Legislative Commentary

I had expected the biggest news from last week – the seventh week of our 2013 legislative session – would be the fact that all 15 of the Senate committees have now completed their work on Senate bills.

Then, Thursday morning and with little notice, the state Supreme Court issued a long-awaited ruling on the voter-approved law that made it more difficult for the Legislature to approve tax increases than other bills.

Court says ‘no’ to taxpayer-protection law; MCC ready with solution

In the past 20 years the voters of our state approved five ballot measures to make it more difficult – not impossible, just more difficult – for state lawmakers to raise taxes. The latest of these was Initiative 1185, which reaffirmed the law created in 2010 by the passage of Initiative 1053. Both were approved by about 64 percent of those voting statewide.

During the 2011 legislative session the Democrats who controlled (and still control) the House of Representatives conducted a vote on a bill in a way that set the stage for a legal challenge to the I-1053 law. The lawsuit went all the way to the state Supreme Court, and Thursday a majority of the justices declared this important taxpayer-protection law to be unconstitutional.

Because that ruling trumps the I-1185 law also, it means the Legislature can once again raise taxes with a simple-majority vote. This would seem to be especially happy news for the House Democrats who rolled out their massive transportation-tax package last week, and had seemingly resigned themselves to a public vote on the proposal.

The high court made it clear in its decision that the only way to make the two-thirds-vote requirement constitutional is for the Legislature and the voters to make it part of the state constitution, literally – not merely part of the state code, as initiatives do.

Our Majority Coalition Caucus has just the legislation to do that: Senate Joint Resolution 8205, approved Feb. 19 by the Senate Governmental Operations Committee and Thursday afternoon by the Senate Ways and Means Committee; it may come for up for a vote by the full Senate as soon as this week.

SJR 8205 would, as you might have guessed, amend the state constitution so that approving a tax increase would once again require a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. It’s the same two-thirds standard contained in I-1153 and I-1185.

If a proposed constitutional amendment is endorsed by two-thirds of the Senate and House of Representatives it automatically goes to the following November’s general-election ballot; the governor cannot veto the measure.

Two-thirds of the 49-member Senate means 33 votes. Our bipartisan coalition is good for 25 votes – and seeing how I-1185 passed in 44 of the state’s 49 legislative districts, it’s reasonable to figure that 19 of the Senate minority caucus senators also have reason to make sure SJR 8205 passes and goes to the House of Representatives (where 88 House members also should have reason to vote “yes”).

There’s another reason why Democratic lawmakers should back SJR 8205 – they’re not voting to set the threshold themselves, they would simply be letting the voters of Washington have the final say. I’m reminded how several years ago, when Democratic legislators wanted to change the state constitution to do away with the supermajority requirement for passing school levies in favor of a simple majority vote, they repeatedly said we needed to just let the voters decide. Then let’s allow the voters to decide this one too!

Budget committee backs my bill to create ‘inventory’ of state fees

A few weeks ago I mentioned my interest in making it possible for the people of our state to have easy, one-stop access to information about all the fees imposed by state agencies. Since then I introduced a bill that would require the state Office of Financial Management to do that, which essentially means regularly updating a database made available online several years ago.

This past week my colleagues and I on the Senate Ways and Means Committee approved Senate Bill 5751, and hopefully we’ll vote on it as a full Senate in the next week or so. It’s a straightforward way to bring transparency to state government – one of our majority coalition’s goals – by letting people see exactly who is collecting the fee, the purpose of the fee, the current amount of the fee, the amount of the fee over the previous five years, and the statutory authority for the fee.

Tax hikes for education: what do voters, teachers say?

Poll results published this week in Tacoma’s News Tribune offer an interesting bit of insight ahead of the discussions about what the new state-operating budget will do for K-12 education, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s McCleary decision.

According to the newspaper the poll was done by a Portland firm at the behest of supporters of school funding and accountability; pollsters talked to 500 voters in January and 500 teachers in December. One of their key findings: 70 percent of the teachers want more funding for K-12 schools even if it requires a tax increase, compared to 45 percent of voters.