Braun: The 2025 session in one sentence — It didn’t need to be this way

For the past few years Senate Republicans have focused on public safety, affordability and improving the lives of Washington’s children. Now that the 2025 legislative session has wrapped up, let’s use those priorities as a lens to look at some of the decisions that came from the Capitol.

Big progress was made toward a safer Washington through the creation of a grant program to help communities hire and retain law enforcement officers. It began a few years ago as a Republican-only proposal that couldn’t get the attention it deserved — until gubernatorial candidate Bob Ferguson turned it into a campaign promise this past summer.

After he took office and publicly complimented Republican Sen. Jeff Holy’s legislation, Democrat legislators jumped in with a similar bill of their own, which will become law. It is not exactly Senator Holy’s bill, but as they say, you can get a lot done in politics if you don’t care who gets the credit.

The worst decision in the public-safety category — and maybe the biggest failure of the 2025 session — was the move by House Democrat leaders to “kill” Senate Bill 5278. I sponsored this bill to address the overcrowding, violence and drug abuse at Green Hill School in Chehalis.

When the state Senate unanimously passed SB 5278, I saw it as belated recognition of the flaws in the pre-pandemic laws that allow offenders to remain in state juvenile-rehabilitation facilities until age 25. This resulted in older offenders being placed with much younger offenders, which was problematic on its own — and worse, it created chronic overcrowding which exacerbated the problems.

I believe there were enough votes in the House to pass the bill as well, had the speaker allowed it to come up for a vote. But clearly, the extremist wing of the House majority is still calling the shots, even though some of its members from a year ago are now part of the Senate majority.

This session was a disaster for affordability in our state. The budget Democrats adopted on the session’s final day was balanced with the largest tax increase in state history, in terms of cost; $9.6 billion at the state level, and $12.5 billion when you include the local tax increases they enabled.

By resorting to a huge sales-tax increase, a larger tax increase on Washington businesses, and clearing the way for higher property taxes by allowing school districts to pursue larger levies, Democrats have added to the tax burden on the lower- and moderate-income Washington families who can least afford it.
Food, housing, health care, prescription drugs, even TV streaming — all will be more expensive when the cost of the higher taxes is passed through.

With a week left in the session, Gov. Bob Ferguson had warned Democrat legislators that $12 billion in new taxes would be too much, without saying what would be acceptable. He may go along with the lesser amount of state-level taxes, but to a family’s budget, taxes are taxes whether they’re state or local — and the people are taxed enough already.

Besides, the governor also said he didn’t want to see higher taxes on working families, and the sales and property tax increases approved by Democrats clearly conflict with that.

For both of those reasons the governor should already be looking for ways to reduce the Democrats’ tax package, using his veto pen.

If legislators have to come back to the Capitol for a quick “special” session to do some rebalancing because Gov. Ferguson crosses out some of the tax increases, Republicans would not mind — because the taxpayers would ultimately come out ahead.

There’s some consolation in remembering the budget the Senate Democrats produced on March 29 was balanced with $21 billion in new taxes. While the final $12.5 billion tax package was closer to half of that number, which is good in a broad sense, let’s also remember Senate Republicans proposed a budget that didn’t need a single tax increase or cut anyone off of services. That would have been the right way to go.

Finally, this wasn’t a good session for those of us who are working to improve the lives of Washington’s children.

We heard one speech after another from the majority about the importance of K-12 education. Yet they allowed funding for public schools to drop yet again, as a share of the state budget.

Meanwhile, the Democrats pushed more of the responsibility for school funding down to the district level. Authorizing larger school levies is equivalent to property-tax increases, in a way that will put lower-income students at an educational disadvantage. At the same time, experts have told us the state will be sued, as it was in the McCleary case, for not adequately funding our constitutionally required paramount duty: K-12 education.

Then there’s the anti-parent bill passed by Democrats. It undermines the parental bill of rights created a year ago through Initiative 2081, which received overwhelming bipartisan backing. The new law literally puts a new set of “student rights” ahead of parents’ rights, limiting the ability of parents to be involved in issues that their children are facing. This is unacceptable.

If that’s not enough, the House Democrats once again killed the bill that would add fentanyl and other synthetic opioids to the state’s child-endangerment law, after it flew through the Senate for a third straight year.

This year was also a bad one for transparency. The people are still learning what’s in the operating budget because Senate and House Democrats took it behind closed doors for more than three weeks, emerging with a deal on the next-to-last day of the session. And when it came to debating bills at the committee level, the majority was often dismissive, rejecting our ideas without offering an explanation and giving the people very little time to be heard. That’s wrong.

It will take a good deal of space, at another time, to run down the list of bills Republicans were able to stop. But we cannot rest, because many of those bills will return for another try in 2026.

For now, let’s recognize that the harmful policies coming out of this year’s legislative session will hit families all over the state of Washington. For them, Republicans have a simple message: It didn’t need to be this way. Our state must do better.

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Sen. John Braun of Centralia serves the 20th Legislative District, which spans parts of four counties from Yelm to Vancouver. He became Senate Republican leader in 2020.