Olympia has been buzzing all week with rumors that Democrats are planning to surrender on half of the citizen initiatives waiting for their action and are planning to pass them this session rather than make voters pass them in November. Center Square writes that “Washington state Democrats have signaled a willingness to pass three initiatives to the Legislature scheduled for public hearings next week,” with banning future income taxes to be heard Tuesday, while sessions on the parents’ bill of rights and restoration of reasonable police pursuit laws are scheduled for Wednesday.

Voters from across the state kept up the pressure on the Democrats with a rally in Olympia Friday afternoon. Check our social media feeds to see coverage of the demand that the Legislature acts on all six of the initiatives that have been certified for action.

The Democrats continue to ignore the three initiatives currently taking the most money from taxpayers – the carbon tax, the income tax on capital gains, and the long-term health scheme. Read on for the prediction from State Senator/Democrat gubernatorial candidate Mark Mullett: “I expect all three initiatives that are having hearings to end up passing this session” here… Center Square, Let’s Go Washington Facebook.

House Republican Deputy Leader Mike Steele of the 12th Legislative District joins us for this week’s Newsmaker Interview. Rep. Steele delves into the notable achievements and disappointments of the ongoing 2024 legislative session. He highlights the bipartisan success in crafting the supplemental capital budget, emphasizing its crucial role in driving economic development across our state. He discusses the successful opposition to concerning bills, including those related to voting rights for incarcerated felons. Rep. Steele also provides insights into his legislation (House Bill 2307) to offer additional tax credits to Main Street businesses. Read more.

Another day, another promise made during those heady “Summer of Love” days is broken by another Democrat (and reality). That’s the key feature of this story from Axios Seattle: “King County won’t close its youth jail by next year, as County Executive Dow Constantine previously pledged during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.”

Back when all of the public that wasn’t protesting in the streets was locked in their homes, Executive Constantine decided that we no longer needed a youth jail because he was going to wish away crimes by youth. Instead, crime has soared thanks to liberal policies focused on protecting criminals’ rights, with the numbers showing that “Prosecutors filed 68 felony assault cases against juveniles in King County last year, up from 54 in 2019… Vehicle theft charges against minors more than doubled in the same time frame, from 70 cases in 2019 to 159 last year.”

You can read on to see that even liberal apologist King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion has figured out after decades in law enforcement that “(S)adly we have juveniles who commit serious violent crimes.”… Axios-Seattle.

Democrats in Olympia are very afraid of the citizen initiatives that have been submitted to the legislature, as demonstrated by the lack of any public hearings on the offerings so far (though a couple are scheduled next week). This dereliction of duty has come despite some media protests, such as the Seattle Times weighing in two weeks ago for the Democrats to at least have a debate about Initiative 2124, the effort to repeal the costly long-term care tax scheme.

Now, the Times is stepping up the argument, highlighting the Washington Policy Center’s voice in the debate. And that voice is clear: “It’s a good time for the Legislature to acknowledge the mistake that is WA Cares and repeal the 2019 law that created the program.”

For those unaware, the current scheme is intended to “just grow the number of paid caregivers advocated for by the Service Employees International Union,” which helps grow Democrat campaign contributions.  Read on to learn what will happen after the Democrats continue to do the SEIU’s dirty work against I-2124 here… Seattle Times, Seattle Times.

Who could have guessed – other than all the rational people screaming about it during Governor Jay Inslee’s 975 days of “emergency” rule – that our state government would waste millions of the dollars that it was demanding to deal with the COVID pandemic? That’s the lesson from the Crosscut investigation that the “state’s Department of Health confirmed it junked more than 14 million gowns, 5 million surgical masks, and 140,000 face shields as of July 2023 — supplies the agency paid about $1.5 million to acquire.”

Since the money for the trashed materials didn’t come from their own pockets, it doesn’t bother Democrats much – except for some experts who suggest that “expired surgical masks could still be utilized by janitors, garbage collectors or other non-medical settings where the mask does not need to be sterile, it just needs to block particulate matter” as an example. Read on to see other ways the bureaucrats just decided to throw money away rather than do something constructive… Crosscut.

Perhaps there is some light at the end of the current waste stream tunnel which is Seattle’s support for the region’s coordinator for the homelessness industrial complex. That’s the story from KOMO, as the “city of Seattle is taking back money from the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA), raising national questions about the future of the city’s support for the agency.”

This being Seattle, most elected officials were trying to be nice about the failures of the KCRHA. But at least new Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson was willing to say, “That’s taxpayer money. We need to make sure it’s being spent the way it should be, and for the dollars that are going to KCRHA, we better make damn sure that it’s being spent wisely.” Read on to see how unlikely that is here… KOMO.

Shift will leave with little comment this sad piece about retiring Congressman Derek Kilmer, from the (Tacoma) News Tribune, other than to note that the media always portray “progressives” as tolerant people, while these leftists prove time and again that true believers these days only tolerate opinions they agree with – and they prefer to shout down and shut down the rest.

A Democrat Congressman trying to give a speech about public civility, and a university president begging his student “activists” to be polite – how quaint… (Tacoma) News Tribune.

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