In December, state representative Brady Walkinshaw announced that he’d run against 45-year incumbent Jim McDermott for his seat in the national House of Representatives. A month later, McDermott announcedthat he wouldn’t run for reelection, citing age, painting, and Gandalf the wizard.

Serendipity? Cause and effect? Insider knowledge? Hard to say. We asked Walkinshaw about how he got so lucky vis-a-vis the timing of McDermott’s retirement. He also talked about why government is broken, how Seattle can lead the rest of the country, and whether all drugs should be decriminalized.

SW: Why is our government, at least in the state and national legislative branches, so broken?

BW:I’d say three things. One is the influence of money in politics is out of hand. We absolutely have to take every effort to try to move toward public financing of elections. I think one of the biggest things at stake in this presidential election is the potential nomination of up to three Supreme Court justices who will have a hand, hopefully, in overturning Citizen’s United.

The second issue, which is related, is the gerrymandering of districts. If you look at what happened coming out of the Census in 2010, we have seen an increasing polarization because you have districts that are increasingly [polarized], on both ends of the spectrum, and it doesn’t drive people to work together.

The third is, I think, our media environment. [It] increasingly is one where you hear what you’re inclined to want to hear, which I think reinforces messages and increases polarization.

Something I’ve brought to politics that has given me a lot of inspiration in my work is that I grew up in a really rural, conservative area. I grew up in an area where the vast majority of people didn’t share my worldview and my values. But at the same time I gained an incredible appreciation for how you work with people and understand where people are coming from in communities that aren’t necessarily yours.

When you declared you candidacy, did you know Jim McDermott was going to step down?

The reason I ran for the seat back in the beginning of December, and my husband and I had been talking this through for a long time, was because we live in one of the most relevant parts of this country. I think that if you look at what will happen in the Pacific Northwest and in the Puget Sound over the next ten, twenty years, we’re going to be at the forefront of a lot of economic and social policy. I believe that our region…is going to keep growing and influencing, and has the potential to influence federal policy in a lot of ways. I originally got into this race because I thought there was an opportunity to do a lot more.

I did not know when I entered the race that Congressman McDermott would be retiring.

Did you suspect, based on his absence of fundraising and campaigning?

Eh…maybe, but I anticipated that the congressman would be running.

Who do you think your main competitors are at this point?

Because an open seat comes up in the Washington 7th Congressional [District] very infrequently, I think it’s a great opportunity to have several people running for the seat…

This is a type of region that has the luxury of thinking about and pushing for federal policy in areas that can be more controversial elsewhere in the country because it’s such a safe seat. An example of that is expansion of federal entitlement programs. I strongly believe we should be looking to expand Social Security, looking at how we can even bring down the retirement age. And there are ways of doing that. We’re seeing potential candidates talk about lifting the cap on the payroll tax, which would create solvency in our Social Security system. Those are ideas that I really espouse and support.

What you’re saying seems to fall in line with the “metropolitan revolution” idea that cities are the laboratories of democracy.

Absolutely. And I think it goes both ways. I think we need to ask ourselves what influence Seattle and our region can have on the country…[and] I also think we need to ask what kind of federal partnerships do we need for our region as we’re growing.

We have 2,900 people experiencing homelessness for the first time every month in King County today. We should be fighting to get FEMA dollars back to King County, so we can address the fact that we’re seeing rising homelessness. We’ve seen only 10 percent of families in Seattle who’ve seen their income rebound to the level it was at before the economic recession in 2009. There’s so much wealth in this city right now, but at the same time growth is not going to work in our region if we don’t put in place the economic policies that distribute that and make sure that inequality does not grow.

You’ve helped make Narcan, an antidote for heroin overdoses, more available in the state. What’s your broader view on drug policy?

This is something I’m going to really focus on in the campaign. I think looking at drug policy and racial disproportionality and looking at our criminal justice system is one of the most important civil rights issues of our time.

Let’s start with heroin and opiates, which I’ve been working on a lot over the past couple years, and passed legislation that changed the laws on access to opiate reversal agents like Narcan. I think we’ve already made in Washington, thanks to that legislation, some of the best policy in the country around availability for Narcan…So you hear Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders talk about how every police department should be carrying Narcan, and that wasn’t possible until we passed that legislation last year in Washington State. So now that’s possible here.

I think we need to be doing safe needle injections—

You would support safe injection sites?

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Another issue I’ve been working on here in Olympia is, we need to look at how people who are in prison, addicts who are in prison, they’re suspended off Medicaid, so they’re not able to get access to medication-assisted treatment. So you see this huge spike of overdoses when people come out of prison. There are a lot of little things we can do around how we look at addiction and chemical dependency that I think could truly save a lot of lives. So I think there’s a lot of really good bipartisan work to be done on this. The opiate legislation I had last year, I worked across the aisle…We were able to make progress on this legislation, despite divided government.

But we need to go further, and look at how we can decriminalize drugs, how we can make sure that drug policy is not having the types of disproportionate impacts on people of different racial backgrounds in this country. And [this] feeds into a larger criminal justice platform that I will be rolling out within the next month.

To be clear: you do support the decriminalization of drugs, and instead treating them as a civil and medical issue?

Certainly for cannabis.

What about meth, cocaine, heroin?

I think we need to look at that. We need to really understand the experiences of countries like Portugal, who have taken that approach. The ACLU has been doing excellent work in this area.

I will be taking positions on those issues as we roll out the campaign. But specifically, we shouldn’t be putting people in jail for minor drug offenses. Full stop. We should be taking innovations like what we’re seeing here in Seattle. We developed some of the best drug courts in the country back in the early 2000s. That’s a model that could be expanded nationally. There’s excellent work going on around the LEAD program. I’m working on getting more funding for that this year in Olympia so that other cities besides Seattle can start piloting that.

Because of a lot of amazing work that people have done over the last twenty years–since, I think, one of the worst pieces of federal legislation we’ve had, which in 1994 when we passed mandatory minimums on sentencing–as we’ve started to move away from that, it’s been because we have really good data, and it’s been encouraging to see people working more across the aisle on criminal justice legislation.

Any thoughts on the carbon tax–or, potentially, taxes–that are going to the ballot in November?

I think that when you put a price on carbon, it’s very important that it generate revenue. I will looking at them carefully.

What I also think is very important is that we take action on putting a price on carbon at the ballot this year.