Democrats Increase Pressure on Corporations to Cut Ties with Matt Shea

Who even uses umbrellas? WASHINGTON STATE REPUBLICANS

Today the Rampart Group is scheduled to conclude its investigation into Rep. Matt Shea, the Spokane Valley Republican who, according to the Guardian , offered to use his powers as a lawmaker to run background checks on his rivals. The results, which should determine whether Shea “has engaged in, planned, or promoted political violence against groups or individuals,” are due on Dec. 1. Since that report in the Guardian we've learned the fanatical secessionist and road-rager with ties to white nationalist groups has promoted a group dedicated to training child soldiers for holy war , which I'm sure has nothing to do with the Biblical Basis for Holy War document he's admitted to distributing.

Perhaps in honor of this special day, the Washington State Democrats have launched a website that makes it easy for the public to shame corporations and PACS who have recently donated to Shea's campaigns. If you want to Tweet at Premera, Puget Sound Energy, Altria, the landlords, or his 15 other backers, then head on over here.

Surprisingly, it's expensive to agitate for holy war from within the Republican party. According to the Seattle Times, Shea has used a good chunk of campaign cash— $68,000, or "roughly 13% of all contributions he has raised"—to fund American Christian Network, the radio network that hosts his platform for spreading his Dominionist nonsense, Patriot Radio. So cutting his corporate donors is a meaningful thing to do.

This public pressure campaign is also the latest Democratic attempt to pressure house minority leader J.T. Wilcox to expel Shea from the caucus, or else vote to remove him from the Legislature entirely. Crosscut has a great piece on why that's such a difficult thing to do, and why it could end up being a hollow moral victory. Even if the House votes to boot Shea, voters in the 4th Legislative District could just re-elect him again in 2020. Given that he won nearly 60% of the vote last year, that doesn't seem like such a wild possibility, though doing it without the backing of major corporations and PACs would be more difficult.

Of course, as the nice oppo dump section of the new website demonstrates, the Democrats have known about the dangers of Shea's right-wing extremism since his first election in 2008, and yet the party hasn't invested maximum resources into defeating him at the ballot box. They didn't even run anybody in 2010 or 2014, and they only gave his 2018 challenger, Ted Cummings, a list of Democratic voters. However, after putting all this time and effort into removing Shea, there's no way they won't spend just as much energy finding and supporting a Democrat to replace him. Right?