Democrats Crucial To Gop Victories Legislators Say They Knew Voters Demanded Results

House Republicans set the agenda this legislative session, but Senate Democrats and Gov. Mike Lowry helped them clinch some of their biggest victories.

Democrats crossed party lines to enact a far-reaching property rights initiative, and Lowry backed down from his promise to kill any attempt to overturn health care reform.

House Speaker Clyde Ballard, R-East Wenatchee, chalked up the GOP victories to broad and bipartisan - support for the GOP Contract with Washington State.

“When we came in here people said we would never get anywhere, and if we did the Senate would block it,” Ballard said. “But we delivered nine out of 11 of our contract bills and we will be back for the other two.”

The GOP failed to pass welfare reform or stiffer penalties for juveniles who commit crimes with guns.

But at least part of the other bills on the GOP’s agenda passed, including tax cuts, tougher penalties for adult armed criminals, and regulatory reform.

“People are tired of rhetoric. They wanted results, and common sense solutions. And they got them,” said Senate Minority Leader Dan McDonald, R-Bellevue.

The property rights measure, Initiative 164, requires taxpayers to pay property owners, including businesses, for any drop in property values due to regulation.

The measure - bankrolled by building and timber interests - would have gone to the voters for approval. But the Senate’s vote made it law without even going to the governor for signature.

Opponents are gathering signatures to try to overturn the measure at the ballot box.

The 1993 landmark health care reform law also got overturned by the GOP’s momentum.

Lowry vowed to fight any rollback of key provisions of the act. But he wound up working with GOP negotiators to virtually repeal the law.

The governor said he was driven by political realities - including the 1994 election, which handed Republicans a commanding majority in the House - to remove key provisions of the bill.

The law still preserves insurance reforms enacted in 1993, and expands access to state-subsidized coverage for the poor. But Lowry helped the GOP check off nearly every item on its health care reform shopping list.

A cap on premium rates was repealed. So was a requirement that all employers pay some of the cost of their workers’ benefits. The state’s commitment to universal coverage was thrown out.

Critics attributed the GOP victories to heavy spending by businesses on their lobbyists.

Business and insurance interests were big winners this session: In addition to the property rights bill and health care reform rollback, lawmakers also passed more than $800 million in tax breaks, mainly for businesses.

They included a $173.1 million reduction in the business and occupation tax; a $148 million sales tax exemption on new plant and equipment for manufacturers; a $146 million property tax cut; and a more than $300 million reduction in the unemployment compensation tax rate.

The tax breaks have yet to stand the scrutiny of Lowry’s veto pen. The recent announcement of 5,000 layoffs at The Boeing Co.; job cuts at Hanford, and likely cuts in federal spending on state programs make the size of the tax give-back troubling, said Senate Majority Leader Marcus Gaspard, D-Puyallup.

But Ballard said Lowry would be “foolish” to veto any of the breaks.

Cutting taxes will be better for the state economy than any government program, argued House Majority Leader Dale Foreman, R-Wenatchee.

Foreman said Lowry has “viewed government as a candy store for his liberal friends to come in and redistribute the wealth.”

Lowry has until June 17 to veto the tax cuts.

Democrats often turned to Lowry’s veto pen and the one vote Democrat majority in the Senate this session to kill some of the GOP’s most revolutionary ideas.

Pressure from the Senate gained state employees an across-the-board, 4 percent pay raise, despite GOP efforts to hold the increases to $100 a month, with 7 percent hikes targeted to community college, corrections, and state patrol workers.

And despite GOP vows to change business as usual, state employees even held onto their free health care premiums.

GOP lawmakers had wanted to charge all state workers $32 a month toward the approximately $330 premium paid every month by taxpayers.

The deepest cuts and most fundamental changes proposed for K-12 and higher education never happened, including a move to tie district spending to school attendance, at a cost to districts of more than $120 million.

Gaspard said the Senate’s biggest victory was preserving education as a priority in the budget.

The GOP push on social issues was also largely snuffed, with help from Lowry and the Senate.

Bills to rewrite state abortion laws, eliminate all welfare aid to teenage mothers, limit welfare benefits to two years, end affirmative action and censor arts, writing, and music to protect kids from pornography all died or were vetoed.

The big question is how hard social conservatives will push those goals next year, now that the GOP’s Contract with Washington State, with its focus on economic issues, is history. Some observers say the best - or worst - is yet to come.

But predictions of a social revolution next session are groundless, said Rep. Scott Smith, R-Graham.

The House can’t take on affirmative action, the state abortion law or other prime conservative targets all by itself, Smith said.

“I don’t want to raise false hopes. We are still are only one leg of the stool. Until we get the Senate in 1996, and the governor’s mansion, it will be the same story.”

But that doesn’t mean social conservatives are giving up.

A group of more than 20 House Republicans coordinated by Rep. Larry Crouse R-Spokane, teamed up this session to work on social issues in the coming years.