It’s likely to be months before the Washington Supreme Court tells us if Initiative 747, one of Tim Eyman’s tax-cutting nostrums, is constitutional after all.

A lower court judge has said it is not, on the unsettling premise that she knows better than the voters did what they were thinking when they handily passed the 2001 ballot measure.

For the record, I-747 was a bad idea, a simplistic appeal to knee-jerk tax opposition. It put an unreasonable 1 percent annual limit on property tax growth. The Spokesman-Review editorial board urged voters not to approve it. They passed it anyway.

A year earlier, The Spokesman-Review editorial board urged voters not to approve another misguided Eyman enterprise, Initiative 722, which would have fixed the property tax growth limit at 2 percent. But they passed that one, too.

Alas.

But more is at stake in the I-747 appeal that was argued this week than the survival or failure of a feel-good tax cut. A more far-reaching concern is the fact that King County Superior Court Judge Mary Roberts’ ruling nearly a year ago rested on her conclusion that voters were misled.

Nothing could play more directly into the hands of those who accuse courts of legislating from the bench than to start making judicial findings by reading voters’ minds – retroactively – and correcting the mistakes a judge thinks they made at the polls.

To refresh your memory, I-747 (with its 1 percent limit) was written and circulated in the belief that I-722 (with its 2 percent limit) was law. Between then and the November election, however, I-722 was overturned. Suddenly, I-747’s 1 percent limit on property tax growth would reflect a cut all the way from 6 percent rather than just from 2 percent.

Even though the electorate had chosen in 2000 to slash tax growth by two-thirds, opponents of I-747 now argue, as Roberts previously reasoned, voters wouldn’t have been so harsh if they’d understood the truth – which both the news and the state voters pamphlet had made clear during the 2001 campaign.

Would Washington’s cities and counties be better off without Initiative 747? Absolutely. But if that happens because the courts assume responsibility for protecting us from ourselves, the consequences of such a precedent should give us all chills.