Whether you are heading to the sold-out Roanoke conference or just enjoying a few more minutes of sun after the weekday, the entire team at Shift hopes you enjoy the first post-work starting time for the sunset as we continue keeping an eye on the legislature for you. And of course, we’ll keep watching to see if the Democrats will start to follow the state constitution and start acting on any of the six initiatives which have now been certified by a Democrat Secretary of State for legislative action (and a vote of the people this November since the Democrats are too afraid to talk about ay of them)… Let’s Go Washington.

The Secretary of State has finished certifying that all six of the Let’s Go Washington initiatives to the legislature have submitted the required 325,000 signatures – in fact, all six were submitted with well over 400,000 signatures. That success caused the team at Shift to recall our interview last fall with the person most responsible for putting these policies before the people – Brian Heywood – and to bring it back for you. Read more.

The virtuous circle that features Democrats taking care of the policy needs of their special interest campaign donors, in exchange for the campaign money that keeps them in power, is being tested in a big way. That’s the story from a ProPublica investigative piece, which found that the green dreams of Governor Jay Inslee and his big-money environmental donors are at odds with the tribal governments which have put millions into Democrat campaign coffers, given that since “early 2023, developers had proposed 50 new solar and 12 new wind projects across the state, according to government data. Most are in Eastern Washington where the ancestral lands of the Colville Tribes and the Yakama Nation are.”

The project highlighting this conflict now is a Badger Mountain solar project, which has been working through the regulatory process since 2021, and “(P)olitical pressure to advance the Badger Mountain project has been growing for years.” However, while the “Yakama Nation considers all of Badger Mountain to be a traditional cultural property, leaving the state in a “very uncomfortable situation where they had an unhappy, politically connected developer.”

Read on to see how one green lobbyist was even caught suggesting the state break the rules so he could show his foreign bosses that the deal was already greased to go through here… Pro Publica.

You know that the city of Seattle is heading in the wrong direction when they are leading the nation in a new policy that other localities smartly avoid. The latest example of civic suicide, covered by Axios Seattle, is the city’s new extreme green and job-killing building rules, as “Seattle is one of only nine cities and counties nationwide that have adopted these kinds of building performance standards.”

The climate posturing standards will mean “existing buildings over 20,000 square feet will have to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets starting in 2031 or face noncompliance fees of up to $10 per square foot.” Read on to see how arbitrary rules developed by bureaucrats who don’t know what they are doing will drive jobs from the city as the new rule “requires large buildings to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.”… Axios Seattle.

You would think that Democrat workers given the chance to work for important Democrat legislators would celebrate such opportunities.  Instead, the working conditions under their liberal bosses are so taxing that they need union protection to survive – at least according to Crosscut, as “staffers said workers have been sometimes forced out by long hours or low salaries.”

The privileged staff members have a variety of complaints, such as “if the elected official they work for loses reelection, that could mean they too are out of a job” and “a legislator not respecting boundaries and texting staff late at night.” Read on to understand why one legislator said “I’m not sure what we’re gaining here other than we’re gonna give more money to the unions” here… Crosscut.

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