By Donna Gordon Blankinship
and Rachel La Corte
The Associated Press
OLYMPIA —
The state Supreme Court has struck down a requirement for a two-thirds majority vote in the Legislature to pass a tax increase.
A divided high court ruled 6-3 Thursday that an initiative requiring a two-thirds vote was in conflict with the state Constitution and that lawmakers and the people of Washington would need to pass a constitutional amendment to change from a simple majority to a supermajority.
A coalition of lawmakers and education groups sued the state over the issue, and a King County judge decided last spring that the state constitution requires only a simple majority to pass tax proposals.
The Supreme Court agreed to expedite its consideration.
“This ruling is a huge win for kids and schools,” said Chris Korsmo, CEO of the League of Education Voters, one of the lead plaintiffs.
“Washington schools need to be fully funded in order to ensure that all kids reach their potential.
“This ruling, combined with the recent McCleary decision, will help ensure that our kids have all the resources they need to get an excellent education.”
Most people agree the state needs about $4 billion to fulfill its constitutional promise to fully pay for basic education by 2018.
Gov. Jay Inslee said the court had done the right thing.
“The supermajority requirement gave a legislative minority the power to squelch ideas even when those ideas had majority support. That is inconsistent with our fundamental form of representative democracy,” Inslee said in a statement.
State Sen. Pam Roach, R-Auburn, said the court had opened the floodgates of taxation with its ruling.
Amendment proposed
The chairwoman of the Senate Governmental Operations Committee has already proposed a constitutional amendment to make the two-thirds majority permanent.
“This is a seminal point in our history,” she said, noting that the people in every county have already shown their support for a two-thirds tax rule.
To pass a constitutional amendment, the Legislature must approve the measure by a two-thirds majority and then it goes to the people for a simple majority vote.
The two-thirds majority rule has been approved in a series of initiatives pushed by activist Tim Eyman. Voters most recently approved the supermajority rule last November.
In a statement reacting to the court decision, Eyman wrote that the voters were more enthusiastic about his most recent tax initiative than they were about the new governor.
He said he agreed with a dissent by Justice Jim Johnson that “democracy will carry the day,” and the voters will not be denied their rights.
Rep. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, said he is open to discussion about enshrining more tax limits into the Constitution — perhaps a limit to the sales tax if lawmakers considered an income tax.
But he and other Democrats opposed the idea of enshrining the two-thirds rule.
Democratic Sen. David Frockt said whatever decision lawmakers make on taxes, voters still have their say at the ballot through referendums and elections.
“We are accountable on those votes,” Frockt said.
Owens writes majority opinion
The majority opinion, written by Justice Susan Owens, a former district court judge in Forks, states that under a commonsense understanding, any bill receiving a simple majority vote will become law.
No language in the provision qualifies that requirement by stating a bill needs “at least a majority vote.”
They wrote that without the simple majority rule in the Constitution, the people or the Legislature could require particular bills to receive 90 percent approval rather than just a two-thirds approval, thus essentially ensuring that those types of bills would never pass.
“Such a result is antithetical to the notion of a functioning government and should be rejected as such,” the justices wrote.
Johnson dissents
Justice Charles Johnson, writes in a dissent, that “In its eagerness to embroil itself in the political arena, the majority abandons any semblance of judicial restraint to declare the process of legislative enactment constitutionally infirm.”
Johnson wrote that voters have repeatedly voted for the supermajority provision, and that the court has repeatedly been asked to weigh in in past years and had previously “rejected the invitation to engage in this political dispute, exercising the wisdom, restraint, and temperance not to step outside the court’s constitutional authority.”
“Evidently something has changed, though the majority does not tell us what, to cause it to abandon these limiting principles and chart a new course for the court to more actively engage in the political process,” he wrote.
“This change is both unwise and unprecedented.”
Justice Jim Johnson, writing in a separate dissent, wrote that the majority “ironically overrides our constitution and prior case law to enforce an invented policy concern: the fear that laws requiring a supermajority to raise taxes permit a “tyranny of the minority.”
He said that with its decision, the majority “is imposing their policy preference over that of the 1,575,655 voters who passed Initiative 1053 (I-1053) and the millions who qualified and passed similar tax protections.”
”I regretfully observe that this court has become the tyrannous minority it purports to guard against,” Johnson wrote.
