Our state Senate held hearings last week on proposals to ask Congress to (1) block troop movements in Iraq and (2) start an impeachment investigation against President Bush and Vice President Cheney.
Someone joked that the legislature must have solved the state’s education and transportation problems since it had time to deal with federal issues.
So, why did the state Senate’s committee on government operations and elections hold hearings on these “memorials” to Congress?
I asked Committee Chairwoman Darlene Fairley, D-Lake Forest Park.
She answered that the committee had little else to do since the deadline for non-financial bills had passed; so a hearing on the resolutions, which are dead for this session, gave citizens a chance to express their views. Otherwise the six senators at the hearing, who listened quietly as citizens vented their frustrations over Iraq, would have been sitting in their offices answering e-mails.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Patty Murray and Democratic U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee have been particularly critical of the request for an impeachment investigation, saying that talk of impeachment would end any bipartisan efforts to change the course of the Iraq war.
Fairley said that Murray’s and Inslee’s opposition to the impeachment request disappeared when they learned that the senate memorial wouldn’t pass.
In addition, the hearings gave Democrats a chance to let their constituents vent frustration over the war.
The continuing story of Washington’s primary election
The Washington State Grange had two choices after a federal court of appeals ruled against the top-two primary it had sponsored. One was to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case. The other was to seek legislation eliminating party affiliations from the ballot, in effect creating a non-partisan top-two system.
When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in its next term, the Grange stopped pushing the non-partisan primary in the Legislature. Grange officials say that, if the Supreme Court rules against the top-two primary, they’ll file an initiative petition for a non-partisan ballot.
In the meantime, attorneys for the Grange and the state Attorney General’s office will rely on language in the Supreme Court opinion seven years ago that struck down a California blanket primary and led to the lower-court decisions that struck down the Washington blanket primary.
The court said that, while the blanket primary violates the parties’ right to pick their nominees, a primary that qualifies two candidates for the general election, rather than pick party nominees, would be constitutional.
Since the Supreme Court won’t issue an opinion for at least a year, we’ll see the pick-a-party system for the few partisan positions in this year’s election.
Evan Smith is the Enterprise Forum editor. Send
comments to entopinion@heraldnet.com.
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