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News / Opinion / Columns

Westneat: Drought hits citizen initiatives

By Danny Westneat

Published: July 18, 2022, 6:01am

Maybe it’s the sidelining of Tim Eyman. Or malaise from the pandemic. Or more fallout from our hyperpolarized political times.

No one is quite sure why, but this fall will mark the third year in a row voters will find zero statewide citizens’ initiatives on their ballots. For this once insanely popular form of “direct democracy,” it’s the longest drought going back nearly a century, to the 1920s.

For the past three decades, through 2019, we averaged three issue initiatives on the ballot per year (either initiatives to the people or to the Legislature). There was only one year during those decades that had none.

The initiative was once a populist relief valve, so that hacked-off citizens could take their ideas around the stranglehold of the powerful and straight to the people. Later, the tool was itself hijacked by corporations and special interests, as well as twisted into a rent-seeking factory by mercenaries like Eyman.

Now it seems, the whole concept is momentarily defunct.

Personally I am OK with the break. It could also be that this is the calm before the storm — a big storm, if a new initiative-promoting gambit gets its way.

From Eyman’s ashes, two outfits have risen on the right. One is called Restore Washington, the other Let’s Go Washington. Their joint drive is bankrolled mostly by a Kirkland businessman named Brian Heywood. “I came here from the People’s Republic of California,” Heywood introduced himself to a conservative crowd recently at a Marysville church. “I’m an economic refugee. I came here to make money, and to be free.”

Unlike Eyman, Heywood isn’t trying to make bank off his initiatives — he’s already rich. He’s given more than $750,000 to GOP causes in the past five years, including $150,000 last year to try to repeal the state’s long-term care program (that also failed to get enough signatures).

But now Heywood is taking his make-money-and-be-free bravado and amping it all the way up to 11. In an environment where $3 million just failed to get a single measure on the ballot, his outfit, Let’s Go Washington, has started collecting signatures for 11 initiatives simultaneously.

These are GOP wish-list proposals, such as cutting gas and sales taxes, divvying up Electoral College votes by district rather than by state, and curbing Gov. Jay Inslee’s emergency powers.

The kicker is that these are initiatives to the Legislature. So if they get enough signatures by December, and then are approved by that body next year, they could pass directly into law. By a constitutional quirk, Inslee would have no opportunity to veto them.

“I think that’s pretty clever,” said Rep. J.T. Wilcox of Yelm, the Republican leader in the state House, when I asked him about this veto end-around. (When he got done chuckling, though, he allowed it likely wouldn’t end up being that simple. For starters, Republicans first have to win both the state House and Senate in this fall’s elections, which hasn’t happened in nearly three decades.)

So … initiatives are in a record drought, but also, here comes 11 of them? Yep, though it’s a longshot. And as payback for Inslee jamming through decisions on COVID without Republicans, now Republicans have concocted a plan to push through laws around him?

Doesn’t seem healthy, but strange things sometimes emerge out of political upheaval. Twenty-five years ago, nobody would have predicted Tim Eyman either.

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