About 250 people showed up earlier this week to attend Elizabeth Uelmen’s campaign kickoff event. She’s challenging first-term U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas, this election season. Uelmen, a Democrat, hosted the kickoff on Tuesday evening at the Fort Vancouver…

Here’s how Washington state members of the U.S. Senate voted on major issues in the week ending March 16. The U.S. House of Representatives was in recess. (A little background about why I’m re-posting this can be found here.) SURFACE-TRANSPORTATION…

News about bill being signed into law has been slow-going this session, especially since the governor offered an ultimatum to state lawmakers, who have yet to reach an agreement on the budget. Last week Gov. Chris Gregoire told legislators she…

U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas, passed a nonbinding resolution on Thursday to recognize hydroelectric power as a renewable energy source. Her bill does not change clean energy rules for Southwest Washington, but it does touch on a debate over…

Here at The Columbian, we publish information every Sunday inside the C Section about how members of Congress from our state have voted. I’ve recently learned that this information is not available on The Columbian’s website. I believe the plan…

When compared to other Republicans in Congress, U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas, appears to vote in a more moderate fashion. According to the nonpartisan National Journal magazine, based in Washington, D.C., Herrera Beutler ranks 222 on the conservative scale…

The Senate shake-up on Friday, in which the minority Republicans got three conservative Democrats to join them in approving the Republicans’ budget, has stirred up a lot of emotions in Olympia. In a story I wrote for Sunday, I quoted…