Congressman Doc Hastings: Twenty Years of Turmoil

By C. Mark Smith

Congressman Doc Hastings: Twenty Years of Turmoil traces the causes and growth of our nation’s political divide during the twenty years that Richard “Doc” Hastings represented his Eastern Washington district in Congress. A trusted ally of Republican House Speakers, Doc was rarely in the public spotlight yet helped create the nu

• Language: English
• Publisher: Doc Hastings
• Release date: Mar 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781945271960

C. Mark Smith

C. Mark Smith is an award-winning author of three books. He spent forty years managing economic development organizations at the local, state, and federal level, but his greatest interests have always been at the nexus of history, politics, and community service. He and his wife, Elsa, make their home in Richland, Washington.

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Congressman Doc Hastings:

Twenty Years of Turmoil

C. Mark Smith

What Others Are Saying about

Congressman Doc Hastings

I think Doc stayed around as long as he did because the people at home felt like he was there for the right reasons. He wasn’t there for Doc. This wasn’t about making him look good; this was about trying to change the government in a way he and they thought it needed to be changed. All of that is laid out in Mark Smith’s excellent narrative. It’s a first-class biography.

Lindsey Graham

Member of Congress (R-SC) (1995-2003)

US Senator (R-SC) (2003 to present)

Mark Smith’s book about Doc Hastings provides an in-depth look at Congress during the exciting but difficult years between 1995 and 2015. . . . Although he rarely sought the spotlight, his colleagues considered him a true legislator who thought government should be the servant of the people, and not its master, and who could be counted on to carry out difficult assignments when asked.

John Boehner

Member of Congress (R-OH) (1991-2015)

Speaker of the House of Representatives (2011-2015)

Mark Smith’s compelling, insightful biography of Doc Hastings introduces a statewide audience to an underrated Eastern Washington conservative with a conscience.

John C. Hughes

Legacy Washington Historian

Doc was a mentor for me and an example what principled, conservative leadership is all about. He was a Ronald Reagan delegate to the 1976 Republican convention and remained true to the values of small government and free enterprise during his entire political career. . . . Doc was an influential leader on issues vital to our area: the cleanup of the Hanford Site, protecting the dams that provide electricity and irrigation, and improving forest management practices to reduce wildfires. . . . He came to know the complex House rules better than just about anyone. The Speaker could always turn to him when he needed a steady hand.

Cathy McMorris Rogers

Member of Congress (R-WA) (2005 to present)

Chair, House Republican Conference

Other Books by C. Mark Smith

Raising Cain:

The Life and Politics of Senator Harry P. Cain

Community Godfather:

How Sam Volpentest shaped the

History of Hanford and the Tri-Cities

In the Wake of Lewis and Clark:

From the Mountains to the Sea

Book Publishers Network

P.O. Box 2256, Bothell, WA 98041

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Copyright © 2018 by C. Mark Smith

All rights reserved by author including, but not limited to, any media now known or hereafter devised. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

LCCN: 2017912638

ISBN: 978-1-945271-78-6

ISBN: 978-1-945271-96-0 (eBook)

Library of Congress Cataloging–in–Publication Data

Smith, C. Mark

Congressman Doc Hastings: Twenty Years of Turmoil / C. Mark Smith.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

LCSH: Hastings, Richard (Doc), 1941- | Legislators--United States--Biography. | Politicians— United States--Biography. | United States. Congress. House. | United States--Politics and government--20th century. | United States--Politics and government--21st century. | Political culture--United States. | Washington (State)--Politics and government--20th century. | Washington (State)--Politics and government--21st century. | LCGFT: Biographies.

LCC: E748.H3867 S65 2017 | DDC: 973.92/0924--dc23

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition

Cover Photo: House Committee on Natural Resources

Cover design: Laura Zugzda

Editor: Julie Scandora

Book design: Melissa Coffman

Production: Scott Book

Graphs: Matt Mathes

eBook: Marcia Breece

Index: Sam Arnold-Boyd.

Printed and bound by Bang Printing. Brainerd, MN

This book is dedicated to the men and women

who devote their careers to public service

and to the interaction of their personal beliefs

and visions of America.

It is also dedicated to the notion

that those beliefs and visions

have the best chance of success

when our public servants listen to each other—and to us.

As always, it is also dedicated to my family

for putting up with a very focused author.

Author’s Note

I have lived and worked around the fringes of politics all my adult life. The subject of my first book was Harry P. Cain, the controversial former Tacoma mayor, US senator, and civil libertarian. He was a close friend of my father’s and my first real role model and mentor outside my family. In my early thirties, quite by accident, I found myself serving as the regional director of the federal Economic Development Administration for the eight western states. I interacted daily with one or more of the eight governors, sixteen senators, and fifty-seven congressmen who represented the states in my region, as well as with presidential appointees in and out of my agency and the occasional member of the White House staff. That experience resulted in my forty-year career managing economic development organizations at the local, state, and federal level—jobs that were themselves never far from politics.

My second book was about Sam Volpentest, a legendary economic developer and community leader—in many ways the visionary behind the development of the modern Tri-Cities area in Washington State. Sam’s success was the result of his tenacity and salesmanship, but it wouldn’t have been possible without his longtime political connections and his adroit understanding of how to use them. I remember vividly the day I first met him in the mid-1970s. He was looking for a federal grant, and his visit to my Seattle office was followed almost immediately by a supporting call from our state’s senior senator, Warren Magnuson.

Both Harry Cain and Sam Volpentest were gone when I wrote about them—something of an advantage for an author. Doc Hastings is very much alive, and our collaboration on this book has been an altogether different experience—one for which I shall be forever grateful. I say that because it has provided me with an opportunity to better understand, for better or worse, how the US House of Representatives—the People’s House—works and the motivations and frustrations of those who know it well.

This is a book of biography and history—with a little commentary added for context when I thought it necessary. The thread that binds it together is the twenty-year congressional career of Richard Doc Hastings, the only member of Congress ever elected from Franklin County, Washington. For ten terms—twenty years—Doc represented a rural district that stretches from the Canadian border to the Columbia River, and the district he represented explains a lot about who Doc Hastings is as a person and a politician.

Doc was elected in the Newt Gingrich Republican Revolution of 1994 and served in Congress until January 2015. Many Congress watchers consider that 1994 Contract with America election as the modern starting point of the political polarization and governmental dysfunction that characterize today’s political landscape.

The dramatic increase in political discord in our nation is the strong subtheme of this book. The 1995 budget crisis and government shutdown, the Clinton impeachment, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Great Recession, the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and the budget crisis and fiscal cliff of 2013 played a role, but they were events. They occurred against a backdrop of cultural and technological trends, such as the increased use of social media, identity politics, self-segregation, and political gerrymandering that are described in more detail in my introduction to this book. As a result, the electorate was so conflicted that they voted to change the control of Congress in three major wave elections in 1994, 2006, and 2010. In addition, for most of that time, no party controlled both the legislative and executive branches of government at the same time. Doc’s time in Congress has to be viewed against the backdrop of these events.

This book was written with the complete and much-appreciated cooperation of Doc Hastings, his family, and many of his friends and colleagues, but it is an independent work. I retained the final right of approval, and although Hastings and others read and commented on the chapters as they were being written, their primary contributions have been to help me better understand complicated political and procedural issues and to correct technical and factual errors.

I conducted more than fifty recorded interviews with Doc and his wife, Claire, at their home overlooking the Columbia River between January 2016 and August 2017. Claire contributed freely, occasionally corrected her husband, and provided numerous anecdotes. Obviously for the Hastings, politics is a team sport—and a highly partisan team sport at that. More than fifty others contributed through personal, transcribed, or email interviews including current and former members of Congress. Unless they declined to be mentioned, their names appear in the bibliography.

As always, I am indebted to many for their help. I particularly want to mention Kathy Rusk, who researched the Hastings’ family history and made my job immeasurably easier. This is the third book in which I have collaborated with Tara Pegasus, a gifted editor and musician who again helped me in many, many ways. Again, I need to thank the research librarians at the Richland Public Library for their help with their veteran microfiche machine, which, like fine wine, seems only to improve with age. I am deeply grateful for the help of Donean Brown, the librarian for the Yakima Herald-Republic, and to Jack Briggs, Ken Robertson, and Bob Brawdy, denizens of the Tri-City Herald, for their critical help and advice.

Many people read the book as it was being written, too many to list here, but in particular I want to thank Tim Peckinpaugh, former staff aide to congressman Sid Morrison, and a partner of K&L Gates in Washington, DC, who has worked with Doc and our community on so many important issues; John C. Hughes, the former editor and publisher of the Aberdeen Daily World, the director of the Washington Secretary of State’s Legacy Washington program, and my mentor on all matters of Washington State political history; Gary Petersen, former vice president of Government Programs for the Tri-City Development Council (TRIDEC), who worked with Doc over his entire career; and Tom Moak, a fellow Tacoma native, former state legislator, mayor of Kennewick, and now commissioner for the Port of Kennewick, who, as always, was a great sounding board, asking me the questions I hadn’t thought to ask myself.

Many of Doc’s staff—again too many to mention—have provided me with great insight and valuable assistance, but I would like to single out one, Todd Ungerecht, for his particular help. Doc was indeed fortunate to have been served by such people, and I can easily see why they were considered to be one of the best congressional staffs in Washington, DC.

As with each of my previous book projects, my wife and family have endured—perhaps enjoyed—my many months behind the closed door of my office as I worked on this book. They will probably hope I find another project soon.

Finally, my appreciation goes out to Sheryn Hara and her Book Publishers Network team, who turned my scribblings into this book.

Many people are responsible for what is good about this book. I, alone, am responsible for what is not.

There is an old saying to the effect that if we saw how sausage was made, we wouldn’t eat it. Lawmaking and governing are similar. It’s hard work, and it’s often not very pretty. There is a lot of sausage making in this book—arcane congressional rules and processes by which legislation is created and passed. If you find yourself getting bogged down in the details, move on. It’s the result, more than the method, I want you to be aware of.

There is another old saying that voters love their congressman but hate Congress. Much in this book suggests that this is also true. Doc was routinely reelected by majorities of more than 60 percent while the approval ratings for Congress plummeted to as low as 9 percent. My hope is that this book allows the reader to become more familiar with what it’s like to be a member of Congress and provides food for thought about what we can do as citizens to make the institution better.

Introduction

Doc Hastings was the first and only person to be elected to Congress from Franklin County, Washington—a wedge-shaped expanse of sparsely populated shrub-steppe extending north from the Columbia and the Snake Rivers in southeastern Washington State. Much of the low, rolling hills is covered with bunch grass, sagebrush, and dryland wheat fields. But irrigation water from the rivers and electricity from the hydroelectric dams transform the land into crop circles, orchards, and vineyards that change color with the seasons and produce an endless bounty of agricultural produce.

The residents of Franklin County are the sons and daughters of hardy pioneers—many originally from Scandinavia and Germany—who arrived on the Northern Pacific Railway before the turn of the century and lived in scattered farms and small towns with names like Mesa, Eltopia, and Kahlotus, The county’s biggest city, Pasco, was created by the Northern Pacific Railway and incorporated in 1891.

Hastings represented the largely rural Fourth Congressional District, consisting of all or parts of eleven counties extending from the Canadian border to the Columbia River border with the state of Oregon. It had been created after the 1910 Census when the total population of Washington State was slightly more than a million people. Republican William LaFollette, the brother of the legendary Wisconsin Progressive congressman and governor, Robert LaFollette, had been elected to Congress from the Third Congressional District in 1910 and then represented the Fourth after it was created. The boundaries of the district changed twice due to reapportionment following the censuses of 2000 and 2010 (appendix A).

Its first two representatives had been Republicans, but that changed with the start of the Great Depression in 1932. The district and its voters certainly benefitted from President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Columbia River and Snake River dams provided electric power and irrigation water, and the government provided subsidies for farmers to grow wheat and paid others to keep their land out of production. Federal agencies created the vast national forests, funneled money into Indian reservations, and created federal payrolls at the Yakima Firing Center and the huge Hanford Site where plutonium was produced during World War II and the Cold War. During the war, the district slowly began to return to the Republican column, and only two Democrats have represented it since then (appendix B).

With few urban areas and a tiny unionized workforce at the time, 71 percent of the state legislators elected from Eastern Washington between 1933 and 1942 were Democrats. That percentage declined to 36 percent between 1943 and 1958 as the Republicans regained control after the end of World War II. Democratic Party representation increased to 52 percent between 1959 and 1966 during the Kennedy and Johnson years but dropped to 34 percent in the aftermath of the Vietnam War as the district’s conservative farmers and ranchers became disenchanted with the Democrats over their positions on nuclear power, gun control, and controversial social issues. By the time Doc Hastings was elected to Congress in 1994, the percentage of Democrats elected in Eastern Washington had dropped to just 14 percent.¹

Each congressional district is unique. More than 40 percent of the Fourth District’s roughly nineteen thousand square miles of land is in some form of public ownership. Most of Okanogan County consists of the Okanagan National Forest and the Colville Indian Reservation. Most of Chelan and Kittitas Counties are in the Wenatchee National Forest. The 2,185-square-mile Yakama Indian Nation and much of the US Army’s 327,000-acre Yakima Firing Center are in Yakima County. The Atomic Energy Commission’s 580-square-mile Hanford Site occupies large portions of Benton and Grant Counties. In addition, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management oversees large sections of land throughout the district. The result is that much of the land in the district is not on the local tax rolls.

Most of the privately owned land is used for farming or ranching. By 2012, more than ten thousand of Hastings’s constituents operated 16,600 farms and ranches, totaling more than 7.2 million acres. They were, arguably, his most important constituency. The number of farms and owners decreased each year, but their productivity and the market value of the crops they produced continued to rise dramatically. The income from the sale of crops, livestock, and poultry exceeded $6.1 billion annually, ranking it twelfth out of all 435 congressional districts in the market value of products sold.¹

In Franklin County, the largest crop is dryland wheat. In the 1970s, as president of the Pasco Chamber of Commerce, Hastings worked hard to attract more farmers to its membership, so by the time he ran for Congress, he had a good understanding of a farmer’s needs and philosophy of life. What he liked most about them was that none of their crops, with the exception of wheat, was subsidized by the federal government. His farmers took their chances with the free market, and he admired that. Believing that the best way to help them succeed was to expand the foreign markets for their crops, he became a strong supporter of free trade.

Another feature that makes the Fourth District unique is Hanford. Originally known as the Hanford Engineer Works, the original 670 square miles of mostly deserted shrub-steppe had been acquired by the US Army for the top-secret Manhattan project in 1943. Hanford’s nine nuclear reactors produced the plutonium used in the nation’s nuclear arsenal during World War II and the Cold War. By the time Hastings was elected to Congress, the process of cleaning up the nuclear waste at Hanford had begun but was progressing slowly, with much difficulty, and at great cost as the Department of Energy, its contractors, and the unions struggled to adjust their collective culture from nuclear production to cleanup.

Still another issue of concern was the impact of the 1973 federal Endangered Species Act on farmers in certain parts of the district, particularly in Grant County. The precious water that farmers needed for their crops was allocated to local irrigation districts by the Bureau of Reclamation. As technology improved, farmers could irrigate more land using the same amount of water. This led to more profits, but it also conflicted with the Bureau of Reclamation and other government agencies that were legally required to ensure that there was enough water to protect endangered salmon species and other fish runs in the Snake and Columbia Rivers.

In 1994, the Fourth Congressional District had a population of approximately 615,000.² More than 75 percent of constituents identified themselves as white. Approximately 2 percent were American Indians. Another 2 percent were Asian. Less than 1 percent identified as black or African American. More than 15 percent had been born outside the United States. Many of these identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino. Most had come from Mexico to work in agriculture. Some were recent immigrants, but most were descendants of migrant workers who had been working the fields and picking the crops of the Columbia Basin for at least six decades. By the mid-1990s, many of them had put down roots and owned small farms or businesses.

During the twenty years that Doc represented the Fourth District, its population grew by more than 14 percent to 704,000, but the number of Hispanics or Latinos in the district grew from 114,000 to 268,000, an increase of 135 percent. By 2014, Hispanics represented 38 percent of the district’s total population.³ They lived in all the district’s heavily agricultural counties but were concentrated in Yakima and Franklin Counties.

In 1994, the median household income for a family of four in the district was approximately $31,500. That number would grow by the time Hastings retired to more than $50,000—but it was still less than the US average and more than $10,000 less than the average for the state of Washington. More than 13 percent of his constituents lived in what the federal government defined as poverty. Seventy-eight percent had completed high school. Nineteen percent had received a bachelor’s degree or higher.⁴

Another unusual characteristic of the district is that while it is overwhelmingly rural in terms of land use, by 2014 almost 75 percent of its population lived in two urban areas, the Yakima County and Kennewick-Pasco-Richland Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) consisting of Benton and Franklin Counties. The population of those two metropolitan areas had grown by 35.5 percent between 1994 and 2014. The Yakima County MSA grew from 208,950 to 247,600, but the growth of the Tri-Cities MSA was even more pronounced, increasing by more than 100,000 people from 1994 to 2014 to become one of the fastest-growing urban areas in the nation.

By 2010, the state’s population had grown by another 830,000 people, requiring another redistricting plan. The plan transferred Klickitat County from the Fourth District into the Third District, moved Chelan, Kittitas, and most of the population of Douglas County into the Eighth District, and moved Okanogan County and Adams County into Doc’s district.

Doc Hastings served in Congress during a time when it, and the nation as a whole, experienced a series of events that created nearly non-stop political turmoil. Partisanship had always been part of politics, of course, but prior to 1994, many moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats serving in Congress were willing to reach across the aisle and find bipartisan solutions to major issues facing the nation. Doc correctly notes that the vast majority of day-to-day congressional business is concluded in a bipartisan way. But there is no escaping the fact that both the nation and its representatives in Congress became more partisan and politically polarized during the twenty years Doc served in Congress. During that period, we have seen partisanship and political polarization inserted into the electorate’s already existing cultural, racial, and religious divides to become an important—if not always welcome—part of our daily lives. Observers have noted a number of reasons for the change. Commentator Fareed Zakaria has called these dividing lines the four Cs—capitalism, culture, class, and communications.

One of Doc Hastings’s primary motivations in running for office had been to stem the growth of government and return more freedom to its individual citizens. By the time he left office in 2015, Americans on both ends of the political spectrum believed their government had failed them. Many on the right believed the United States had become a socialist state while many on the left believed their government had favored the wealthy at the expense of the working and middle classes. Both sides believed their cultural and civil rights were in danger.

America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq created trillions of dollars of new debt and helped lead to the Great Recession of 2008, multiple budget crises, a government shutdown, and the 2013 fiscal cliff. The greatest economy crisis since the Great Depression caused considerable suffering, and the slow pace of recovery led many to fear for their economic survival. Many still feel they are being left behind. Technology and regulatory changes have resulted in dramatic declines in manufacturing and natural resource-based jobs, while jobs in technology and health care sectors—requiring vastly different skill sets—have soared, challenging the preconceptions of generations of Americans who saw an assembly-line job as the path to middle-class success. In addition, they find themselves competing for jobs with a massive influx of immigrants seeking a better life in the United States. The growth of immigrant populations has increased the speed of major demographic changes that were already well underway because of the natural growth of existing minority communities.

As people became more politically polarized, they self-segregated themselves depending on their political views. Liberals moved to larger cities or to more liberal-leaning states, whereas the reverse was often true for conservatives. Rural residents resent what they perceive as the elitism of urban areas. Sixty percent of minorities surveyed in a 2016 Pew Research Center report believe that race relations are generally bad. Another Pew study reported that six in ten Republicans and Democrats actually feared the other’s political agenda, a four-fold increase since the mid-1990s.
 Back then, Pew polling reported that 36 percent of Republican voters were more liberal than the average of all Democratic voters, while 30 percent of Democrats were more conservative than the average of all Republican voters. In 2014, when Doc retired from Congress, the poll suggested that just 8 percent of Republican voters and 6 percent