When Will Democrats Stand Up Against Violence?

Source:  ShiftWA.org

Democrat Governor Jay Inslee was afraid of a special session of the legislature, and now we know why.   Even before the regular session of the Washington State Legislature began this week, both Republican and Democrat legislators were pre-filing bills to remove Inslee’s dictatorial “emergency” powers that the governor mis-used during his failed one-man rule of the state since March.  Inslee feared any session of the legislature, even one controlled by his own party, because he knew the legislature would challenge his broken logic, overreaching rules, and inaccurate COVID dashboards by instead putting responsibility back into the hands of the elected representatives of the people of Washington. (Shift Article)

Why have Democrat politicians allowed without comment the violent actions by the liberal activists who control their party, and yet Republicans stood up against the violence committed by far-right criminals in the Capitol last week and continue to rebuke those among their supporters who advocate violent behavior to achieve their goals?  As Shift has reported many times during the past year, not one Democrat statewide elected official or one Democrat member of the state’s congressional delegation has condemned the violent actions of liberal activists who forcibly took over a portion of Seattle’s Capitol Hill last summer and conducted numerous violent attacks on businesses and police officers. In fact, the Democrats on the Seattle City Council rewarded the violence by breaking their campaign promises to increase police funding by instead caving into the activists’ budget demands to defund the police. Q13’s Brandi Kruse has recently criticized Washington State Democrat Chair Tina Podlodowski for remaining silent and not standing up for media members who were attacked by the violent mobs.

Meanwhile Republicans (including Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Congressman Dan Newhouse, House GOP Leader J.T. Wilcox, and State Republican Party Chair Caleb Heimlich) immediately condemned the violence perpetrated by a fringe group of Trump supporters in the nation’s capital and in Olympia.  Former Republican Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna has been critical of the President and has said, “Republicans who are not extremists need to step up and take the party back.”  McKenna has also stated that Republicans need to continue to “criticize threats of violence, the use of violence, to stand against it.”  In doing so, maybe Democrats can learn the importance of condemning violence by their activists instead of mindlessly caving into the rioters’ demands. (KUOW, Brandi Kruse Twitter, McMorris Rodgers Twitter, Newhouse Twitter, Wilcox Twitter, and Heimlich Twitter)

Governor Inslee gave his virtual “State of the State” speech on Wednesday – and it was instantly forgettable.  The governor failed to mention major issues that have impacted the state during the past year.  Not one mention in Inslee’s speech regarding the violence by Left-wing activists who forcibly took over a police precinct and six blocks of Seattle’s Capitol Hill (or the loss of life due to six shootings in CHAZ/CHOP).   Inslee failed to mention his administration being responsible for one of the largest scams in American history, when foreign criminals stole hundreds of millions of dollars due to incompetence at his Employment Security Department (or the resulting delay in providing unemployment benefits to tens of thousands of Washington workers that the governor’s “emergency orders” had thrown out of work).  Inslee also failed to mention the many failures of his administration in managing the state’s response to COVID-19.  From phony dials on an unscientific “dashboard” which provided little actual data, to dramatically failing to perform contact tracing (only notifying 6%, out of the promised 90%, of those who came in contact with someone infected with the virus), to state run hospitals and corrections centers failing to adhere to the state’s own health guidelines and being the source of many COVID-19 outbreaks, to Washington State being in the bottom five of states for distributing the vaccine now that we have it.  We can understand why the governor would choose to leave out of his speech all of these failures of his administration, yet he also failed to mention one of his key proposals for the 2021 legislative session – his unconstitutional income tax on capital gains. As we said, the speech was forgettable. (Seattle Times and Shift)

Everyone, but state Democrat lawmakers, knows the income tax on capital gains proposal is an income tax.  Besides all other 49 states and the IRS categorizing a capital gains tax as an income tax, now nonpartisan legislative analysts in our own state agree with that classification.  While Governor Inslee and legislative Democrats continue to insist their capital gains tax proposal is an excise tax, not an income tax (and thus not unconstitutional in Washington State), the nonpartisan legislative staff’s analysis of the proposal used the words “income tax” at least seven times in describing the bill.  If it quacks like an income tax and waddles like an income tax, it is an income tax. (Washington Policy Center)