Legislative Commentary

The legislative session ended late Thursday night, on schedule. Unfortunately, wrapping up on time was about the only good thing I can say about our entire final week in Olympia.

We saw the new Senate majority ignore the state constitution, starve the state’s rainy-day fund, and refuse to roll back the school-tax increase that has caused a property-tax spike statewide, and that was just in the final two days of the session.

I’m glad it is over, and I am looking back to getting home and onto a tractor.

In what is probably my final weekly commentary for the year, here are a few wins and the biggest disappointment from our 60 days at the Capitol.

Water access solutions, and investments in communities

The session started out well, with bipartisan agreement on a fix to the Hirst decision that addresses water-access issues in all 39 counties. That agreement was followed with bipartisan approval of a new and capital budget that makes very good investments in the Ninth District, especially in our state parks.

No new income tax, no new energy tax

The Democrats who continue to run the House of Representatives keep talking about imposing Washington’s first state income tax, starting with a tax on income from capital gains.

This year they went so far as to include it in their budget proposal, but as usual, they wouldn’t let the full House vote on it, and it collapsed.



With Democrats controlling the state Senate this year as well as the House, Governor Jay Inslee must have thought this was the year for what he called a carbon tax, which in reality was a regressive tax on energy, from the fuel for our vehicles to the energy that lights and heats and cools our homes and businesses.

My Democrat colleagues moved the energy-tax proposal (Senate Bill 6203) through two committees but would not allow a full Senate vote.

That’s probably because our side was ready to expose its many flaws, such as an immediate 12-cent cost increase on a gallon of gas without any road improvements in exchange.

The carbon-reduction bill Senate Republicans passed in 2015 is still the only carbon bill to clear either the Senate or House, and it wasn’t a new tax.

Ban on gun purchases stalls

All this past week we kept hearing that the majority Democrats were going to call a vote on Senate Bill 6620, the Senate Democrats’ so-called “student safety” bill.

If the sponsors had removed the section that would ban purchases or transfers of semiautomatic rifles by people younger than 21, the bill might have passed, because the rest of it was actually about increasing school safety.

But apparently it was a package deal, and the talk of bringing it to a vote was nothing more than that.

Streak of bipartisan budgets is broken

As the 2018 session went on, the disappointing decline toward partisanship picked up speed.

Nowhere was this more obvious than the supplemental operating budget, which was adopted on the session’s final afternoon.

The stage had been set the day before, when my Democrat colleagues sidestepped the state constitution to effectively divert $700 million in tax revenue that should have gone into the rainy-day fund.

We already knew state government’s revenue collections are running $2.3 billion ahead of projections, meaning it is far from being a rainy day at the Capitol.

But there the Democrats were, with just two days left in the legislative session, claiming the Legislature simply had to deprive the rainy-day fund to offer any relief from the property-tax spike the House majority engineered last year, as part of the bipartisan education-funding reforms.

I opposed that move, because I know the Legislature was positioned to address the property-tax spike this year, dollar for dollar, without harming the rainy-day fund.

Our side had already proposed using $972 million in existing revenue to offset the property-tax increase, and we offered it again Wednesday. The Democrat majority said no. Its leaders also ignored state treasurer Duane Davidson, who called their backhanded raid a “dangerous precedent.”

The budget does some good things, but the tax relief it offers only amounts to 30 cents on the dollar, and it relies on depriving the rainy-day fund of hundreds of millions that should be saved for real emergencies. That combination was too much for me to support the budget, which I don’t see as being sustainable.

Here’s what I said publicly after the vote:

“I’ve been in the Legislature for 26 years and in that time, I’ve seen three recessions, as well as wildfires, a major earthquake and other emergencies. At one point, state government was almost $10 billion in the hole, which left it empty-handed to respond to those kinds of situations. In that important context this partisan budget is shortsighted. We could have done better by the people of Washington.

“The new Democrat majority did not save in this budget for the rainy day that is sure to come. Its members knowingly hijacked $700 million that should have gone into the rainy-day fund. The money won’t be there when the inevitable occurs, and that’s criminal. It wastes the opportunity that seemed obvious to our side with a $2.3 billion surplus.

“During the five years that Republicans had the majority in the Senate, the budget process was strongly bipartisan. This was difficult at times, but it meant that the final product was something that really represented all of Washington. This year, in contrast, our lead budget writer couldn’t even brief us on the content of the budget until the last minute because Democrats wouldn’t allow him in the room when they wrote it. That’s not good governing.

“The majority budget chair said today that writing the budget may be even harder when one party has the majority. We could have helped with that.”

Starting in 2011, even before we officially had the majority in the Senate, Republican and Democrat senators had worked together on the budget.

Our side’s continued emphasis on stable tax rates and responsible spending led to some of the most bipartisan votes in support of an operating budget. I think that’s better for the taxpayers and our state than what we saw this past week, when the budget went out on a straight majority-minority vote.

After so many years of bipartisan cooperation that led to sensible budgeting, it’s unfortunate to see bare-knuckle partisanship return to the Capitol.