Washington Supreme Court

brother that's right yeah

um you know i want to talk about faith here because my wife demonstrated faith to me on thursday night brother and let me tell you how uh the washington supreme court overturned the people's initiative to stop the natural gas ban in washington state on thursday and that's where i was kind of lamenting yes and laurie looked at me and said we can still fight i just converted i just converted my whole house to gas brother my range i got a gas fireplace i'm like we better sell this place quick and so then i did a little research and and she's right i mean this is a this is a long-term democrat strategy right to to ban all uh what they call fossil fuels they're not fossil fuels they're just naturally occurring stuff in the earth there's plenty

clean burning energy as well oh my gosh heavily available and yet they want to restrict it to force you back on electric or they're trying

all kind of stuff here in washington state and that's why i think that as washington state awakens and i believe in miracles brother and i believe that that we can do this but this is also along the line of this permit to buy a firearm.

This type of omnibus legislation happens frequently in government at all different levels.

Now, the Washington Supreme Court described the single subject rule as a safeguard against exactly that kind of practice as well as a way of preventing unrelated provisions from being hidden inside much larger pieces of legislation.

So this brings us to Initiative 2066.

The initiative was framed broadly around energy choice and natural gas access, but underneath that umbrella were provisions governing utilities, local air quality regulations, building codes, local government authority, and provisions of the Washington Decarbonization Act.

Initiative 2066 actually contained a severability clause.

That means that if one provision of the law is declared unconstitutional, the remainder can survive.

But the Washington Supreme Court refused to do that in this case.

The judges concluded that they could not know which parts voters would have approved and which ones they wouldn't have, so they chose to throw the whole thing out.

Unless we see another construction boom like we did in the 2010s, the budget picture is not likely to see the same level of growth for a long time, if frankly ever, because an Amazon doesn't come along every couple years to... spur the kind of growth that we have seen in the city.

The city could consider an income tax if the Washington Supreme Court says it's okay, but the reality is there's a lot to do as far as, again, buildings, the Seattle Center, libraries, animal shelters, without a particularly clear path to get there.

And so for me, that leaves me with kind of a hazy view of what Seattle is going to do with what some city officials have estimated is about $6 billion in maintenance needs.

But that does kind of put into picture exactly the scope of what the city is looking at here.

This was from last week.

The Washington Supreme Court ruled that an initiative which was intended to give to guarantee continued use of natural gas in Washington state is unconstitutional.

The ruling was six to three.

We'll get into kind of the reasons for their ruling here.