Posts published in July 2006

The Washington Supreme Court has ruled: The subject of same-sex marriage will not be a huge factor in the campaigns of this year's general election in Washington and beyond.

That sure looks like the immediate effect of Heather Anderson v. King County, in which the court held that the Washington Legislature is constitutionally able to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples. That is what the Legislature sought to do in 1998 with passage of its version of the Defense of Marriage Act; the constitutionality of the measure was challenged in court, and lower courts said it was unconstitutional.

That's the bottom line. The decision rambles on quite a bit from there, not surprising since the justices took well over a year since the oral arguments to reach a decision which led to six separate opinions from the court. The key statement, near the top of the decision, reads like this:

The two cases before us require us to decide whether the legislature has the power to limit marriage in Washington State to opposite-sex couples. The state constitution and controlling case law compel us to answer "yes," and we therefore reverse the trial courts.
In reaching this conclusion, we have engaged in an exhaustive constitutional inquiry and have deferred to the legislative branch as required by our tri-partite form of government. Our decision accords with the substantial weight of authority from courts considering similar constitutional claims. We see no reason, however, why the legislature or the people acting through the initiative process would be foreclosed from extending the right to marry to gay and lesbian couples in Washington. It is important to note that the court's role is limited to determining the constitutionality of DOMA and that our decision is not based on an independent determination of what we believe the law should be.

That opens a political door on same-sex marriage: The legislature could always reverse DOMA and that reversal would, likewise, be constitutional. And you can expect candidates will be asked about it in the months ahead. (more…)

Politics in Washington state will be rocked, and in Oregon affected somewhat, by a document scheduled to be on file tomorrow morning: The Washington Supreme Court's decision on gay marriage.

We don't know what the court will say. We can tell you right now that it will have much more political impact if it falls in the pro-gay marriage side: That will energize the social conservatives, possibly not quite as much as in 2004 but enough to keep the issue fron-burner for some time. A decision against same-sex marriage would have less impact, since no immediate policy change would be contemplated and the impact would be moderated by the gay rights law recently passed by the state legislature.

Expect also that the decision could become central to the re-election odds of two Supreme Court justices, including the chief.

Back tomorrow with more on this.

You can keep track of exactly who is filing this week for office in Washington state through a comprehensive list maintained by the secretary of state's office.

It's on this page on the office's web site.

So far, among the early-earlies, we have a couple of candidates for the U.S. Senate, though neither is named Cantwell or McGavick. (They should show up soon.) The first U.S. House district to draw multiple candidates is District 7, one of the most lopsidedly uncompetitive in the state.

Much more, soon.

One of the great and spectacular trips in the Northwest is the ferry ride from Washington over to Victoria, British Columbia. It's not, however, quite as super, natural as British Columbia might like, for this reason: For years, Victoria has been dump raw, untreated sewage into the water, in the Straight of Juan de Fuca.

This seems a surprisingly third-worldish thing to do, for a country so self-consciously green in many ways. But there is, and might have continued for a long time. But it appears to be headed toward a welcome conclusion in another year or two, due largely to an external influence: The coming arrival, in 2010, of the Olympics games at Vancouver, activities of which will be spread around southwest British Columbia.

Joel Connelly's column today in the Seattle P-I lays out some of this. "Bluntly put, green games could not coexist with the brown reality of "Victoria's Secret" -- the daily discharge of 31 million gallons of untreated sewage into a waterway shared by the U.S., Canada, salmon runs and endangered marine mammals," he wrote. "The province's touristy capital dumps a volume of effluent into the strait that would fill 40,000 Olympic-size swimming pools each year."

This may be the single most valuable thing the games do for the Northwest.

As Jim west did not leave his post as mayor of Spokane without having accomplished some worthy things, so with Dave Skramstad.

No scandal hit him; he was far less well known around the region. But he was an impactful figure in Olympia, where among other things he played a central role in changing the city's form of government.

But there was also much more. As the Olympian noted in its editorial, "When you attend a symphony presentation at the Washington Center for the Performing Arts, you have Dave Skramstad to thank for the marvelous venue. When you walk along the Percival Landing boardwalk on a summer evening, you can thank Dave Skramstad for the spectacular facility. When you spend an afternoon enjoying the Olympia Farmers Market, thank Dave Skramstad."