Workhorse: Sen. Maria Cantwell seeks a Fifth Term

The advent of 24/7 news cycles on Cable TV has spotlighted show horses of American politics, from a snarling Sen. Ted Cruz on the right to puff piece interviews of Rep. Pramila Jayapal by MSNBC hosts.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash) does not keep such company. She is serious and focused, in many ways a throwback to Sen. Henry Jackson, who held the seat for 30 years and shaped environmental and defense legislation.

 Cantwell won her Senate seat in 2000 upsetting GOP Sen. Slade Gorton by just 2,129 votes. She is a heavy favorite over Republican Dr. Raul Garcia as she seeks a fifth term. She chairs the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. As well, she holds seats on two other A-list panels, Senate Finance and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committees.  

It’s a heavy workload. Cantwell is a notoriously demanding boss, and just as demanding on herself. She has worked details of legislation, starting as a young state legislator who helped shape the state’s Growth Management Act.  She has since, in the U.S. Senate, taken on Enron’s energy scams, the safety of oil tanker cars, and regulation of derivatives in the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, commonly known as Dodd-Frank. She held out for creation of a consumer-protection division as part of the legislative response to the Great Recession.

Cantwell developed a strategy, using the federal Clean Water Act, to block the controversial Pebble Mine project in Alaska. The Environmental Protection Agency detailed loss of salmon-spawning habitat in watersheds of two rivers feeding Bristol Bay.  

Cantwell has also fought for two decades against oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Yet she is a friend and sometime collaborator with Alaska’s GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an outspoken drill-baby-drill advocate. These Senate colleagues have pushed successfully for heavy duty ice breakers to do duty in Arctic waters.

During years when Republicans controlled the Senate, Cantwell was still able to be effective. She was able to push through a ban on mining exploration over 311,000 acres in Washington’s upper Methow Valley. She used the GOP-sponsored Great American Outdoors Act to secure permanent authorization and funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which uses federal oil revenue to buy up land for recreation and preservation. She also persuaded President Obama to designate federal lands as a San Juan Islands Natural Monument. As Commerce chair, she was principal author of the CHIPS and Science Act, designed to get the United States back in the business of semiconductor research and manufacturing. Its bipartisan backing extended Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

Cantwell has found time to climb Mt. Rainier, the Grand Teton, and Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro. She also rafted in the Arctic Refuge, spotting a grizzly bear and wolverine at different altitudes on the same mountain slope, turning to conservationist friend Tom Campion with the question, “Is this unusual?”

An Indiana native, Cantwell arrived in the state 40 years ago to work in the presidential campaign of California Sen. Alan Cranston. She rose in the Legislature, flipped a U.S. House seat in 1992 only to see the seat flip back to Republican Rick White in 1994. Out of office, she went to work at Real Networks, made serious money and spent much of it winning election to the Senate,

Cantwell was and is a focused warrior. Such was so obvious in Cantwell’s 2000 campaign that body aide Gavin Lodge earned a nickname “the human firewall” for shielding press aides from the candidate. Aides have since faced relentless work demands, on issues ranging from Tacoma Smelter pollution to danger from a Union Pacific oil train derailment in the Columbia River Gorge.

 Cantwell and seatmate Sen. Patty Murray have now served together for 24 years. Cantwell is a shade to the right of Murray, notably in her 2002 Senate vote in favor of the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Forces Against Iraq.  She has taken a bold position in urging that rivals U.S. and China, the world’s greatest emitters of greenhouse gases, cooperate in curbing carbon emissions and fostering green energy.

The Biden-Harris Administration has put a lot of money into this state. It is financing a new ferry to Lummi Island at the northwest corner of Washington, and upgrading the Pullman-Moscow Airport at the southeast Washington-Idaho border. It has committed $1.5 billion to jump start a badly needed bridge over the Columbia River between Vancouver and Portland. Cantwell has again been up front in making stuff happen.

How does one achieve a safe Senate seat? A few years back, while Washington, D.C., luminaries were marking the annual Gridiron Dinner Sen. Cantwell was a continent away, speaking and dishing out the potato salad at Pacific County Democrats’ crab feed in South Bend, Washington.