Eli's got the headlines of the new Washington Poll—a lot of interesting data from one our state's more reliable pollsters—but the numbers that jump out at me concern public support for new taxes to help close our state's growing budget gap: a full 71 percent of respondents support some new taxes, with only 24 percent saying that the budget should be balanced with spending cuts alone. Over half of respondents support closing the budget gap equally, mostly, or entirely with new taxes.

Of course, supporting taxes in the abstract, and approving specific new taxes at the polls are two different things, but these results do give lie to the public fiction that voters are broadly opposed to new taxes, or that supporting new taxes would amount to some sort of political suicide. Likewise, all the bullshit about how tax hikes are impossible due to I-1053's unconstitutional two-thirds supermajority requirement is just that: Bullshit. Any substantive tax hike measure is going to come before voters as a referendum anyway, so legislators might as well just put it on the ballot as a referendum in the first place, which only requires simple majority. If there is popular support, all I-1053 can really succeed in doing is to delay implementation of the tax.

Alternatively, the Dems could pull a parliamentary maneuver in which a tax hike is passed by a simple majority, and the presiding officers in both the House and the Senate simply rule I-1053 unconstitutional and invalid, forcing the issue finally before the state Supreme Court in a way the justices can't weasel out of ruling. The Dems know this, but they either lack the balls, or enough real Democrats to pull it off.

If only our Democratic legislators were as bold and progressive as the voters that put them in the majority, or as responsible as the electorate as a whole, they'd stand with the majority of Washingtonians, instead of with The 24 Percent. Ah well.