Over the course of the past twenty-five years, right wing Republicans in Washington have been on a mission to sabotage the majority vote clause of our state’s Constitution. Through a series of statewide initiatives sponsored by Linda Smith and Tim Eyman, they’ve repeatedly attempted to grant themselves the power to block any bill that would raise revenue to fund essential public services.
Since its founding in February of 2002, NPI’s Permanent Defense has been fighting nonstop alongside leaders like Senators Reuven Carlyle and David Frockt to defeat these destructive initiatives and uphold Article II, Section 22 of our Constitution, which says that bills in Washington’s Legislature shall pass by a majority vote.
We’ve had a lot more success in the courts than in the court of public opinion. In 2013, the Washington Supreme Court finally struck down as unconstitutional the statutory requirement imposed by Smith’s I‑601 and Eyman’s I‑960/I‑1053/I‑1185 that any revenue bill receive a two-thirds vote in order to pass. The Court held that the words majority vote in Article II, Section 22 meant just that — a majority vote.
Two years later, Eyman responded to that decision by sponsoring I‑1366, which narrowly passed with the support of just 19% of Washington’s registered voters.
I‑1366 threatened to eliminate $8 billion in funding for schools and vital public services over six years if the Legislature did not pass an amendment sabotaging Article II, Section 22 by April 15th, 2016. Thankfully, I‑1366 was never implemented; it was struck down as unconstitutional in January, and that judgment was affirmed by a unanimous Supreme Court last month.
I‑1366 is now in Washington’s political graveyard, where it belongs. But the right wing is still bent on sabotaging our Constitution. Tim Eyman and his friends at the Washington Policy Center want to give right wing Republicans in the Legislature permanent veto power over any revenue bill.
Eyman and the Washington Policy Center claim that the people are on their side. They cite the the passage of Initiatives 601, 960, 1053, and 1185, along with polling they’ve commissioned, as evidence that the public wants to amend the Constitution to require that revenue bills pass with a two-thirds vote.
Effectively, that would mean that right wing Republicans would be dictating Washington’s fiscal policy no matter what — for when a two-thirds vote is required to do something, it puts just over one-third in control of the outcome.
This pictogram illustrates what I’m talking about (click to enlarge):
“Washington’s constitution makes it very clear the people are the sovereigns of the state and not subjects of the political class. The real question is whether lawmakers will finally represent the will of the people or instead continue to ignore the clear and consistent message from those they are supposed to represent,” opined the Washington Policy Center’s Jason Mercier last November.
Eyman and Mercier’s assertion that the public is with them has largely gone unchallenged for years. But no longer.
Today, we are delighted to share new research that shows that a large majority of Washington voters agree with us that a simple, fifty percent majority vote should decide the fate of all revenue bills in our state House and Senate.
We asked likely November 2016 voters in Washington the following question:
Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree or strongly disagree with the following statement: all revenue bills and budgets in the Washington State Legislature should be decided by a simple fifty percent majority vote?
679 likely voters in Washington State responded to our survey, which was in the field from June 14th-15th, 2016. All respondents participated via landline. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 3.8% at the 95% confidence level.
These were the answers we received to the question above:
- Agree: 59%
- 36% “strongly agree”
- 23% “somewhat agree”
- Disagree: 34%
- 17% “somewhat disagree”
- 17% “strongly disagree”
- 6% answered “not sure”
Nearly three-fifths of the voters we surveyed agreed that all revenue bills and budgets in the Washington State Legislature should be decided by a simple majority vote. Contrast these answers with the outcomes of Initiatives 601, 960, 1053, 1185, and the polling done by the other side. This important finding is a testament to the old adage the answers you get depend on the questions you ask.
How a question is framed to the public is hugely consequential. For years, the right wing has been asking voters, Do you think it should take a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to raise taxes? while also relentlessly promoting a two-thirds vote for taxes as a worthy idea and a “good government” reform.
Washington’s progressive movement has not responded effectively to this long-running campaign in the court of public opinion — or, in some cases, at all. We’ve either lost by a little or a lot depending on the effort we’ve put in.
In years where we have collectively bothered to try organizing proper NO campaigns, we’ve lost by close margins (as was the case in 1993 and 2007). When we’ve neglected to do the early work required to build a credible, meaningful NO campaign, we’ve suffered blowout losses (as was the case in 2010 and 2012).
We can be grateful that our courts have repeatedly stepped in to uphold our Constitution and safeguard our cherished tradition of majority rule.
But it’s time we started winning in the court of public opinion as well as the courts. We’ve been losing because we keep allowing the right wing to frame this debate on their terms. When we let them frame the questions, we lose. It is that simple.
It’s as though Eyman, Mercier, and Co. have been continually challenging us to a wager on a rigged coin flip (heads they win, tails we lose). And, like oblivious characters in a James Bond movie sitting across the card or backgammon table from the cheating villain, we keep playing their game — and losing.
No more.
We shouldn’t be continually having to explain why requiring a two-thirds vote to raise revenue is a bad idea. Instead, we should be explaining why requiring a majority vote for all legislation is a good idea.
We win when we go on offense. The last time we gave Washington voters the opportunity to vote for a simple majority threshold for revenue, the voters said yes. The year was 2007, and the Legislature at the time had Democratic supermajorities in both houses. Over vehement opposition from the likes of Republicans such as Ed Orcutt, Democrats succeeded in passing a constitutional amendment to lower the bar for passage of school levies from three-fifths to a simple majority.
In accordance with Article XXIII of the Constitution, it took a two-thirds vote to pass the amendment out of the Legislature and send it to the voters for consideration. (Because the Constitution is our plan of government, it requires minority consent to amend. That way, its carefully-crafted provisions, which balance majority rule and minority rights can’t be changed on a whim.)
The amendment, HJR 4204, appeared on the November 2007 ballot alongside I‑960, the first of Eyman’s I‑601 clones.
Remarkably, as I’ve previously noted here on the Cascadia Advocate, both measures passed. Given that the affirmative vote for each measure was a majority, it’s likely that there were at least some voters who voted yes on each.
What this shows us is that not only does the will of the voters change from election to election, but frequently the voters contradict themselves within the confines of the same election. Voters have passed Tim Eyman initiatives while at the same time electing leaders fiercely opposed to those very same initiatives, for example.
The research above suggests that if progressives qualified an initiative to the ballot to clean up the Revised Code of Washington and remove the now unenforceable language saying a two-thirds vote is required to pass any revenue bill, replacing it with language affirming that a simple fifty percent majority vote is sufficient to pass revenue bills like the Constitution says, that initiative would pass.
Tim Eyman and the Washington Policy Center tried very hard in the wake of the passage of I‑1366 to intimidate Democratic lawmakers into submission and get the amendment that they wanted. At the same time, we encouraged House and Democrats to hold firm and defend our Constitution. And they did.
In an amazing display of Democratic unity, not a single Democratic lawmaker capitulated to Eyman and the right wing. Not a single one.
Our Founders would be proud of them.
In the summer of 1889, when our Founders drafted our Constitution, they debated what the threshold for passage of legislation should be. They decided to require an absolute simple majority vote of each house to pass bills. That means greater than fifty percent — no more, and no less. Any other standard would mean that a few would be in control of the outcome, instead of the many.
The plan of government they gave us has stood the test of time. Sadly, the power-hungry right wing in our state wants to sabotage our Constitution for their own gain. They’ve done an awfully good job convincing the press that the people are on their side and want a two-thirds vote to determine the fate of revenue legislation. But we’ve just proved that’s not the case. Our new research shows that when you ask a very different question, you get a very different answer.
I want to point out that we could have put a leading question into our poll, like the Washington Policy Center did in theirs last autumn, to increase the likelihood of getting a favorable answer. We chose not to do this. We could have authored a question that referred to the Constitution, perhaps something like this:
Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree or strongly disagree with the following statement: the Washington State Legislature should abide by Article II, Section 22 of our state Constitution and pass all revenue bills and budgets with a simple fifty percent majority vote?
But we made no reference to the Constitution at all. Instead, we asked:
Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree or strongly disagree with the following statement: all revenue bills and budgets in the Washington State Legislature should be decided by a simple fifty percent majority vote?
And we found that 36% strongly agreed with this statement, while 23% somewhat agreed — for a total of 59%. We asked about both revenue bills and budgets because in a number of other states (California comes to mind), the right wing has succeeded in changing the rules to require a two-thirds vote to pass budgets.
We have no doubt that were the right wing to succeed in getting Washington’s Constitution changed to require a two-thirds vote to pass revenue bills, they would then move on to trying to impose a similar requirement for budgeting, in order to give themselves more power. They are always seeking more power for themselves. Even if they don’t have legislative majorities, they want to be calling the shots.
With this research in hand, we hereby serve notice to the right wing in Washington — Tim Eyman and the Washington Policy Center included — that we will no longer allow them to go unchallenged in claiming that voters support their efforts to sabotage Article II, Section 22 of our Constitution.
Majority rule is good for everybody. Whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, a Green, a Libertarian, or an independent, you should want to live in a state where the laws get made by the many, and not the few. Our legislative process is already deliberative in nature, and raising taxes is already difficult. We should stick with the plan of government our Founders gave us — which wisely balances majority rule with minority rights — and reject ill-conceived attempts to mess with it.
