, Republicans simply could have called a meeting of the Ways and Means Committee, put the identical language on a new bill, tabled all of the Democratic amendments and been back to the Senate floor within an hour. The subsequent House vote could have been just as quick, he said.
“The rules are there to protect the minority and to help the majority get things done,” Snyder said.
The irony, Snyder says, is that Locke will veto the chunks of the budget that legislative Democrats were concerned about - education, health care and work force training - and that Republicans actually have extended the length of the session.
Snyder says the Republicans have been playing fast and loose with rules and the concepts of open government and bipartisan cooperation ever since the session started.
“Before the election, there was all this talk about everybody working together, but we were virtually shut out of everything,” he said.
The budget and other major pieces of legislation were written behind closed doors by the Republicans with the Democrats shut out, he said. The so-called compromise bills were compromises only between the House and Senate Republicans, he said.
Only a few negotiating committees were appointed and few, if any, changes were made in open sessions. Democrats simply were presented with the final products that the Republicans planned to adopt.
The final welfare proposal, for instance, was sprung on the Legislature and no public hearings were held, Snyder said.
He says the freeze-out-the-Democrats policy even extended to such petty things as not notifying them of when dinner breaks would occur. Saturday night, for instance, Republicans ordered pizza for their members while Democrats sat hungry and excluded, he said.
Asked if he thinks the public understands his decision or if it will change anything, Snyder answered no to both.
“People won’t understand because they don’t understand the procedures and that we’ve been trashing them all session long,” he said.
Meanwhile, Majority Leader Dan McDonald, R-Bellevue, defended his party’s handling of the session, including the rule change to allow a third vote on the budget.
Rules are meant to facilitate the will of the majority, and if they act as a roadblock, they need to be changed, he told reporters. He said this particular rule change was a narrowly drawn exception to the two-time limit on voting on the same bill.
Snyder’s resignation “does not diminish our mandate to finish the business of this Legislature,” McDonald said.