Special Session Enters Week 3

As the session goes into its third week of overtime, there are reports of slight progress in breaking the sales tax impasse. Austin Jenkins writes at Crosscut that the Senate may be retreating from its insistence on a sales tax increase.

[Friday Senate Majority Leader LIsa] Brown ... offered the first hint that the Senate may blink first. She said she’s begun looking for $200 million in taxes that could replace the Senate’s proposed two-tenths-of-a-penny sales tax increase. What those alternative revenue sources might be, Brown isn’t yet saying.

In the Everett Herald, Gary Chandler, top lobbyist for the Association of Washington Business, reminds us that the longer this goes on, the riskier things become.

There wasn’t anything too bad or too good for business this year, but as Chandler told members of the Greater Marysville-Tulalip Chamber of Commerce, things are far from over yet. Lawmakers are in special session and still have to approve a budget. And they could basically deal with any other issue while they’re in Olympia.

“They may go back in and make changes in legislation to pick up a vote (on the budget),” said Chandler, a former legislator who owns a UPS store in Moses Lake.

For example, as we noted here, the employer gag rule may come back. The Kitsap Peninsula Business Journal has this.

Representative Bruce Chandler (R-Granger) has sent a letter to State Attorney General Rob McKenna asking for informal guidance on a proviso in the proposed 2010 supplemental operating budget [that he finds] is “eerily similar” to the Employer Gag Bill...

The attorney general’s office responded to Chandler that the proviso would likely “be preempted by federal labor law” and that the language has a “striking similarity between the proposed legislative language and the language in California statue invalidated in Brown vs. United States Chamber of Commerce.”

Pushing unconstitutional anti-business legislation seems like an utter waste of time ... but so does much of what's happened during this prolonged session. They need to get it right. And then they need to leave.