Following up on Dick Davis's discussion yesterday of the Senate's I-960 debate over a $10 million liquor tax increase, I note the AP's report that this debate lays the framework for the inevitable legal challenge to the initiative:
Senate Democrats have laid the groundwork for a lawsuit against a tax-limiting initiative, with the majority leader considering the unusual step of filing her own lawsuit in hopes of making it easier for lawmakers to raise taxes.
More on the lawsuit aspect:
"I believe the only way we can resolve this is in the courts," [Senate Majority Leader Lisa] Brown [D-Spokane] said after the vote. "The potential conflict between the constitution and the initiative is illustrated by what happened."
Brown later indicated that Senate Democrats would be the ones to file the lawsuit. The fact that Brown asked for a legal ruling on the Senate floor is a legal maneuver that could give her the proper standing to bring a lawsuit against the initiative.
Conventional wisdom holds that such a lawsuit is inevitable, but probably not this year because support or opposition to the lawsuit, and by extension I-960, would become a campaign issue. Statewide candidates in particular would face a variant of this question: "Do you support five members of the Supreme Court invalidating an initiative which 816,792 Washington voters approved last year, which reinstated (in this regard) a law that a virtually identical (**) margin of the people approved in 1993, and which has the effect of limiting tax increases?"
Difficult question.
(**) Interesting factoid: I-960, which at its heart recodifies I-601, passed by a 51.21% margin in 2007. Fourteen years earlier, a different set of voters approved I-601 by a 51.24% margin -- a virtually identical, and durable, margin of support for the policy.
