Jay Inslee loves to blame Republicans for keeping him from making Washington State the kind of clean-energy paradise that he’d like to live in. Unfortunately, reality is rearing its ugly head again as the Inslee’s last potential legislative session approaches, and once again Democrats are the ones who can’t agree on how to approach their greatest menace, global warming.
Yesterday, in the annual Associated Press pre-session forum, Democrats spend their time attacking an initiative written for and supported by other Democrats. The Seattle blog Crosscut pointed out, “The skepticism over the a carbon-tax initiative, I-732, is coming from Democrats, not Republicans. At a legislative session with the press, the top two Democrats in the Legislature both expressed concerns about the possibility that Carbon Washington’s supposedly revenue-neutral measure would actually cost the state money.”
Of course, the irony isn’t just that Democrats like House Speaker Frank Chopp are suddenly concerned about fiscal accountability, but rather that they prefer a different approach – which takes a lot more in taxes from Washingtonians, and spreads it around among their special interest friends.
In the Democrats never-ending desire to raise energy costs on Washingtonians by implementing some kind of tax on carbon emissions scheme, Inslee and Chopp both support an as-yet unreleased initiative partially underwritten by California money-bags Tom Steyer. But, since that one hasn’t even been written, let alone having signatures to qualify it for submission to the legislature (like I-732), the Democrats are left to attack the one which is in front of them.
And, Republicans are more than happy to let them do just that. After all, if environmentalists are fighting with each other, they are doing less damage to the rest of us.
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