Representative Position No. 2
There is no way longtime former House Speaker Frank Chopp is going to lose this seat. This straight, white, cisgender mustache has been representing the queerest district in the state for 25 years now, and he’s just too well-connected, too well-funded, too powerful, and too mustachioed to go down.
But if there’s anybody prepared to replace him—and to hold him accountable in the meantime—it’s Sherae Lascelles. As Lascelles made clear more than once during our endorsement meeting, Democrats like Chopp talk about bringing marginalized and vulnerable communities to “the table,” but they so rarely get out of the way so that someone from those communities can run the fucking table.
“I’m told people who don’t look like me know better how to represent me. It’s gaslighting. It’s a literal mindfuck,” Lascelles said. Lascelles has lived in teen homeless shelters east of the mountains, they’ve been through the foster care system, they’ve rented in Seattle as prices have skyrocketed, they’ve endured institutional racism and survived life as a sex worker. And in response, they’ve dedicated their career to reforming a system designed to jail or to kill them.
That work included founding two nonprofits focused on sex work: People of Color Sex Worker Outreach Program and Green Light Project, which built a hand sanitizer factory for sex workers during COVID and pushed the Seattle City Council to repeal its drug traffic and prostitution loitering laws. They want to take that success to the state level, where they support taxing the holy fuck out of the rich, investing massive dollars in housing, and ending the homelessness crisis.
During his eons in this seat, Chopp has consistently—to borrow a phrase from his fellow lawmakers—“Chopped” pieces of progressive legislation in order to build and preserve a majority that Democrats then refuse to use to its fullest extent. Now that he’s stepped down from his leadership role, Chopp says he’s free to dream big, but we’re not buying it.
His Public Priorities and Progressive Revenues Plan would only nearly patch our $9 billion budget hole, and it would do so with watered-down versions of taxes already proposed by other lawmakers. Though getting these taxes on the books and increasing them later is a nice thought, the fact is we’ve been suffering through several major crises BEFORE the pandemic, and this incremental shit just doesn’t cut it anymore. Chopp’s business-friendly strategy has produced real results that have undoubtedly helped the people of his district and the state in general—but it’s far from enough, and his path forward is unacceptably slow. The 43rd deserves a representative who will fight for more.
Vote Lascelles.
