This afternoon, AWB filed an amicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief in Brown v. Owen, the lawsuit by Senator Majority Leader Lisa Brown challenging the constitutionality of the provision of Initiative 601 that requires a supermajority vote of both houses of the Legislature to raise taxes. From the brief's intro:
AWB makes this short amicus submission to add an additional dimension to respondent’s separation of powers argument, contending that the petition raises essentially a political question that the court, as a matter of prudence and restraint, should decline to reach. Should the court reach the merits and grant the writ, it would in essence absolve a coordinate and co-equal branch of government from the difficult political and policy choices it must confront under RCW 43.135.035(1) by invalidating the statute under the same constitutional principle – majority rule – that the Legislature may itself use at any time (and has used in the past) to avoid the statute’s procedural requirements. The court should refrain from granting a single member of a single political caucus of a single chamber of the Legislature the extraordinary relief of striking down an enhanced procedural requirement the full Legislature has chosen for itself when the full Legislature could, by its own authority and through its own processes, loose the binds of that requirement at any time.
The rest can be read here. The Supreme Court takes up the case on September 9th.
(Cross-posted at WashACE.com)
