Local professional Citizen’s Initiative Filer, Media Whore and all around goofball, Tim Eyman, likes to put tax cutting or limiting Initiatives on the ballot. During the early part of his career, he was quite successful in getting them passed, though not as successful at having them meet later court challenges or getting the state to listen to items passed by the voters Usually, the local, county and state governments always found their way around his authored and voter approved Initiatives, much to the taxpayers disdain.
He’s at it again with I-960, which would make it state law that all tax increases would need a successful 2/3 Supermajority vote.
The local leftist Moonbats, who already think that he is a big meanie as it is, are going nuts with fright. They’ve gotten together with their socialist buddies at the local SEIU and filed suit in King County Superior Court declaring it “unconstitutional”. They want the court to order the Washington Secretary of State to NOT spend a penny to put it on the ballot.
Their perspective is that if they are going to fund their leftwing hackery and pet projects to force Joe and Jane Average onto mass transit and out of their cars, strip them of their property rights and stuff socialized medicine down their throats, they are going to need supply our betters in government with as much money as they can get their grubby little hands on.
And they even say that, though not so bluntly. At any time when any of Eyman’s previous Initiatives to limit the tax for automobile tabs to $30, if a local leftist worth his salt in in on the discussion, they will tell you that doing so hurt the amount of money the state was able to take in, which limited road maintenance and construction and, worst of all, lowered the amount of cash to go to mass transit.
Did it do those things? No.
No one can show where the state was unable to keep up on maintenance and with their planned road building projects. The state officials had a grand time saying that the Initiatives hurt their efforts and works, but they can’t show it anywhere on paper. Nonetheless, the meme took off and is repeated at almost every turn when Eyeman’s doings are discussed.
This one has the leftists so scared that they aren’t even willing to let the people vote on it. It may be unconstitutional, I’m not a legal scholar, so I don’t know. But I don’t care. Let the people show their feeling on this and let the courts strike it down in the future.
And let the public servants in the state capital listen to the people for once. Maybe they’ll get the drift that we’re taxed out?
Had a similar item here in OK a few years back on tax increases. People started a petition to put it on the ballot, and the legislators, one and all, screamed bloody murder. “We won’t be able to run the state! Everything will fall apart!”, etc.
Everybody was so pissed at the Legislature over crap they’d pulled, it passed by a BIG margin. Just about every year since some elected clown will bitch and moan about how “We can’t take care of this matter because of it”, and they’ve tried to find ways around it. But the state kept running.
Actually, there’s lots of issues I’d like to see put on a nation-wide ballot. A lot of these “culture war”-type issues, for one. So many organizations and politicians use them in their rhetoric to leech cash from us, and they divide us Americans from each other. I think a national referendum on many of them could finally put some of them to rest.
That and in our representitive democracy, our representitives don’t always represent us correctly (case in point, Bush/Kennedy’s new amnesty). Having the people vote on the issue would have us represented better.
Pingback: Random Nuclear Strikes » Citizen’s Choice