Three Dumb Ideas from Olympia

Writing on different topics is a good idea for a blogger, it helps keep the site fresh and interesting for the reader, so I like to follow a political post with perhaps a book review or a personal note, but sometimes our elected officials just keep doing dumb things that I feel compelled to expose. This month has been such a time.

      Dumb idea number one was highlighted in a post titled “Unfair to Felons?” The Washington State senate has passed a bill to restore the voting rights of felons before they have paid restitution to their victims. The supporters of the legislature tell us that it is unfair to deprive the felons of the right to vote and it is just too hard to keep track of which felons have paid restitution and fines and should, under current law, have their rights restored. As I asked in an update to that post, why should the state of Washington make felons whole before the felons have completed paying court ordered restitution to their victims and thereby made them whole?

      Dumb idea number two was titled, “Blind Eye to Sex Offenders.” As you all know the state is facing a nine billion dollar budget deficit that our legislature and governor created. One way our leaders want to fix their problem is by allowing some 12,000 sex offenders to have unsupervised release.

      We shouldn’t be releasing sex offenders at all, but the current law allows it. This new horrid legislation, SB 5288, comes a mere two months after a convicted sex offender killed a teenage girl in the Vancouver area. The fundamental purpose of government is the protection of the rights and property of citizens. By considering SB 5288 our elected officials have shown that they are not willing to meet even the minimum requirements of good government. I asked our elected officials in my earlier post, “What were you thinking?” I’m still waiting for an answer.

     Dumb idea number three makes me think that we really do need education reform. Our elected officials want to pass a bill, HB 2316, that makes it illegal for someone working for Boeing to “threaten any legislator...with the relocation of manufacturing jobs...based upon the outcome of any pending or proposed legislation.” The legislation doesn’t name Boeing, but that is the target.

How many of our elected officials passed high school civics? I’m just a blogger, but I think that saying, “if you do that I will leave,” is an exercise of free speech.

If the legislature attempted to enforce such a law I am sure that it would quickly be challenged. Then the taxpayers of Washington State would spend millions defending the law while it slowly wound through the courts but, hopefully, ultimately it would be declared unconstitutional.

Even if the law was enforced, Boeing could still move all the jobs out of the state, they just couldn’t say that to anyone in Olympia. Shouldn’t our elected officials want to know if Boeing was planning to move?

      These three bills should be allowed to die quietly in committee. Then our elected officials will have only spent our time and money writing dumb legislation, not enacting it. Perhaps afterward they can spend some time and effort working to fix the nine billion dollar budget deficit they created.

Comments

[James Pratt]

I agree most felons should not have the right to vote. But after they served their time that right should be returned. Interestingly criminal vote left of center, why do you think that is?