WA DINO Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez Sides With Trump, Votes To Try 14 Year Olds As Adults In D.C.

Yesterday, two of Washington’s Democrat congress members, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Rep. Kim Schrier, betrayed the city they work in, betrayed their party and betrayed the resistance against authoritarian overreach when they sided with Trump and his Republican cronies to approve a bill to tighten the Trump Administration's fascist grip on the City of Washington, D.C.. Gluesenkamp Perez, who we must conclude picked her party affiliation based on what color she preferred, also joined Republicans to allow D.C. judges to try 14 year olds as adults for certain violent offenses. 

The first bill, dubbed the D.C. Crime Act, edits the D.C. Home Rule Act to prohibit the City of D.C. from changing their own sentencing laws, requires judges to use mandatory minimum sentencing, and also weakens a D.C. provision that used to allow lighter sentences for people under 25, lowering that threshold to 18. 

Democrats argued that the bill was not a serious attempt to promote safety in D.C., but rather another example of Trump’s unwarranted federal overreach. Still, 31 Democrats, including Gluesenkamp Perez and Schrier, approved the D.C. Crime Act. 

The second bill, which also passed with Republican support, would lower the age that juveniles can be tried as adults for certain violent offenses to 14 years of age. Only 8 Democrats crossed party lines for this one, Gluesenkamp Perez among them. 

Unfortunately, Gluesenkamp Perez and Schrier are both on something of a switch hitter streak. They both joined Republicans in voting for the Laken Riley Act, which exploits a tragic murder to criminalize immigrant communities, massively expand immigration detention, and encourage anti-immigrant states to file lawsuits against the federal government for certain immigration decisions it makes. While 46 Democrats voted in favor of the Laken Riley Act, all the Democrats in Washington, including Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, voted against it. 

The DINO duo also teamed up with MAGA to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian in congress, for her comments following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks. Even fewer Democrats, just 22 and none from Washington, joined the GOP dogpile. 

Their defenders (and there seem to be very few remaining who aren’t on their payroll) excuse the shitty votes by pointing to the swinginess of their districts.

Gluesenkamp Perez represents Washington’s 3rd District, which stretches across the state’s southwest corner, including Clark, Cowlitz Wahkiakum, Pacific, Lewis, and Skamania counties, plus a sliver of Thurston County. In 2022, Perez faced a heated battle with alleged Nazi sympathizer Joe Kent to turn the district blue after Republican incumbent Jaime Herrera Beutler fell out of the graces of the MAGA movement. Then they had a rematch in 2024, which garnered national attention as it was among a handful of races that would decide the balance of power in Congress.

But she’s still fighting for her political life. In 2026, she faces a much more mainstream Republican, Washington State Sen. John Braun, which may prove a harder fight than her past match up where she made the case that a Conservative Democrat represented the district better than a nutjob like Kent. That in mind, she may feel the pressure to rack up a few more points with the conservatives in her district.

So Schrier has not attracted as well-known or potentially competitive a challenger as Gluesenkamp Perez has. But that doesn’t mean she won’t see one. Schier has held her ground in a purple district since 2018, but she doesn’t sail to re-election like her colleagues in truer bluer districts such as Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Adam Smith. 

Whatever excuses they may have, it does not change the fact of the matter. Gluesenkamp Perez and Schrier gave D.C. to Trump on a silver platter and we shouldn’t trust them to defend us any better.