I was stunned by what I read yesterday as a once again reasonably (to this point, anyway) intelligent group of Republicans had taken control of the legislative agenda for this state by doing the exact opposite of what the opposition wanted.
Now?
Now it appears that their plan is to out-democrat the democrats.
The salient points of the information released yesterday include these:
1. They've seen the democrat's extortion of 10.5 cents per gallon in gas taxes and raised them a cent to 11.5 cents per gallon.
2. They failed to demand a referendum clause, which should be a standard feature of any tax increase generally, but PARTICULARLY the largest gas tax increase in our history... which is likely to be a subject of yet another effort to do the legislature's job and result in a hugely expensive effort to get the needed signatures to put this on the ballot.
3. It removes a critical element of political advantage on the right by obliterating the line between the formerly tax and spend democrats to the now tax and spend GOP. In fact, democrats find themselves in the position of pointing to GOP taxing excess... thus cratering GOP efforts to bring tax relief to the families and small businesses that need it.
The only up side here is that there's no mention of the CRC anywhere in this garbage pile, which brings us to this point:
What are our legislators here locally to do?
This is obviously being driven by the Seattle-centric members of the Majority Coalition Caucus (MCC) including Sen. Rodney Tom who has about as much chance of being re-elected at this point as he does of mastering levitation.
Do we demand our legislators vote against this and run the risk of having the King County legislators turn against them... which means they would then join with the democrats and ram the CRC down our throats?
With that possibility, do we demand that our legislators vote for this, being forced to spread the pain statewide as a cost to avoid the agony of the CRC being rammed down our throats?
Do we demand that we hold the Seattle-centric plan hostage to a referendum clause?
These are tough questions. I have no ready answers. But it appears to me that this group has played directly into Inslee's... and the democrat's hands, all under the bizarre and worthless guise of Inslee abandoning his ineffective support of cap and trade... which, since the MCC controls the senate, is a worthless position for him to take in the first place, and one he can immediately renege on having gotten what he wanted out of the MCC.
Idiots.
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