good piece. the caucus tension pits urban liberals (from safe districts)wanting more spending and more revenue, versus more spending cuts and fewer new dollars.

BTW, lt gov can't vote on final passage, so ya need a "constitutional" majority of 25 on final passage in the Senate.

For what it is worth, though the social services advocates/employees caucus with the remainder of the bureaucrats the hard fact for the legislature is to trade off between those two interests, as well as the closing of tax loopholes.

I like how our representatives in Olympia are proposing a "temporary" increase in the sales tax to help cover the state's expenses--while at the same time extending the stadium tax on hotels and restaurants that was originally billed as "temporary." Now that the stadium costs have been paid, one would expect that this so-called "temporary" tax would be retired. But no, that's not how the people's representatives in Olympia see things. For them, "temporary tax" is an oxymoron. So how can we believe them when they say that their proposed sales tax increase will be "temporary"?

Thanks Austin. A look at the internal political dynamics of the caucuses is really refreshing. Since Ammons took to the bureaucrat's life, we're relying on folks that seem more concerned about meeting word quotas and deadlines than providing any insight into the politics of the place. Your efforts to cover the what and whys of individuals within the process supplies us with some valuable insight, and your efforts are appreciated.

Mr. Ammons, thanks for the clarification on "final passage" rules. Any chance we can get you to write a piece on how the Olympia press corps/White House crowd turned into Gov's Office lap dogs?

Apparently Ammons didn't pay close attention. Geoff Simpson is not an "urban liberals (from safe districts)". In fact, I am a fiscal conservative from the same swing, suburban district that Claudia Kauffman is from. Government should first enact efficiency measures and cut the fat from government where it exists, but we have already done that. In fact, we've cut far deeper than efficiency and fat allow for and ventured into making cuts that endanger public safety, our elderly and vulnerable, the future of our children and our economic viability as a state. Further cuts would irresponsibly cause further harm. Tough times call for leaders that are more interested in providing good government than in protecting themselves politically.

Excellent reporting and useful analysis -- actually the best I've seen on this topic -- save for one all-important point: the Democrats' biggest blunder in 1994 was not on taxation; it was their attempt to impose New York City-type forcible disarmament on the entire state.

Despite methodical suppression of this story by mainstream media, the electorate learned of it by newsletter and word-of-mouth. The Democratic effort was correctly recognized as not just a huge expansion of the prohibitions against legal firearms ownership but the imposition of mandatory pacifism and thus compulsory victimhood.

Especially infuriating was the Democrats' ultra-sneaky manipulation of legislative procedure to enact -- literally in the closing minutes of the 1994 session – lifetime prohibition of firearms ownership by any past, present or future participant in any outpatient mental-health program of more than two weeks duration.

Hiding behind deceptive language and parliamentary sleight-of-hand, the Democrats duplicated the New York City law that says if you see a shrink even once, you lose your Second Amendment rights forever. (The only exceptions to the NYC law are for psychiatric evaluations required as conditions of employment.)

Following the Big Apple's example, Washington state's Democratic legislators decreed that nearly all U.S. military veterans and even people in grief counseling or therapeutic self-improvement are "prohibited persons" for life – forever stripped of their right to firearms ownership and therefore, effectively, of their right to self defense.

Both here and in NYC, the prohibitions evolved from the statistical probability -- first calculated in the 1980s by federal sociologists -- that at least 50 percent of the U.S. citizenry will receive mental health treatment at some point in their passage through what has long been clinically recognized as the most psychologically destructive socioeconomic culture in the industrial world.

Among U.S. vets the get-treatment number approaches 95 percent.

From the perspective of the mandatory pacifists and the other fanatical hoplophobes, the measure was intelligently tyrannical math: add the outpatient gun ban to the longstanding prohibition against firearms ownership by people adjudicated incompetent or insane, and you had forcibly disarmed all but a tiny minority of veterans and at least 60 percent of the overall civilian population.

But in Washington state, which has one of the highest percentages of firearms owners and concealed carry permit holders in the nation, it was political suicide.

Indeed it gave birth to an oft-repeated electoral truism that lingers to this day, especially in blue-collar and rural districts: “Ain't a damn bit of difference in the parties any more – don't matter if you vote Democrat or Republican, working people get screwed either way – but at least the Republicans let us keep our guns.”

Hence the GOP landslide in the 1994 fall elections.

Never mind that the Evergreen State's version of the Big Apple's go-to-therapy/lose-your-gun-rights-forever measure -- part of the so-called Youth Violence Act -- had already been item-vetoed by Gov. Mike Lowry.

***

Lowry's veto and its surrounding circumstances are themselves revealing.

Was it a response to irresistible pressure by the Second Amendment Community, the so-called “gun lobby”?

Was it due to the protective power of the American Civil Liberties Union in mental-health controversies?

Nope; neither.

Though normally a leader in the fight against the odium U.S. society routinely affixes to all things “mental,” the ACLU refused to protest the measure despite at least one formal plea-for-action from its membership. The National Rifle Association, its local affiliates and all its kindred organizations were also silent.

Why?

Because civil libertarians and Second Amendment defenders alike were terrified to submission by the anti-gunners' malicious threat to slander them as advocates of “guns for crazies.”

But the organizations that represent mental health professionals and veterans refused to be intimidated.

Mental health pros argued – correctly -- that the ban criminalized mental health treatment, criminalized even the mildest forms of mental problems, and re-criminalized mental illness in general.

Veterans argued -- also correctly -- that the measure was a classic example of how the draft-exempt Democratic elite were now making laws to codify what they had formerly expressed by flinging bags of human waste at Vietnam returnees: their undying hatred and contempt for men and women who honorably served the nation.

Lowry responded by setting aside his strongly anti-gun personal values and courageously applying the item veto. This infuriated Lowry's fellow Democrats – so much so there remains a strong suspicion the sexual harassment charges that subsequently demolished Lowry's political career were actually the party's vengeance for his decision to overrule its gun ban.

But even Lowry's bravery could not undo the damage already done. November 1994's outraged voters obliterated a 65-33 Democratic majority in the House and gave it to the Republicans by a nearly mirror-image 62-36. The same electoral anger slashed the Democratic majority in the Senate to a single seat (25-24), then two years later gave the GOP a majority there also, 26-23.

Finally -- as if to underscore their support for the Second Amendment and their hostility to those who would nullify its guarantees -- in 1997 the state's voters rejected the Democrats' notoriously anti-gun Initiative 676 by a landslide 71 percent.

Thank you, Loren Bliss, for defending the right of the mentally ill to own and use firearms. The authors of the Second Amendment would be proud indeed.

I am always of two minds when the ignorance, terror and just plain vicious bigotry that define Moron Nation's attitude toward mental-health issues surfaces in some public forum.

My sociological-journalist intellect revels in the triumph of disclosure – rather as when (during the 1960s when I was involved with the Civil Rights Movement in Tennessee), some “good Christian man” was goaded into admission he was the Klavern Klexter or perhaps even the Kleagle of the local Ku Klux Klan.

But my humanitarian heart is invariably appalled beyond words.

That said, to be in self-improvement therapy or grief counseling does not define us as “mentally ill.”

Neither does consultation with mental health professionals in the wake of victimization by rapists, other criminals, abusive parents, violently dysfunctional families, schoolyard bullies, life-altering injury, terminal illness, or the miscellany of disasters man-made and natural – fires, transport accidents, floods, storms, chemical leaks, nuclear meltdowns – that increasingly afflict us on our dying planet.

The same applies to the horrors that twist the minds of military veterans – especially, in the case of the United States, the atrocities committed in the name of capitalist imperialism. To be profoundly wrenched by war is not synonymous with being “mentally ill.”

Indeed to recognize the need for therapy in the wake of any such episode is perhaps ultimate proof of sanity.

Apparently though R on Beacon Hill disagrees.

Apparently R wants to live in a realm where all contacts with mental health professionals have to be reported to the police forthwith. (With the employment exception noted above, this is the law in New York City.)

Apparently too R embraces the terrified bigotry institutionalized by lawmakers in NYC, a few other notoriously anti-gun realms (and here too in Washington state but for Gov. Mike Lowry's courageous and probably career-destroying veto): that anytime we are troubled by a condition in which the term “mental” is used or even implied – never mind what the clinical truth might be -- we are to be redefined as subhuman and stripped of our Constitutional rights.

Thank you, R, for so perfectly demonstrating the hideous truth of what I described as “the odium U.S. society routinely affixes to all things 'mental.'”

Geoff, point taken. But the generalization is also true that the majority caucuses in the Senate and House are divided on the level of new revenue, and that those from urban Washington, representing a more liberal electorate, are more inclined to a heavier mix of taxes. Other than Senator Sheldon, I'm not aware of any hell-no Democratic reaction to much, if any, new revenue. It will be interesting to see what Gregoire proposes, and how much. And I would think the Legislature will send her a somewhat larger revenue package than she proposes, based on past indicators. Anyway, my thoughts are with all of the legislators. They're getting whacked from all sides and won't make anyone happy. The next question will be the attitude of the voters in November.