In a campaign speech Wednesday to the Vancouver Rotary Club, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., praised her Democratic colleague, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, as a tenacious, committed advocate for Southwest Washington.
Murray is fighting the toughest race of her career against Republican real estate investor and former gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi for a fourth Senate term. Rossi spoke to the Rotary Club in late September.
Mostly steering clear of outright partisanship, Cantwell said Murray has been willing to fight for such unglamorous projects as infrastructure improvements on the Vancouver riverfront and at the Port of Vancouver, and also for the Columbia River channel-deepening project, which celebrated its official completion last week.
The $190 million project to dredge the river’s shipping channel and improve commerce by allowing deeper-draft vessels to reach upriver ports is a good example of “the practical, patient, almost under-the-radar work that has made (Murray) a workhorse, not a show horse, of the U.S. Senate,” Cantwell said.
Seniority matters in the Senate, Cantwell said. Murray’s positions as a senior member of the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and as chairwoman of the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Subcommittee have earned her the clout to get things done, Cantwell said — whether fighting the Bush administration’s effort to close veterans hospitals, including one in Vancouver, or winning funding for Washington transportation projects.
“I almost would call her Senator Infrastructure,” she quipped.
Rossi ‘shortsighted’
Cantwell, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, noted that Rossi was the first candidate this year to come out in favor of repealing Wall Street reform legislation passed by this year’s Democratically controlled Congress.
That’s shortsighted, she said, because “we are still dealing with the effects” of the economic meltdown in Washington state, including a wave of bank failures.
“Eleven-plus banks were taken over in our state,” she said. “We need rules of the road.”
In response to a question about why the federal government isn’t bearing a greater share of the cost of a new bridge on an interstate freeway, Cantwell said every major federal transportation project now requires a significant local match.
“If you don’t have local support and commitment, some other project somewhere else will get that funding,” she said.
Asked when Congress is likely to vote on extension of the Bush-era tax cuts, she said she hopes it will happen before those cuts expire at the end of the year.
“I would hope we would pass legislation to provide certainty and predictability,” she said. “If they wait until Jan. 20 to start their process, it will cause consternation.”
For one thing, she said, a delay wold cause huge problems for the Internal Revenue Service, which must begin issuing directives and printing tax forms and manuals in January.
Asked her view on the federal estate tax, which expired this year and is likely to be reinstated by Congress in some form next year, Cantwell said she favors enacting a new estate tax but not one that taxes inheritances at 55 percent.
Unless Congress acts, current law would raise the tax from zero this year to 55 percent in 2011 on estates that exceed $2 million per couple.
Any new tax must be sensitive to the situation facing farmers and others affected by inheritance taxes, Cantwell said.
