Spin Control: Stepping down as leader was keeping his word, Wilcox says

In the closing hours of the legislative session, word rippled through the lobbyist gaggles in the Capitol’s marbled hallways that Rep. J.T. Wilcox was stepping down as leader of House Republicans.

It’s a job that is sometimes compared to herding cats, an analogy that admittedly is overused and in this case might offend feline sensitivities by the comparison.

As part of his leadership role, Wilcox also has a hand in recruiting and promoting candidates. House Republicans have slipped deeper into minority status in recent years after being one seat away from parity in the middle of the last decade.

Wilcox had hoped to change that trajectory in the 2022 election and said he’d step down if Republicans didn’t pick up seats.

Instead, they went from being down 57-41 in the House to 58-40. That means Democrats have the votes to do just about anything they want in the House – except, it seems, come up with a plan to prevent the state’s drug possession laws from evaporating on July 1.

“It’s been weighing on me since the election,” Wilcox said of the loss of a seat. “I don’t go back on my word.”

Despite being down a seat, Wilcox had fewer members who might be described as “hard right” in the 2023 session. In the Spokane Valley’s 4th District, Bob McCaslin gave up his House seat to run unsuccessfully for Spokane County auditor. Rob Chase lost an intraparty race to Leonard Christian.

Elsewhere, Vicky Kraft gave up her seat in her unsuccessful bid for Congress, Jesse Young lost a bid to move to the state Senate and Robert Sutherland lost his seat to another Republican.

The new crop of lawmakers is talented and “ready to be serious legislators,” Wilcox said. “I thought that it was a pretty good time to step down.”

Wilcox led his caucus through two difficult years of COVID-19 restrictions that relegated most interactions to computer monitors rather than face-to-face. The biggest controversy of his tenure involved the caucus leadership’s decision to oust Rep. Matt Shea after a special investigator’s report questioned whether the Spokane Valley lawmaker’s involvement with certain groups could be considered support of domestic terrorism.

They made that call shortly before the start of the 2020 session. Shea lost his committee assignments and access to GOP staff and services. Wilcox and other Republican leaders said he should resign from the Legislature, but when he refused they didn’t back a Democratic effort to expel him from the House. Ousting Shea from the caucus angered some members who supported him and the feelings lingered.

“I think anyone involved in that is forever branded,” Wilcox said in a conversation with reporters after his announcement. “It was important for me to take the blame for that … and do it in such a way that the bad stuff stuck to me.”

To describe Wilcox as a conservative isn’t very instructive, because all Republicans in the Legislature are conservative, both on fiscal matters and on certain core issues like abortion and gun rights. The caucus has held solidly together on those issues for many years.

If the defining factor in the brand of conservatism is former President Donald Trump, Wilcox is decidedly non-Trumpian, both in demeanor and in his political alignment. When he became caucus leader, he made it a practice not to a talk about national elections.

In the recent conversation, however, he didn’t mince words.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that having (Trump) at the top of the ticket hasn’t been positive for elections in Washington,” he said. “It’ll make people mad, but he didn’t do well in this state and there is an impact, up and down the ticket.”

Wilcox isn’t resigning his seat for a district that covers a swath of suburban and rural Thurston and Pierce counties between Mount Rainier and Interstate 5.

His family operates Wilcox Family Farms, which has been supplying eggs to stores around the Northwest for four generations. Wilcox said one of the real pleasures of his tenure was inviting urban and suburban representatives, especially Democrats, out to the farm for food and conversation.

While Republicans have been in a distinct disadvantage for most of his 12 years in the House, Wilcox said he has tried to “aggressively find things that we have in common.” But he believes many of the bipartisan efforts died in the 2023 session.

“Partisanship has become more important than the idea,” he told reporters.

A few hours later, Wilcox’s words seemed to ring true when the last-ditch effort to revise the state’s drug possession laws failed on a vote of 55-43. This despite the fact that the six-member bicameral committee that crafted the compromise had four Democratic members, the Democrats hold an 18-vote majority in the House and Republicans in both chambers were signaling they didn’t like the final version.

But in postsession news conferences, Gov. Jay Inslee and Senate Democratic leaders refused to put any blame on the 18 defecting House Democrats who refused to vote for the proposal. Instead, they pointed the finger at House Republicans for all voting no.