This Prince Sees Royal Pain In Legislature

Maybe the simple, enduring rule about consuming alcohol was part of what drew Gene Prince away from elected office and into the cocoon of appointed commissioner.

You don’t drink until 21.

That’s the rule.

A basic, unwavering rule. A rule a man with a job to do can use to guide him as chairman of the Washington State Liquor Control Board.

Prince, now a former Republican state senator from the Eastern Washington farm town of Thornton, will take over the $72,351-a-year job as liquor board chairman on Monday.

When asked why he abruptly resigned elected office last week to oversee Washington state’s 318 state-run and contract liquor outlets, Prince talked about the rules.

The rules in politics used to be clearer, he said.

The rules once allowed people to be heard in private.

The rules allowed minority viewpoints to have a platform in a debate.

The rules directed politicians try to work things out among themselves, then go public.

But the rules of politics from the national level right down to the state Legislature and City Hall have changed.

Been trashed, in Gene Prince’s view.

“People don’t want to abide by many rules of civility or letting people be heard,” Prince said Friday, his last day in the Legislature.

“I blame it on affluence,” he said. “When things are tough we struggle together. I guess when things are really good we have a tendency to pull apart and believe only in ourselves.”

Ten years ago, Prince’s vision of consensus politics was the rule.

From 1986 until 1992 Prince chaired the Republican caucus.

Caucus. It rhymes with raucous, but it means something more civilized than the win-at-all-cost spectacles we have recently witnessed in places like the U.S. Congress and particularly the House Judiciary Committee.

The definition of caucus: a private meeting of leaders or factions to discuss and then decide policy issues.

Private. Discussions. Policy issues.

Prince remembers chairing meetings among the Washington state Republican legislators where such words had meaning.

`In the old days, we debated in the caucus before we took a position,” he said.

“In the last five years, the leadership of the party has just come in and told the caucus what the issue is and how to vote on it.”

Different rules.

When Prince started out as a legislator in 1980, bills passed by the House and then reworked in the Senate would come back to a conference committee where both the supporters and opponents of the legislation had a seat to iron out differences.

No more.

Today, if one party controls both houses, that party also controls conference committee votes and can even rewrite legislation from scratch.

“The changes in the conference committee rules just tell the minority party to go to hell,” Prince reflected.

Even the legislative rule on what it took to change the rules was changed.

For most of this century, two-thirds of the Legislature had to vote to change the rules on how a bill is passed, a debate proceeded, or an issue could be brought to the floor.

But in the single-minded spirit of giving all the power to the party in control, the rule on changing the rules of governance was modified a few years back. Now, a simple majority can suspend the rules on anything.

Prince recalls with most regret the lost rules on civility.

When he first went to Olympia as an un-elected clerk in 1959, Prince remembered that every freshman legislator attended a basic course in political civility at the invitation of the old pros.

“New freshmen legislators learned two rules right off,” Prince said.

“First, if you don’t respect the other person’s opinion, he won’t respect yours.

“Second, what goes around comes around.”

As Prince cleaned out his office he noted,”That’s all gone by the wayside.”

Instead, “Everybody wants to be a dictator, just tell other people what to do,” the 68-year-old lifelong Republican legislator reflected.

He then offered a rather gloomy assessment: “I don’t know how you hold a free society together if you can’t keep people civil to one another and working together.”

The result is one the politicians, the single-issue advocates, the naysayers might want to consider as Prince bids adieu to elected office as he thought he knew it.