The other evening I shared a potluck dinner with a group of friends. Inevitably, the discussion turned to the Washington, D.C., political mess, including the Jack Abramoff scandal, the Tom DeLay scandal, FEMA cronyism and the quagmire in Iraq. The wheels appear to be coming off the bus for the Republicans, but the Democrats don’t seem to have their mud and snow tires on. And while the headlines may embarrass some Republican leaders, their agenda is still moving forward.

For example, the administration has launched an attempt to hollow out the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). This law enables a worker to take leave to care for a newborn baby, a newly adopted child or an ill family member or recover from his or her own serious illness. FMLA only covers employers with 50 or more workers. You have to work for at least a full year for that employer to gain FMLA rights, and it is not paid.

Now the Bush administration wants to roll back even these minimal FMLA protections. Among other “adjustments,” they intend to redefine “serious illness” to exclude acute appendicitis, pneumonia and certain kinds of heart attacks. Workers incapacitated with those illnesses would no longer be able to take leave under FMLA to recover their health.

Our state pioneered family and medical leave in a bipartisan fashion, largely thanks to the efforts of then-state Sen. Patty Murray. Murray made family and medical leave her first keystone issue. She did not relent until both the state House of Representatives and the Republican-dominated state Senate passed it.

Murray recognized that with George H.W. Bush in the White House, family and medical leave would not be in the cards in D.C. So, it fell to our state to create the law for family and medical leave that would set the template for future federal policy.

When Bill Clinton gained the presidency, the first bill he signed into law was the Family and Medical Leave Act. The federal law expanded on the Washington statute, covering more workers and allowing leave for more medical and family conditions. It is the law that has been protecting Washington workers for the last 13 years.

My own example shows how it works. My son has Crohn’s, a chronic disease. Every two months he has to get an infusion. It takes a half-day. So my wife or I take him in and sit with him while he goes through this. We are excused from work to enable us to meet these family medical needs.

These are not exceptional responsibilities. All of us have similar tasks of love and respect for our families. It makes sense that we should not fear losing our jobs because we are responsible for our families. For the 60 percent of workers who are covered by FMLA, that uncertainty was thought to be gone. But not any more.

Luckily, our legislators in Olympia can help us out. Each state can enact its own family and medical leave law. That’s what Oregon did in 1995. In 2003, California went one step better and enacted family leave insurance, providing partial compensation for workers when they are incapacitated or caring for a newborn or newly adopted child.

State Sen. Karen Keiser, D-Des Moines, and State Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, D-Seattle, are sponsoring legislation to create a state family and medical leave act. It would replicate the provisions in the federal law, so that if the Bush administration succeeds in rolling back family and medical leave, we will still be protected in our state. And it drops the threshold of the law to cover employers of 25 or more workers. This brings in 330,000 more workers under the family and medical leave umbrella. Close to 2 million workers, almost 75 percent of the work force, will be protected by this law.

This proposal isn’t rocket science – it is more like good business as usual. All the major corporations in our state – among them Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, Safeco and Costco – are already providing family and medical leave under the provisions of the federal law. With passage of this proposal in Olympia, now they will know that those provisions will remain in force and be extended to employers with more than 25 workers.

That’s the sort of economic security and community caring that we should be promoting in this great state of Washington. And that’s how we can do something, while D.C. is steaming in its own juices of corruption.

John Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute (www.eoionline.org), writes every other Wednesday. Write to him in care of the institute at 1900 Northlake Way, Suite 237, Seattle, WA 98103. His e-mail address is john@eoionline.org.