Sometimes it seems like a Washington legislative session is little more than a series of deadlines that matter mainly to people inside the white domed building in Olympia – except when they tell us that something really important is happening! And today is one of those days (when non-finance bills must have passed both legislative bodies) where anxiety runs rampant as observers wait out the final week of this year’s session.

So, while we wait to see which bills clear their respective chambers by the 5 pm deadline – and which bills are otherwise announced as deceased – Shift is out with an early edition of the daily briefing. Enjoy.

GOP House Floor Leader Rep. Jacquelin Maycumber (7th LD) joined us for this week’s newsmaker interview. Rep. Maycumber highlighted successes and disappointments of the 2024 legislative session. She also expanded on her advocacy for property tax relief and her perspective on the challenges faced by law enforcement due to anti-police policies. Finally, she outlined her commitment to empowering parents in education and shared aspirations for her run for U.S. Congress in the 5th Congressional District. Read more.

Even Shift finds it hard to keep track of all the ways that Democrats will try reaching into your wallets when the legislature is in session.  Another reminder comes from KIRO radio, that Democrats are complaining there “isn’t enough money in the budget to finish the State Route 520 (SR 520) project so the Washington State Legislature may expand tolling to make up the difference.”

It seems that since toll increases on I-405 and Highway 167 have dominated the news recently, Olympia Democrats decided to just add another toll increase to the mix, hoping no one would really notice. Read on to see how many more people will have a chance to pay tolls as “now, tolling is only allowed on the floating section of SR 520. The bill would remove that limit and expand the ability to toll drivers from I-5 in Seattle to the end of the line in Redmond.”… KIRO radio.

Shift has kept you posted over the past few years at the wide-ranging attempts by Democrats to tinker with election laws to give them more advantages and commit more public money to turning out Democrat voters. The latest effort appears dead for this year, writes the Washington State Standard, as the liberal “push to let cities and towns in Washington conduct elections in even-numbered years rather than odd ones, as they do now, has come up short.”

One Democrat activist leading the charge to tilt the playing field to the Left promises that the bill to eliminate odd-year elections is “coming back next session,” despite what he admits was a lack of support this year “in the face of a lot of opposition.” Read on to see why even some Democrats opposed this partisan change here… Shift, Washington State Standard.

Political secrecy and Washington legislators go together like dark-money campaign contributions and liberal Democrats. That’s what is clear from the Seattle Times very lengthy story about the Democrats fighting desperately to illegally keep their public records secret from the public, reporting that “lately, legislators in the Democratic-majority House and Senate have been quietly asserting a new means of shielding some of their internal records from public view.”

You can read on to see how some confused but Democrat-friendly “judges have initially sided with their arguments in two separate lawsuits — allowing individual lawmakers to invoke the alleged privilege even as its legal justification remains in dispute.” … Seattle Times.

Washington lawmakers love to brag whenever they are first in the nation in passing some law that other states have wisely stayed away from. They can look to the south to see the consequences of the legislative “let’s be first” ideology, as now first-to-legalize drugs Oregon is preparing, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting, to pass a law “that would make possession of small amounts of drugs a crime in Oregon for the first time in three years.” Read on to see how this is “a dramatic change in how we have conducted business in the criminal justice system in our state” according to the bill author… Oregon Public Broadcasting.

The entire team at Shift was laughing so hard when we read Senator Marko Liias’ op-ed in the (Everett) Herald yesterday that we couldn’t even stop long enough to include it in the briefing.  But, in case you missed his comedy routine, we provide it for you today, including his gaslighting introduction that, after two decades in elective office representing a district with a major ferry terminal, he just realized that after “I took over as chair of the Senate Transportation Committee in 2022, I knew that we had to get serious about fixing our ferries.”

The fact that every other ferry rider in the state knew the system was broken long before Sen. Liias became Chairman Liias is ok, because now he knows we need to “shake up how we construct new vessels” because it turns out that paying off Democrat donors with special rules was not working, because “we also need new vessels as quickly as possible.”

You can laugh along with Sen. Liias’ journey to the real reason he wrote this op-ed – to attack the citizen Initiative 2117, which would eliminate his precious carbon tax. Of course, he repeats the same false claims (the “initiative, if passed by voters this November, would cut more than a billion dollars from our ferries”) that should earn him a fact check from the newspaper very soon…. (Everett) Herald.

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