WA senator didn’t have a guide to legislating. So she wrote one

Karen Keiser thought she knew what she was doing when she entered the Legislature in 1995. 

She’d spent her career reporting on and lobbying lawmakers. Doing the job in the state House of Representatives wouldn’t be hard, she figured.

She figured wrong. 

Twenty-eight years later, Keiser, a dean of the Senate Democratic Caucus, has written her first book, “Getting Elected is the Easy Part,” to share wisdom she wished she had received during her early days in Olympia.

“It’s a learning process,” she said in an interview last week. “Many get discouraged and don’t stay. To be honest, when they don’t get big things done in their first couple years, they think they failed.”

Keiser, 75, of Des Moines, started writing the book during the pandemic. “We were stuck in isolation. I had time. I kept writing and writing,” she said. 

What emerged is not a tell-all but a tell-how – as in how to effectively articulate and advance progressive policies in the legislative process at the state level. She pushes her target audience – young and new lawmakers in every state – to keep tight hold of their values as they look for footholds in the process.

“Progress is often difficult but always possible,” she writes in the prologue.

“The legislative process is arcane and often mystifying. And each new legislator has to choose her own path and create her own niche,” she writes. “But—and I know this to be true—if you hold on to your core values and persist, you, too, can change the world one state at a time.”

Road to Olympia

Keiser grew up in Merrill, a small Iowa farming town north of Sioux City. Her father owned the general store and her parents worked there seven days a week.

Prairie populism was her heritage. But she wrote of transforming into an activist and feminist as a student at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s, when the convergence of movements against the Vietnam War and for civil rights and women’s rights “shifted the paradigm for the rest of the century.”

Keiser, who studied journalism, worked as a television news reporter and later communications director for the Washington State Labor Council. 

When a state House seat became open in late 1994, she sought and received the appointment days ahead of the 1995 session. A year later, the mother of three won her first legislative race. She moved to the Senate in 2001 and has been re-elected five times, most recently in 2022.

Keiser is now one of the Senate’s senior members. She chairs the Labor and Commerce Committee and serves as Senate president pro-tem, filling in on the dais when the lieutenant governor is unavailable.

She counsels new arrivals to legislatures to contemplate committees on which they want to serve. Leadership posts, if offered, are a way to find out if that is your calling.

“Everything seems possible when you win your first legislative race. You know you can change your world for the better through legislative action,” she writes. “But it isn’t easy.”

The formula for success requires a persuasive argument, a reputation for credibility, allies – “not just in the other chamber but across the aisle and outside the doors of the legislature” – and a solid vote count.

She opens the “Making Sausage” chapter with a recipe, and an analogy.

“Like sausage, legislation is limited only by your imagination and comes in all kinds of flavors and packaging,” she writes, adding later no bill is perfect or ends up in law exactly as it started.

Write legislation that is simple and clear, she advises. Once drafted, she continues, “be sure to read the damn thing” and “be on guard” for hostile amendments from opponents.

The book’s early chapters focus on the mechanics of the job. Then she moves into some of the dynamics in the legislative bodies. She reflects on legislative successes and opines on a worsening tone in civic debate, in the book’s later chapters.

There are no eye-opening revelations, no divulging of caucus secrets. 

She does call the Roadkill Caucus, a group of centrist Democrats that put the brakes on legislative initiatives supported by progressives, “the most disruptive caucus I ever dealt with.”

“This caucus made it so difficult to make real progress, or even manage the Washington Senate caucus and floor action, that the Majority Leader (Lisa Brown) abruptly resigned shortly after a particularly disruptive session in 2012,” she recounts.

A theme throughout is legislative payoffs are a product of patience and perseverance. Paid family leave, a policy she pushed early in her tenure, took two decades to get up and running, she notes. 

Though Keiser focuses on the pursuit of progressive policies, she insisted instructions on how to succeed apply to all lawmakers regardless of party.

“In the kitchen, sausage is often made by following a familiar, predictable recipe,” she writes. In the Legislature, there are a lot of cooks who may want to tweak your recipe as your bill moves through the process. Keep an eye on every step to make sure what comes out in the end is what you intended.”