ANALYSIS | The Race for Washington’s 9th District U.S. Representative Seat Is a Battle About War

Rep. Adam Smith (D) is, for the U.S., a pretty left-leaning politician. He’s extremely pro-union, he was a co-sponsor of the Medicare for All bill, he was in favor of the famous $15 per hour minimum wage for SeaTac, he joined Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) in co-sponsoring the Green New Deal, and he even co-sponsored a bill to end all government contracts with private prisons. Besides that, he’s also brought home a lot of bacon for affordable housing, trade education, community organizations, and infrastructure in Washington’s 9th District.

Given those progressive bona fides, what does it look like to challenge him from the left, then? It’s a challenge, to put it lightly.

While Smith has easily fended off every Republican who has run against him since he ascended to the House of Representatives, he’s also beat back a couple of people from his own party. Quite handily, too. Currently, he faces another progressive challenger, fellow Democrat Melissa Chaudhry. What distinguishes her from Smith, in terms of policy? Not a lot, by her own admission.

“In many fronts, we are aligned, honestly. So if you like how he votes for Green New Deal and housing and education stuff, you will like how I vote for all of that,” she said in a video interview with the South Seattle Emerald.

There is, however, one area in which Smith differs drastically from the left wing of his own party: War. Chaudhry, the daughter of a Navy commander and wife of a disabled Army veteran, is unequivocally against war. Smith, as the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, is a bit more nuanced on the subject. He is, however, unequivocally not against war, particularly when he deems it necessary to protect U.S. interests or thwart the interests of those he sees as America’s enemies.

“I do not agree with Melissa that the U.S. doesn’t have adversaries that we need to deter,” he said. “I support Ukraine. Okay, that costs money, but I still think it’s important to make sure Russia can’t have their way in Eastern Europe. I think Iran is a major problem in the Middle East. … I don’t think a far-left, ‘The world is the U.S.’s fault and we don’t need to worry about Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis’ worldview is the correct approach. … But nor am I the pro-war person that she likes to portray me as being.”

Now, many people, including Chaudhry — whose campaign slogan is, incidentally, “Principled. Experienced. Unbought.” — have pointed out that a majority of Smith’s campaign contributions come from the defense industry, suggesting that his more nuanced approach might have something to do with that.

This year, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) dropped about $200,000 on his campaign, dwarfing the money received from defense contractors, though they do have similar interests. Israel is as eager to buy weapons from Smith’s defense-related contributors as it is to sell said weapons. Smith, as the top Democrat dealing with military matters, has a lot of say in what kind of arms sales we approve and what kind of financial assistance we provide when it comes to Israel. Thus, these contributions might be seen as Israel and our defense industry greasing the wheels of their deals, so to speak.

That’s exactly what she’s running against, Chaudhry says. “The idea that we would allow ourselves to continue to be duped into believing that spending our taxpayer money on killing kids abroad is somehow moral, is somehow right, is somehow in our best interests, that we could allow ourselves to lose touch with our own humanity to the extent that we would vote for that and vote for someone who, as top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, has a significant amount of pull in these discussions and who is, to use [a] very blunt word, bought out by these interests — that’s not what democracy means. That’s not what America stands for.”

That’s not what he stands for either, Smith contended. “Regardless of where I get money from,” he said, “my general principle is I don’t ever vote or take a position based on who gives me money. Never. I don’t care who they are. I don’t care how much I may agree with them or disagree with them. I make my decisions based on the district.”

Raising money to pay for a campaign is de rigueur for politicians, he pointed out, but asked, “Are you principled enough to make decisions even if it’s going to cost you donors? I am, and I have.” He cited his support of the nuclear deal with Iran, which Israel and AIPAC do not approve of, as well as his previous votes against increases to the defense budget and his public criticisms of wasteful spending on the F-35 and the Sentinel ICBM project.

“I believe I have a principled approach to not just relying on militancy or doing what the defense contractors want,” he concluded.

That all that campaign cash has no influence on his decisions may beggar belief, but, barring telepathy, there’s really no way to fact-check him on it. For what it’s worth, after pressing Smith on this issue a couple of times, this journalist believes that he genuinely believes in what he’s doing. His worldview, whether you agree with it or not, is pretty well set. But even if you take Smith at his word, that doesn’t change the fact that he’s an extremely convenient person to have in office for arms manufacturers and the pro-Israel lobby.

When it comes to aid to Israel, Smith has voted for it, again and again. Though it is not all of the aid we’ve extended to Israel, Congress alone has approved $12.5 billion in aid. As the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, Smith has a major role in pushing those aid bills through. Overall, Israel is into us for about $24 billion in what’s called Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grants, and our aid accounts for a whopping 15% of its overall defense budget. While Israel has a special exception to its FMF program allowing it to use a portion of the money to buy arms from its own manufacturers, that provision is being phased out, meaning Israel will be buying 100% American soon.

While Smith has been happy to give Israel money for munitions, emphasizing that country’s right to defend itself, he’s not happy with everything Israel has done and is doing. He emphasizes that he voted to keep funding the UNRWA, which provides humanitarian aid to Palestinians, against Israel’s opposition. He also expresses strong disapproval of Israel’s actions against Palestinians living in the West Bank and says he supports sanctions against Israeli settlers in the area. And ultimately, he says, he is in favor of a ceasefire, especially now that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is dead.

“I think now is the time to sign a peace deal to get an agreement. Part of what really motivated Israel here was their inability to get the hostages back. Sinwar was [also] part of it,” he said.

That said, while the world waits for a deal, the death toll in Gaza continues to rise, thanks in no small part to American-made arms and the American loans to purchase them. Hind Rajab, the 5-year-old who was infamously murdered by an Israeli tank crew after spending three hours on the phone with paramedics pleading for help, was shot with a M830A1 HEAT-MP-T, developed, in part, by General Dynamics. General Dynamics and its employees donated $31,500 to Smith’s campaign this year. The GBU-39, a small-diameter bomb implicated in the May 26 Rafah Tal al-Sultan tent camp, is manufactured by Boeing, a current and longtime Smith contributor. This year the company and its employees gave $12,175.

Why not stop giving Israel these munitions, especially when its military seems to be firing them at innocent civilians more often than enemy combatants? As far as Smith sees it, no aid means no Israel.

If the card we have to play “is saying we’re going to cut you off,” he cautioned, “when the opposition is Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, and others, it is a very difficult, very impossible situation. If you don’t care whether or not Israel exists, then it makes the whole process a lot easier, I will grant you that.”

Chaudhry, for her part, vows to vote against any more of that aid and do everything in her power to withdraw support for Israel’s military and pressure the Israeli government to agree to an immediate ceasefire. She has also vowed never to accept contributions from the defense industry.

It should be noted that Chaudhry — unlike previous challenger Sarah Smith, who said during a candidate forum that the U.S. military was the greatest threat to global stability and our own country’s security — is not explicitly against the military. She just has a very different vision of what it should do.

Her Navy father, Chaudhry says, inspired her to want to “give the U.S. military a better job.” Instead of engaging in conflicts directly or indirectly, “let’s use this astonishing recruitment, logistics, [and] training capacity that we have that’s already been built and just gradually redirect it towards being for good instead of for harm.”

Besides her dream of a peace-loving, kumbaya-singing corps that builds bridges instead of blowing them up, she’s got other plans befitting an Evergreen State College graduate.

On housing, she notes that there is a need for housing for lower-income people that the market simply won’t supply, because it isn’t profitable. To solve that quandary, she proposes relying on community land trusts, something she learned about during her tenure on board of the Burien-based experimental low-income housing group ecoTHRIVE.

“What the market will never supply, society should,” she said. She’s also rabid about raising wages, noting that “the fact that wages have stagnated or declined in real terms for the last 50 years is a strong contributor to the housing crisis [and] homelessness crisis, actually.”

Besides that, she cites student and medical debt as major detriments to our society’s well-being. Those issues, along with our lackluster housing supply and ongoing homelessness crisis, “should be solved at the federal policy level,” she says.

Smith agrees with all of that, but, he argues, he’s a lot more well-positioned to engender actual policy change.

“It’s not a matter of agreement,” he said. “That’s what, frankly, offends me, is the assumption that Congress is an entry-level position. … Doesn’t matter how hard you work or what you’ve done or what level of leadership you’ve risen to. All that’s just irrelevant as long as you agree on the issues.”

Chaudhry’s status as a first-time candidate, Smith argues, should not be seen as an asset.

“My opponent has never ran for — much less held — an elected position to be responsible to people and figure out how to help them,” he said. “So there is no question that I am going to better deliver for the people of the 9th District and also better deliver on progressive priorities.”

To be fair, he’s right that he’s had more time at the helm. He took office in January of 1997, meaning he’s approaching three decades in office.

While Chaudhry takes umbrage with the idea that she’s inexperienced, pointing to her extensive work with nonprofits and NGOs, including ecoTHRIVE, she is still more than happy to cast herself as an anti-war outsider.

“[My] lived experience, the fact that I’m not a career politician and that I’m not accepting campaign money from anybody other than individuals, and most particularly not from corporate entities that profit from the suffering of humanity — that’s really the difference I’d like to bring to folks,” she said. “I’d like to say I am here as one of us to represent us. I didn’t get a law degree and go straight into politics for the last 34 years like Smith did.”

Do people in the 9th District want an anti-war outsider? According to Chaudhry, very much so.

She’s been able to convert some Republicans to her cause, she says, on her anti-war message alone. But “in terms of reaching people who voted for Smith, we talk to a lot of people, a lot of people, including the older white folk voters, [about] whom many on my team say, ‘Oh, they’ll never vote for you.’ Well, actually, many of them think 28 years is more than enough and are happy to have an alternative.”

While she says she’s optimistic based on her door-knocking efforts and the response she’s received at community forums, she expresses frustration that Smith has so far refused to debate her. His campaign ads — both in print and on TV — also noticeably gloss over any mention of his opponent.

Asked if that was part of his strategy, Smith said it was not.

“We just talked about [her],” he pointed out.

He was eager, in fact, to answer questions about what made him more fit for office than Chaudhry, quickly segueing his answer into a story about how, in order to get a bill allowing the federal government to sell land to affordable housing providers at less than market value passed, he had to negotiate between a bunch of scatterbrained senators. The gist of the story was that Smith was able to bend the ear of people like Sen. Pat Toomey, who he seems to like, and former Sen. Bob Menendez, who he definitely doesn’t like (but also doesn’t have to deal with anymore). When Menendez wouldn’t agree to sign, Smith used some obscure processes to sidestep him and get it done anyway. That Smith knows the inner workings of the other Washington is undeniable.

The real question, for Chaudhry and her fellow peaceniks, is, “Why hasn’t he used that power and influence to engender a ceasefire in Gaza?”

There are plenty of cynical ways to that question, including ones related to his campaign contributions, but this is Smith’s own answer: “I don’t think it’s fair to say that the U.S. could stop this war tomorrow, which I know a lot of people believe. Israel believes they are fighting for their survival. We’re trying to figure out how to convince them that they can survive without fighting. Just walking away is not going to do that.”

Whether people are satisfied with that answer is what Chaudhry is staking her fortunes on. While previous Democratic challengers to Smith have certainly been anti-war and have certainly criticized Smith’s stances on the subject, they weren’t running at a time when the U.S. was funding what the United Nations International Court of Justice has found “plausible” is an ongoing genocide. The people who care about the conflict in Gaza care intensely, as is evident to anyone who has been on Twitter or in a public gathering place anytime in the past year, but Chaudhry thinks there are a lot more of them than just those who show up at rallies. Plenty of everyday people, Chaudhry says, are outraged at the U.S.’ involvement in Gaza and are energized to vote about it. Smith disagrees.

While he concedes that Gaza matters to his constituents “without question,” he believes everything else he’s done matters a lot more.

“It matters more to at least 90% of my constituents, considerably more,” he said. “And so to ignore all of that, whatever disagreements we may have on foreign policy or national security policy … this is not where my constituents are at and what they care about.”

Come Election Day, we’ll find out whether he’s right.

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