Platform

In the last three years, a new, dangerous threat has emerged to the future of our workforce, and the way we live, learn, and communicate.  Artificial intelligence, a technology that holds some promise, but also great peril, is largely controlled by a select group of companies.  These companies, alone, stand to gain when millions or tens of millions of workers lose their jobs. Deepfake videos are proliferating on the internet, including sexualized deepfakes that have destroyed vulnerable kids’ lives.  College graduates are increasingly unable to find entry-level jobs.  And kids are becoming both addicted to AI chatbots and losing their critical thinking skills.  AI companies’ billionaire (soon to be trillionaire) CEOs, meanwhile, alone are deciding pressing public questions like what guardrails will apply to AI’s military applications or whether to release potentially dangerous new models that could pose catastrophic risks, like cyberattacks, loss of control, or bioengineered pandemics. Yet these companies have shown no willingness to slow down—indeed, they have pledged to fight state attempts to regulate them.

AI governance is rapidly becoming, and will eventually be remembered as, the defining issue of our time. We need elected leaders who are unafraid of industry and willing to step into the breach and pass forward-thinking legislation to address AI’s disruption.

On AI, I will:

• Regulate or stop the construction of new data centers to preserve climate progress and keep electricity prices sane.
• Ban the replacement of public school teachers and other essential workers with AI.
• Prohibit the spreading of false depictions of reality that are not clearly marked as such, and hold AI companies liable for deepfakes—including nonconsensual nude deepfakes—created by their technology.
• Tax sales of AI services and products to help pay for AI’s disruptive impacts.
• Pass legislation addressing the catastrophic risks that certain AI applications pose, including right-to-warn protections for AI employees who perceive risks from their companies’ work, regulatory audits and controls that apply before even internal deployment of new models, and required transparency by AI companies of risks flagged internally during safety testing.
• Evaluate mandatory insurance and other innovative governance regimes that address safety risk.
• Found an intergovernmental, national caucus of legislators, governors, and other policymakers interested in ensuring public control over this transformational technology.

Seattle is by some measures the 8th most expensive city to live in in the world, and Washington state is the 5th least affordable state in the country with respect to housing.  Economists and experts agree that the best way to lower the cost of housing is to increase the supply of housing at all levels: market housing, affordable housing, and low-income housing. And environmentalists know that urban density is how you prevent suburban and exurban sprawl, keep wildland wild, and protect wildlife corridors.  At the same time, in the meantime we need to protect renters and homeowners who are feeling the squeeze of rising rents today.

Instead of working productively to increase the types and affordability of housing available in our city and region, my opponent for years led the opposition to common-sense housing density reforms in our state.  The Urbanist ranked Rep. Pollet one of the five worst state legislators in the 2021 session and in the 2022 session, and as a dishonorable mention in 2023, because of his misguided opposition on this issue.

Part of the solution is zoning reform, on which we have made progress in recent years, despite Rep. Pollet’s opposition.  But another critical component of the solution is permitting reform. You can have a years-long permit process and design review, or you can have faster and cheap housing built. You can’t have both.  Permitting delays alone add, by some estimates, over $50,000 to the cost of building a home in King County.

And we need to ensure the people who live here can afford to wait until that new housing is built.

With your support I will:

• • Work with legislative colleagues, housing providers, and city leaders to reduce red tape and hurdles that slow down and raise costs for housing we need.
  • Continue pushing for state-level policies that increase density and improve affordability in every community, not just Seattle.
  • Support rent stabilization laws that help renters from being priced out while housing supply is built.
  • Continue to fund supportive and transitional housing for those experiencing homelessness.
  • Expand transit-oriented housing development and other targeted density programs that maximize housing opportunities along growing light rail and transit corridors.

 

Seattle will only become more expensive if our neighbors–who provide the essential services we need to keep local–cannot afford to live here.  We can increase housing supply in this state in a way that leads to mixed-income, diverse neighborhoods, with greater walkability and, because of greater density, more successful small businesses.

Many Americans are rightly alarmed by this country’s rapid and dangerous slide into authoritarianism. But only one candidate in this race spent years combatting it.

I was part of the first wave of federal prosecutors across the country, and the only federal prosecutor from Seattle, who prosecuted January 6th rioters in Washington D.C. That happened because I raised my hand to do it, taking it on as a second job on top of my existing case load, logging on after hours to identify and charge rioters.  Now, prosecutors like myself, who did their duty in the January 6th investigation, are being fired and harassed by this administration and by newly-pardoned defendants.

I therefore understand the sacrifices that may be required to preserve our democracy.  And as a longtime federal prosecutor and constitutional lawyer, I know what levers states can pull to exert control over federal agents that act unlawfully.  I will bring that unique level of service, experience, and expertise to our work in the coming two years defending the state against federal overreach.

For nearly two decades, social media applications have rewired our kids’ brains, exploited and profited off our private lives, and sowed division and distrust by manipulating  public discourse.  As a result, teenagers today are increasingly socially isolated, addicted to smartphones and social media, and have increased rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. Our data is routinely bought and sold by companies that have monetized our privacy. Yet rather than take responsible action to curb these harms, some of the most profitable companies in the world have doubled down on their business models while insisting they are not to blame.  And our leaders in Olympia have, for far too long, done very little about it.

We need urgent action to protect our kids from the negative impacts of social media. Washington should be leading, not following, other states’ efforts to regulate this industry.

As your State Representative, I will:

• Pass a statewide ban on smartphone use in school, a common-sense issue that unites parents, educators, and students
• Help pass legislation to ban addictive feeds, endless scroll, and other problematic features of kids’ social media accounts, without requiring kids to provide more sensitive age-verification data to these companies
• Require that social media platforms permit all users to easily and intuitively choose the level of algorithmic control their apps use
• Work on data privacy legislation that gives all users the right to opt-out of certain kinds of data collection and to put strict timeframes on others

The Puget Sound region (and the 46th district!) boasts a world class research university and one of the highest concentrations of well-educated parents in the country.  With all of the resources, here at home and across Washington, we should be a top-five state for K-12 education.  Yet the statewide performance of our public school system has lagged as average or below average—most recently, 27th in the nation—for decades.  Nearly 68% of fourth graders in this State were not proficient in reading according to a 2024 assessment, a new high.  40% read below grade level.  70% of 8th graders are not proficient in math.

As a graduate of public schools and a former public elementary school teacher, I firmly believe that fully funding our public schools is not merely Washington’s paramount constitutional duty, it is an investment in our future.  But it does not fully explain why our state lags behind other states that have done more with less money.

The problem is that we have not supported our teachers and followed rigorous, science-backed approaches to early literacy and math.  One report found that of 18 policies important to supporting early literacy—which many states had fully adopted years ago—Washington state had, until recently, only adopted 7.

I am the only candidate in this race committed to addressing these gaps with urgency.

What we need are the things that have been proven to work in other states. I would:

• Work with schools to accelerate curriculum revision and eliminate outdated literacy instructional practices.
• Fund reading and math specialists and additional educator professional development, neither of which is reflected in current spending priorities.
• Pursue additional annual universal reading assessments, dyslexia assessments, and parental notification of results, along with early interventions for struggling readers.
• Fund summer reading camps and other evidence-based interventions.

 

We can’t just impose mandates on teachers and ask them to figure it out. We need to provide them specialist support, training, and the tools required for our students to succeed.  Fully funding education, and passing a public education overhaul bill to make our state’s public education system the envy of the country, would be one of my top focuses in Olympia.

While we have made significant strides in recent years in combatting violent crime, FBI statistics show that across several recent years Washington and Seattle had among the highest crime rates in the country.

Many of us have seen those impacts in our community: stolen cars, garage break-ins, domestic violence.  As a former prosecutor, I understand that crime disproportionately impacts low-income, under-resourced, and marginalized communities. Effectively reducing it is an economic justice issue. Every one of us, not just the well off, has the right to be safe from violence, drug exposure, and property crime.

I’m the only candidate in this race who has spent six years working on criminal justice and public safety issues. Indeed, I am the only candidate in this race with any public safety experience to speak of. Studies consistently show that reactively lengthening the punishment for minor crimes is not the answer, and that certain offenders can be effectively diverted without the cost and recidivism that accompanies incarceration.  That is why, as a prosecutor, I initiated and led a novel federal pre-trial deferred prosecution for a non-violent offender struggling with mental health issues.  But the same research consistently shows that what does deter violent and property crime is increasing the likelihood an offender gets caught, and that is where we have work to do.

In the legislature, I will:

• Work hand-in-hand with my former colleagues, Washington Attorney General Nick Brown and Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans, on solutions aimed at addressing the root causes of crime.
• Combat child trafficking and sexual abuse by increasing funding for the some of our most successful and lowest cost interventions, particularly Washington State Patrol’s Missing and Exploited Children Task Force and the Washington Internet Crimes against Children Task Force.
• Create and fund a sex trafficking law enforcement task force with an exclusive focus on sex trafficking in North Seattle.
• Work to increase cities’ flexibility to rapidly adopt alternatives to officer response to mental health and welfare-check incidents, like Seattle’s CARE Department, while ensuring that such adoption does not displace or eliminate police officers, but instead frees them to focus on violent and property crime.

Our state has made great strides in combating climate change and building our state’s resiliency to climate impacts.  But as climate change continues to accelerate, we need lawmakers who are prepared to stay the course.  The son of an environmental lawyer, I have passionately defended the environment throughout my career.  For example, I:

• Helped establish the legal foundation of state clean energy subsidies (like renewable energy credits) within the United States;
• Sued to prevent harmful seismic airgun testing in the Atlantic ocean, a precursor to oil drilling;
• Sued oil companies for failure to remediate exhausted oil wells;
• And fought alongside residents against a Warren Buffett-owned utility to hold it accountable for failing to prepare for an extreme weather event that sparked multiple wildfires.

 

In Olympia, I will:

• Fight to prevent diversion of Climate Commitment Act funds to meet general budgetary needs
• Require that data centers pay the cost of their data and water usage
• Defend wildfire resiliency funding