Kshama Sawant

In one of her last campaigns before leaving office, Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant is hoping to pass local legislation on rent control that will lead to that state ban being repealed.

Seattle City Councilmembers voted Tuesday to cap the fees landlords charge a tenant for being late on rent at $10 per month.

In a hint of what’s to come, Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant stood alongside PCC Community Market workers to demand better working conditions.

On Tuesday, the Seattle City Council made history. After hearing more than two hours of public comment, a majority of the council voted in favor of a law that makes Seattle the first city in the country to ban a type of discrimination that affects South Asian communities.

Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant wants to add caste to the city's anti-discrimination policy in Seattle workplaces, saying discrimination takes place based on the South Asian practice of assigning people their social status at birth.

Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant announced she is not running for reelection and her party, Socialist Alternative, doesn’t appear to be nominating a replacement. While her brand of third-party socialism might leave the council, in her ten years in office, socialist ideas have spread in Democrat circles.

Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, the most senior member of the Council and the city’s only elected socialist, will not seek reelection when her term expires in December. Sawant announced Thursday that she will instead form a new national labor movement.

Kshama Sawant appears to have survived a recall vote by a narrow margin after facing criticism for pushing cuts to the police budget and higher taxes on hometown tech giant Amazon.

The vote in a recall effort against a socialist Seattle City Councilmember tightened considerably Wednesday as more mail ballots were counted, meaning it would be at least another day until it was clear whether the controversial lawmaker would be ousted.

A recall vote that ends Tuesday asks whether Kshama Sawant should be removed from the Seattle City Council for a campaign finance violation, her involvement in a protest march to the home of Mayor Jenny Durkan, and her decision to let a crowd of protesters into City Hall during the pandemic. Sawant says the charges are a pretext for commercial real-estate and big business interests to try to remove her from office.