1. The closest election of the year was certified after a machine recount on Friday—Republican Hans Zeiger beat incumbent state Democratic Rep. Dawn Morrell (D-25, Puyallup), the house Democratic caucus chair. Zeiger, 25, won the 25th district house seat by 30 votes, 24,925 to 24,895.
The news prompted outgoing liberal state Rep. Brendan Williams to post some choice Zeiger quotes on his Facebook page Friday night. (Zeiger has a controversial record of making inflammatory statements, which Zeiger dismisses as things he said and wrote when he was a teenager.)
Zeiger, an academic senior fellow at the conservative American Civil Rights Union (famous for fighting to allow the Boy Scouts to prohibit gay scout leaders), has since written two books, including 2005′s Get Off My Honor: The Assault on the Boy Scouts of America.
An alarmed Williams posted:
Rep.-elect Hans Zeiger: “[T]he public schools – when federally engineered to produce pawns of socialist control – never work”; “The ‘holy spirit’ is a Babel-god of progressivism”; “[W]e must be a people of strong character, and strong character is founded in the Christian faith”; “The significant difference between the… . . . Religious Left and . . . the Religious Right is that OUR God is real.”
The Democratic advantage in the state house has dropped to 56-42, compared to last session’s 61-37 majority.
2. Both Washington State US Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray voted on Saturday to extend tax breaks for 98 percent of Americans while ending the tax breaks for the wealthiest two percent of Americans—those families making over $250,000. The measure got 53 votes, not enough to overcome a Republican filibuster. The GOP maintains that reinstating the taxes on the wealthy will hurt small businesses.
According to a primer published in August in the Washington Post last summer, though: “Less than 2 percent of tax returns reporting small-business income are filed by taxpayers in the top two income brackets — individuals earning more than about $170,000 a year and families earning more than about $210,000 a year.”
The Democrats came back with a compromise proposal on Saturday—extend the tax breaks for everyone making up to $1 million—which Cantwell and Murray also supported. That proposal also failed with just 53 votes.
Sen. Cantwell—who was attacked in a GOP press release after Saturday’s vote for “toeing the line for her Democrat Party” and “joining her party’s political theatrics” by “voting to impose a massive tax hike on American job creators”—said, “I am deeply disappointed that my Republican colleagues were unwilling to put aside partisan differences to support struggling, everyday Americans.”
The Obama administration is now hammering out a compromise: They will give in on extending tax cuts for the wealthy (worth about $60 billion a year) if the GOP will support extending unemployment insurance, which they blocked last week.
Asked if she would back the Obama compromise, Cantwell’s office said there’s no compromise on the table yet, adding: “Where she is on taxes was stated pretty clearly this weekend with the two votes on making the middle class tax cuts permanent.”
3. As the state senate ways & means committee meets today to consider nearly $1 billion in budget cuts, mental health care workers—citing recent headlines such as the ax murder on Capitol Hill and the grandmother who shot and killed four of her family members—say they plan to release a study documenting the “crisis” that mental health care cuts would create.
Governor Gregoire already took $17.7 million out of the mental health budget on December 1st as part of an earlier round of across the board cuts, with millions more proposed—including $50 million in disability lifeline payments and eliminating the basic health plan for $33 million.
“The consequences impact all of us when the system falls apart,” Tamhas Clinton, a mental health care worker from Compass Health, said in a press release from the health care workers union, SEIU 1199, said this morning.
