Will of the people, blah, blah, blah, blah…
DEMOCRATIC leaders in Olympia should not be so eager to brush aside Initiative 960, which sets the two-thirds threshold for the Legislature to raise taxes. The people have voted for a two-thirds rule three times — in 1993, 1998 and in 2007. Clearly they want it that way.
Without I-960, the Legislature can raise taxes with a simple majority of both houses and signature of the governor. I-960 raises the bar by requiring a two-thirds vote of both houses or a vote of the people. Raising taxes is not impossible — hardly that — but it is more difficult.
The state constitution protects successful initiatives for two years. During that time they can be modified with a two-thirds vote of both houses. Last month, the two years were up for I-960, which can now be brushed aside with simple majorities. But that is not what the people wanted.
Let’s be honest, the Seattle Times editorial board only vigorously defends the will of the people when they agree with it. On issues like light rail and renewable energy requirements, not so much.
Besides, the law is the law, and as the Times argues, if the people don’t like it, they are free to change it. For example, the Constitution says that the Legislature can amend an initiative of the people after two years. If that’s such a big problem then perhaps the Times should endorse a Constitutional amendment that keeps the Legislature’s hands off initiatives, and allows them only to be amended via initiative. After all, just such a restriction on legislative powers has worked out so well for California, hasn’t it?
And you know what else the state Constitution says? That all legislation, even that raising taxes or eliminating tax breaks, requires only a simple majority to pass. The Washington Supreme Court has never approved I-960’s super-majority requirements, rather, all previous challenges to these provisions have been rejected due to lack of standing. And again, unlike in California, Washington citizens cannot amend the Constitution via initiative.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that an initiative should remain inviolable but the Constitution should not.
Or I guess, if you’re the Seattle Times ed board, I suppose you think you can.
The State Constitution also says that a bill, even a bill to raise taxes, becomes law when approved by a simple majority of each house of the Legislature and approved by the Governor.
Eyman’s I-960 attempts to amend this constitutional provision, but the constitution grants no authority to amend it via the initiative process. Only the Legislature can put a constitutional amendment on the ballot (by two-thirds vote of each house).
Seems pretty clear that the Legislature can ignore I-960 any time it wants, as a legal issue, but they do have to pay attention to the political issues of circumventing an obviously unconstitutional measure.
@1: It’s not simply a legal issue as long as Brad Owen is Lt. Governor.
And the legislature should at least amend the part of 960 that applies the 2/3rds vote requirement to repeal of special interest tax breaks. There’s at least 15 Billion potentially available. We only need 2.6 billion.
BTW: I spoke with Hans Dunshee last week. He said that Ross Hunter was leading the leg’s effort to modify / overturn 960 and the list of low hanging fruit (egregious tax breaks) to go after. Suggestions to him would appear to be useful.
The Seattle Times editorial page has always been excellent – for my parrots to poop on!
We [the American colonists fighting in the War of Independence] have shed our blood in the glorious cause in which we are engaged; we are ready to shed the last drop in its defense. Nothing is above our courage, except only (with shame I speak it) the courage to TAX ourselves.
–James Madison, 1782
lets tax everyone at 100%……lets send all our money to the state….they obvioulsy know how to use it better than we do…
(barf)
6 L
or better yet, we can use a meme about sending all our money to the state as a weak and lame straw man to avoid discussing real issues or proposing real policies.
How would YOU come up with $2.6 billion, Leb?
I-960 passed with something like a 51% yes vote. I would suggest that any initiative that would mandate a super-majority should have to pass by same said super-majority.
8 M
And in my opinion, even that doesn’t matter a bit. It’s been two years, the legislature can change it if they want, and that’s the law of the state.
Two years ago we were only one month into the current recesion, and we didn’t know how bad things would get. Well, they’re really, really bad. And if things were better in our state, and if more people in our state had stable jobs, the budget outlook would be considerably different.
My proposal is a temporary graduated income tax with a generous deuctible earmarked for job creation.
Isn’t the State Constitution “just a goddamned piece of paper” or just “a scrap of paper”? I mean if you believe written obligations are “in the eye of the beholder”, you are in good company: Kaiser Wilhelm, John McCloy, George Bush, Hitler, and many businessmen who at other times spout off sanctimoniously about the ‘sanctity of contract’.
@6: “lets tax everyone at 100%……lets send all our money to the state….they obvioulsy know how to use it better than we do…”
Might not be a bad idea. After all it wasn’t the state that invested heavily in fly by night dot.coms or plunged like a drunken sailor into overpriced and overleveraged real estate deals; the state doesn’t hawk cheap shit on the TV for $9.99 and ‘wait! there’s more! crackpot claims; the state didn’t overbuild our fiber optic network back in the 90’s; it wasn’t the state who created Madoff’s ponzi scheme…..
…and can you possibly imagine the Homestead Law if all federal lands had been privatized in 1865? I can’t either.
So you might be onto a good idea. I urge you to explore it further.
re 6: …and, taking the Laffler Curve into account, the best way to collect the maximum in taxes would be to not collect any.
@12: Great line — and so true AND false at the same time.
Why should 33.01% of the people be able to defund schools, courts, and prisons if 66.99% of the people think those things are important enough to pay for?
In this state, you don’t even need a 1/3rd plurality to suspend payment of taxes. You can do it yourself by not buying goods subject to sales tax. And, in fact, that’s just what Washingtonians have done. In the last couple of years, they’ve given themselves billions of dollars of tax cuts. It doesn’t require legislation to do that.
Of course, when you leave it up to the people, you get anomolies like the election a few years ago where the people, God bless ’em, passed initiatives raising teacher pay and reducing class sizes, and on the same ballot defeated the taxes to pay for these initiatives. The masses are asses.
A core element of the American psyche is wanting something for nothing. Detroit figured out 100 years ago the average American car buyer will gladly pay $2,500 extra to get a $2,000 rebate. I repeat, the masses are asses.
@4 The practical uses of newspapers have been the saving grace of editors since time immemorial.
@6 What an absurd and useless comment. No one has ever proposed that. Even the most grasping medieval dukes never took that much.
The reality is that state and local governments take about 8% to 10% of our national income to pay for everything from schools and roads to cops and firefighters.
That’s what brainless nincompoops like you are really bitching about, and your comments absolutely should be evaluated in that context.
12, 13 — If you plot tax rates and revenues on a graph, you get a more or less bell-shaped curve. There is a point on the curve at which raising rates reduces revenue. At the extreme ends of the curve, a 0% tax rate produces no revenue and a 100% rate also produces no revenue. Every other point on the tax rate curve either produces more revenue or less, depending on which side of the zero-point it’s on.
I just want to remind everyone that this session of the legislature will be lowering, not raising, taxes. Washingtonians have given themselves billions of dollars in tax cuts by cutting their spending on taxed consumer goods. The legislature will, at most, recapture a small portion of those tax cuts by raising tax rates for so-called “sin taxes” and perhaps even the sales tax. But even if some nominal tax rates are raised, state taxpayers still will pocket a large overall tax cut, because these rate increases won’t come close to recapturing all the revenue losses.
Goebbles Rabbit, you continue to amaze me with your assinine posts…you really are nutty old fool – how in the hell did you make it this long.
lets cut items like state tuition and free healthcare for illegals before raising my taxes.
If the illegals dont like it, then they can go the fuck back to where they came from.
I doubt you even know whether illegals are eligible for state tuition or free healthcare in this state. People like you always pop off without doing any research or knowing any facts. However, I would venture that most of the illegals in Washington are working hard at jobs like picking fruit and slaughtering beef cattle, and they pay the same taxes you do at gas pumps and convenience stores, so it seems to me they’ve earned it as much as you have. Take a break, dude — you don’t have to be an asshole every day of your life. Even assholes are entitled to vacations.
Because illegals work for low wages, people like Max get to pay less prices for apples and hamburgers. But they bitch like hell if some brown-skinned kid gets a flu shot at a community clinic. Being assholes must be fun for them, because there’s no other explanation.
I’m confused. What does it take to get standing before the courts? Why hasn’t anyone challenged it in court?
I’m confused. What does it take to get standing before the courts? Why hasn’t anyone challenged it in court?
@24….I dont mind paying more for those items..in the end it would save us money, not cost more.
25, 26: A full explanation of what constitutes “standing” in court is well beyond the capabilities of a post on this board. It arises from the jurisdictional limits of the Supreme Court in the U.S. Constitution to “cases and controversies” which come before it. The same principles, however, apply in state courts and was known in the common law.
In short, the courts are generally prohibited from deciding “hypothetical” cases, or those in which the participants are not a “real party in interest”. This makes sense, if you think about it, because if it were otherwise, people could rig up a case with fake parties and a hypothetical set of facts which was predetermined to result in a specific decision which, under stare decisus, would be binding among everyone else on the same issue.
Most of the time, it’s easy to determine who has standing to file a lawsuit. But the hard cases involve spending of tax money and environmental laws.
The court has been reluctant to find that a taxpayer has standing to challenge any legislation which spends tax money, because the class of potential “victims” is just too broad.
Environmental issues are even harder – at one point in the 1950’s & early 1960’s just about every environmental lawsuit was being dismissed for lack of standing, prompting one justice to ponder whether trees should be determined to have standing. But environmental legislation beginning in the early 1970’s allowed “interested parties” to file lawsuits under specific conditions – in effect, becoming “private attorney generals” authorized to enforce the laws.
22 said:
(Heavy Sarcasim Key ON)
Sure, lets get rid of health care for illigals. Make sure they have to pay the highest un-insured prices possible, in cash, and in advance! Because as we all know, germs check out the citizenship papers of each person before they infect them, and any epidemics among illegals couldn’t IN ANY WAY cross over to the rest of the population. It’s like them thar’ Force Shields in Star Trek and such, surrounding each citizen!
(Heavy Sarcasim Key now OFF)
there is an old saying in Olympia among those who actually know how the place works, or doesn’t, “consistency is operational requirement of the small minded.”