Shift’s Newsmaker Interview is with Republican Representative Eric Robertson of Sumner who previously served as an officer in the Washington State Patrol and was appointed U.S. Marshall for Western Washington by President George W. Bush. He previously served in the Washington State Legislature for two terms in the 1990s and returned to the House of Representatives in 2021.  He is the father of five and enjoys being with his nine grandchildren.

Representative Robertson is a legislative leader among those seeking to restore common sense to our state’s public safety policies after the Democrats passed their anti-police measures in 2021.  He is the co-sponsor of the bi-partisan HB 1363 which repeals the disastrous restrictions the Democrats imposed on police pursuits.  The representative discusses in his interview several bills aimed to make our communities safer. He also shares his thoughts on Republican sponsored legislation to financially support more educational options which will provide flexibility in meeting student needs. Representative Robertson also shares his thoughts on taxing cannabis products, providing tax relief to lower- and middle- income workers, and repealing the Democrats’ poorly developed Long Term Care tax/plan. (Click to read full Newsmaker Interview)

A Vancouver Columbian editorial encourages legislators to vote against Democrat Representative Tarra Simmons (Bremerton) latest attempt to make Washington State more comfortable for criminals, this time by paying them the state’s minimum wage (currently the highest in the country) while they are serving a prison sentence and receiving free room and meals.  It cost the state $115 per day (approximately $3,500 a month) to incarcerate a convicted criminal and Representative Simmons’ bill (HB 1024)  would add more to this cost.

Currently inmates make between $0.65 to $2.70 an hour for work they do inside the prison. The lower pay helps to reduce the cost to taxpayers for housing and feeding the prisoners.  The Columbian stated that Representative Simmons’ bill ignores the public demand for punishment of criminals and “as lawmakers consider the bill, they must act in the best interests of the community rather than showing inordinate concern for criminals.”  (Vancouver Columbian and Washington Legislature Bill Summary)

A new report from the Associated Press reveals that the state has no record of where 10,000 students, who were previously enrolled in the state’s public school system, are currently being educated.  The report claims that Washington State’s “missing student” numbers are the sixth highest in the nation.  The report also showed that most of the students who left public schools during the COVID pandemic were younger students (Kindergarten and 1^st grade) and this will impact public school enrollment for at least the next decade. (KIRO News)

It was interesting to see that some members of the liberal national media do not accept the Washington Democrats’ selfish contention that their state income tax on capital gains is somehow not a “state income tax.”  USA Today published a list of the seven states that do not have a state income tax and Washington State was not among them. This is because the national media also believes the Democrats’ “capital gains” tax is an unconstitutional state income tax.

We now wait to see if the nine liberal justices of the Washington State Supreme Court will follow a century of legal precedent and support the ruling of the Douglas County Superior Court and decide the Democrats’ income tax on capital gains is unconstitutional. (USA Today and The Center Square)

The leader of a non-profit homelessness organization blasts the King County Regional Homeless Authority (KCRHA) and its desire to massively increase its taxpayer funding while not being able to show success with all the money it has already received.  Andrea Suarez is the founder and executive director of the non-profit group We Heart Seattle.  The two year old group organizes clean-ups of public places and provides assistance to those seeking housing and drug/alcohol treatment.

Suarez strongly criticizes KCRHA’s recent demand for $25.4 billion (over five years) to spend on massively expanding the region’s homelessness bureaucracy. If one believes the county’s homeless population is 40,000 people, (which most experts agree is a high figure) then KCRHA is asking taxpayers to spend an unbelievable $637,500 per homeless person.

Suarez states, “If money was the solution, wouldn’t we have solved this 20 years ago?” She contends that KCRHA strategy to provide taxpayer housing first is the wrong approach.  Suarez believes that drug and alcohol rehabilitation and mental health treatment should come first.  She cites the success in Alberta, Canada where they have made chemical dependency treatment the top priority. She states that enforcing drug laws is imperative to getting people off the streets., “I’m saying arrest, stop the behavior, triage to treatment, mandate addiction treatment for all, and get people to a pathway of self-sufficiency so they can get a job and get a house.” (MyNorthwest)

The Bellevue School District has revealed what elementary schools they will close due to the large number of students who left public schools due to the poor education that was offered during the pandemic.  The district administrators announced at Thursday’s school board meeting that it is currently planning to close Ardmore, Eastgate, and Wilburton elementary schools starting next September.  More than 2,000 students (10%) left Bellevue’s public schools due to frustration with “distance-learning” which was imposed on students after Governor Inslee’s orders and the teachers union’s demands kept students out of class. (KUOW)

The battle on farmworker overtime pay is heating up as liberal labor unions ironically attempt to use racism as a reason for why there should not be reform of the Democrat’s 2021 legislation which has resulted in smaller paychecks for many farmworkers and threatens the existence of many small family farms.  Two years ago urban Democrats, with no experience in agriculture, caved into labor unions’ demands to pass legislation (SB 5172) to gradually reduce the number of hours an agricultural employee can work before they qualify for overtime pay (55 hours in 2022, 48 in 2023, and 40 in 2024).  These restrictions have forced farmers to cut the number of hours laborers worked (and hired more workers) during harvest to avoid paying higher overtime wages. This resulted in lower paychecks for many farmworkers.

Many agriculture workers are concerned that their paychecks will shrink even further has the overtime minimum hours decrease even further in the next two years.  They support a compromise bill (SB 5476) sponsored by Senator Curtis King (R-Yakima) which allow farmers to designate 12 weeks per year (most likely during planting and harvesting seasons) when the minimum hours would be set at 50.  This will allow farmworkers to receive the larger paychecks during harvest.

During a public hearing this week on Senator King’s bill, an attorney for the labor organization attempted to connect historic agriculture overtime practices with racism in the South.  Evidently the attorney failed to notice the same overtime practices also impacted white workers in the North.  And it is ironic that labor would invoke historic racism when the country’s labor movement grew out of White industrial workers attempting to block the entry of Black workers who came from the South and were willing to work for less wages.  (KING5 News, Washington Legislature Bill Summary, and Commentary)

Once again the Inslee Administration is failing those who suffer from mental health issues, this time it is especially hurting young people who need help overcoming issues they experienced due to being kept away from in-person instruction by the governor and teachers unions. The latest mental health blunder by the state government is that it is taking an incredible amount of time for the Department of Health to provide necessary licenses to sufficiently trained clinical psychologists.  So while thousands of youths are left untreated, license applicants claim they spend months, even years, pestering state employees to move their application through the process.

This is the latest failure of our state’s mental health system under Governor Inslee. The list of failures include the state’s largest mental health facility (Western State Hospital) being so poorly managed that the federal government was forced to decertify it (costing Washington State taxpayers $53 million), the state failing to perform court-ordered competency treatments for suspected criminals which has cost state taxpayers millions in court fines, and the state hiring a “counselor” (with an annual salary of $118,000) with 22 felony convictions, who is now the prime suspect in the theft of thousands of dollars of patients’ money.  Like the homeless issue, the liberals keep wasting millions and millions of taxpayer dollars on the state mental health programs, while the problem gets worse and more people are forced to suffer.  (Click to read full Shift article)

It is great having our friends at BabylonBee back on Twitter!

Do you like The Daily Briefing? Do you want to keep seeing coverage of issues which are important to you?

We continue to be the only news source in Washington to conduct regularly interviews with Washington State Legislators on the important issues being decided in Olympia.

Please consider making a contribution to ensure Shift continues to provide daily updates on the shenanigans of the liberal establishment.

Forward this to a friend.  It helps us grow our community and serve you better.

You can also follow SHIFTWA on social media by liking us on Facebook and following us on Twitter.

If you feel we missed something that should be covered, email us at [email protected].