Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington state and 2020 presidential hopeful, is most known for his detailed plans to tackle our planet’s biggest threat: the climate crisis. But as he explained to Daily Kos backstage at Netroots Nation, he has ideas on how to solve what he believes is America’s biggest problem: Donald Trump.
“We need to make Donald Trump a blip in history,” Gov. Inslee told us backstage at the progressive conference. Trump, Inslee noted, “has never missed an opportunity to give license to racial hatred” and “has never used his position of leadership to bring more love and less hate.”
Inslee didn’t deal in niceties when it came to how important it is to vote the president out of office. He used a word to describe the president that might ring true to your own perception of him, too: insecure. “We have suffered because we have a person in the White House who is very insecure,” Inslee said, “and he has decided to intentionally use the power of fear rather than the energy of hope.”
Utilizing the energy of hope, and cleaning up the countless messes created by Donald Trump, can also describe the overarching theme of Netroots Nation, the country’s biggest progressive conference. At the conference, held this year in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, organizers, activists, and politicians, including many of those running for the Democratic presidential nomination, gathered to share their insights on how to get this country back on track.
The video interview embedded below is part of Making Progress, a new, exclusive series here at Daily Kos. In addition to Gov. Inslee, we’ve shared interviews with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. In addition to the 2020 hopefuls, we have dozens of fresh takes from leading organizers and activists from around the country, all with one goal in mind: making progress.
A transcript is below.
Question 1: Black and brown communities, low-income communities, elderly and indigenous people will often face the harshest consequences of climate change. How do your climate policies address these disparities?
JI: So, our plan to defeat the climate crisis is fully embedded with environmental justice. And the term “environmental justice” is all-encompassing. It starts with making sure that we understand who the first victims are, frequently of the climate crisis and pollution.
Today, I was here in Philadelphia meeting with the community group called Philly Thrive. It’s a community that is trying to take care of the consequences of pollution from the gas refinery that exploded that you may have heard about. And this community, a lot of black folks live in this community that is suffering, just like the community I met next to the Marathon Oil refinery up in Detroit. These are the communities that have been breathing the most pollution. The average black American breathes about 50% more pollution than others and now are the first victims of the climate crisis. The folks in the low-lying areas in New Orleans we think of right now, which are frequently some of the poorer areas. The folks in Little Haiti that I visited in Miami—which is actually in a higher level of Miami—but people are actually now being forced away from the seacoast, and they’re displacing the Haitian community in Little Haiti and Miami.
So our plan, basically, will first assist these communities through this problem. And I’m proud that our bill, which was a 100% clean electric grid bill, has one of the first plans to subsidize, if you will, the utility cost of those people who are exposed to these problems because of poverty, very importantly. And we need to embed those concepts, including where we need to build infrastructure. So we know where we’re gonna build infrastructure in the future: We need to focus first on helping the communities that are suffering the most, which usually are communities of color, indigenous communities, communities of poverty.
The third thing we need to do, as we build the millions of jobs which we will do, in the new clean energy economy, we need to make sure those are well-paid jobs, those are union jobs. So in my bill that we just passed in the state of Washington, we give preference to jobs or companies that pay prevailing wages, that respect union rights if the workers have voted for it. And so, these are all the concepts of environmental justice, and we actually will be rolling out in detail our comprehensive plan here, in just a few days. I hope people will look at it.
Question 2: Your state is leading the way on coming up with long-term healthcare solutions. How did that issue rise to the top of the healthcare policymaking for lawmakers?
JI: Well, my state, Washington state, has a tradition of leading the United States to a world that is more just and verdant. And it’s because we believe in the power of diversity, we believe in the power of community, we believe that we shouldn’t have a trickle-down system; we should have a middle-class-up system. So, this is sort of traditional, and we’ve done many things, including advances in health care. We were the place where the first group health practices started. We are one of the first to provide health care for young people, and our Apple Health Program has been very significant. And now we’ve wanted to take the next step forward to universal health care…
And that is, we have now signed the very first public healthcare option in the United States. We wanted to make sure all Washingtonians have access to insurance by making sure all Washingtonians have a publicly sanctioned plan. This not only gives people additional coverage to access universal health care, but it also, we believe, will help keep costs down for everyone, no matter how your insurance is accessed, because it will drive down costs once we have a state-sanctioned healthcare plan. We think that’s very, very important.
Now, that’s not the only thing we’re doing in health care. We’ve been one of the most successful states. We’ve got 800,000 people now insured. We’ve kept the medical inflation rate lower than almost every other state. We have one of the most active and aggressive efforts to defeat the opioid epidemic by, in part, preventing people from getting addicted in the first place. And many in the United States are looking to us for leadership, as they have on so many occasions, to prevent people from becoming addicted and help them when they are addicted.
So, I’m proud of our state, we’ve led many things, and while we have done these things, I should point out, it hasn’t hurt our economy. It’s helped our economy. Because health care is an industry and employer itself. It’s one of the reasons we have the best economy in the United States.
Question 3: What do you believe the federal government’s role should be in fighting against the rise of white nationalism and white terrorist acts?
JI: Well, the first, more important role in our federal government is to remove an individual who has fanned the flames of division, who has never missed an opportunity to give license to racial hatred, who has never used his position of leadership to bring more love and less hate. … And that means we need to make Donald Trump a blip in history. Because that is a very important position in our nation and it is one that can be used to inspire us to greater virtue, greater unity, and greater tolerance, and greater diversity, rather than the opposite. And that’s what we have suffered. And we have suffered because we have a person in the White House who is very insecure, and he has decided to intentionally use the power of fear rather than the energy of hope. And we need a new president to restore that.
Now, there are many things we need to do legally as well. We need to develop a civil rights law so that everyone in the LGBTQ community is protected in all of their civil rights, just like we have in Washington state. We have to protect the trans community in a variety of ways to make sure they have access to health care. We have to embed in our schools the anti-bullying systems to prevent bullying from our children based on their individual lives. We need to embrace a civil right to women’s right of choice in our country, and I believe this is a freedom issue. And it is an issue that does involve equality for women and everyone else for that matter.
So, we have much work to do. We’ve done it in Washington state, we can do it federally.
Bonus Question: If you could give advice to your teenage self, what would it be?
JI: I would tell my teenage self: Get ready to be the president of the United States. Although, I doubt I would actually do that. And listen, I don’t know that I would give advice to my teenage self. I’ve had a charmed life; I’ve met a woman when I was 15 years of age and I’ve been married to her for 46 years. I’ve been able to serve in public life now in multiple districts. I’ve beaten Republicans quite a number of times, which is a pleasure, in my view. I’ve got three sons and three incredible daughters-in-law. And three grandchildren, and they’ve all now supported me in this effort to step forward and help the nation defeat the climate crisis. And I think, whatever I did as a teenager, it worked out pretty well, because now I can fulfill a pledge to my grandchildren that on my last days, I’ll be able to say that I did everything humanly possible to save my grandchildren and yours from the disaster of the climate crisis. … It’s worked out pretty well.
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