Legislature’s collapse: 3 strikes — They’re out!

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, July 25, 2001

They came, they argued, they failed.

The state Legislature shut down Wednesday in what must be one of the greatest collapses in Washington history. It is simply unacceptable that lawmakers could not cooperate enough to put together even the most skeletal solution to the state’s transportation problems.

For voters, the frustration over gridlock in the Legislature now matches — or exceeds — the frustration over highway gridlock. And the public has only the most limited options for expressing its anger. General elections for legislators don’t occur until November 2002. Locally, two special elections will take place for appointed members, Republican Rep. Joe Marine in the 21st District and Democratic Rep. Jean Berkey in the 38th District. But it’s too bad that other lawmakers won’t have to face voters this fall.

A good housecleaning is needed — particularly in the House of Representatives. To their credit, Republican and Democratic senators came together in bipartisan fashion. The leadership there, including Transportation Chair Mary Margaret Haugen, found ways to cooperate.

It’s too soon to say where all the mistakes were made. There will be plenty of fingerpointing, most of it deserved. It certainly appears that Republicans in the House were irresponsible, but we also wonder if Democratic leaders, and the governor, could not have found a way to at least get something — anything — approved by the Legislature. We will be particularly skeptical, though, of any broad attempts to blame Gov. Gary Locke, who generally appeared to offer helpful ideas. Unless the state constitution has been repealed, he is the governor. He can only make proposals, he can’t pass laws. He did his job.

Legislators did not do theirs. They couldn’t pass a transportation plan themselves. They couldn’t even pull themselves together to ask voters to decide about transportation taxes.

There was never any question that passing a transportation plan was the Legislature’s top priority. Perhaps that was less clear to Eastern Washington legislators. Certainly, their region deserves more sympathy than it usually gets from the rest of the state. But their inattention to transportation cannot be excused. In fact, Western Washington massively exports transportation dollars to the East. Sitting fat and happy with their transportation situation is appalling.

Of course, Eastern Washington politicians are hardly alone in their complacent inattention to the public’s needs. The whole political establishment has perfected the art of complacency that people have increasingly turned to the initiative process to demand change. This latest failure will only fuel the trend. It will give Tim Eyman more of his piercing questions — and sadly probably won’t encourage him or anyone else to put more effort into creating real solutions.

We’d love to encourage Gov. Locke to make lawmakers try again. But these people would probably just continue failing even if they were ordered to commute I-5 from Stanwood to Olympia until they came up with a solution. So it’s time to invoke the political Three Strikes law on legislators. The legislators are out of Olympia. Don’t bring them back.