Mandate Is To Govern, Not To Be A Governess Anti-Meddling: Voters Wanted Less Government, Not More Intrusion

“The aim … of patriots was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community.”

- John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty”

“Cut the budgets, end the mandates, terminate the programs, close the agencies and tell government to climb down off our backs - now.”

- American voter, 1994 election

Both of those sentiments were carved on the hearts of Republicans who marched in triumph to their respective state and federal capitals this year.

The message at the polls had been unmistakable. Power had been snatched from the custodians of the New Deal and entrusted to those who would halt government’s rampage and bring the rogue under control.

But nowhere in their message did voters say, “Tell us how to live our private lives, how to structure our relationships. Make our personal decisions for us, please, and substitute your wisdom as lawmakers for ours as private citizens.”

Somehow, though, a core of Republican leaders in the GOPdominated Washington state House of Representatives has interpreted the 1994 election as a mandate to do just that.

Under consideration in that chamber is a meddlesome package of new mandates for consenting adults who want to marry or divorce or adopt children.

Why the expansive push? Are rights in peril? Do the weak need protection from the mighty? Or is it just that the House leaders, intoxicated on their new-found power, fancy themselves governesses as well as legislators - the very excess for which they once scolded their predecessors?

The only danger to individual rights here is that posed by the pending legislation and the self-righteousness behind it.

The proper role of a government that exalts liberty is to intrude in the people’s lives no more than necessary to safeguard the rights of all. Certainly it is not to dictate uni-think values as a national creed, no more than to impose a national dress code.

The boundary between the appropriate exercise of state power and unjustified meddling always will be disputed.

Given the voters’ recent and urgent demand for restraint, however, we would expect the victors from that election to be tightening the boundary rather than loosening it.

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The following fields overflowed: SUPCAT = COLUMN, EDITORIAL - From both sides CREDIT = Doug Floyd/For the editorial board