Quote of the Day
Not one Republican voted for HB 1163. Washington Democrats built a permit that costs $126, demands a class the state refuses to teach, and disqualifies much of the workforce capable of teaching it. When your own implementing agency has to publicly concede the mandatory step cannot be met, the failure belongs to the people who wrote the law, not the ones handed the clipboard.
JASON RANTZ
September 14, 2026
Washington gun permit collapsed before it even started
I’m reminded of certain types of personality disorders (borderline personality disorder, and possibly others). They will create unwinnable situations for the people around them and when there is a conflict or something goes wrong, they will insist they are never at fault.
You can point out the laws of physics would have to be violated to accomplish what they demand of you and their response will not be to modify their demands. It will something on the order of, “You’ll just have to figure it out.”
See also It is Always Someone Else’s Fault.
“… the mandatory step cannot be met…” — the article does not make the obvious conclusion that this is by design, not by mistake.
It’s an online newspaper, so they probably don’t have the evidence to definitively conclude that it’s by design rather than oversight.
Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
While it’s a safe assumption that it’s by design, an assumption is not proof, and legislators and lawmakers are historically VERY ignorant of most things they seek to regulate. There’s just enough reasonable doubt to justify not making that step.
But design or mistake, the statement, “… the mandatory step cannot be met …” is 100% true either way, and does not require additional evidence to prove.
The judicial branches do not ever want to look into the possibility that the legislative branch is incompetent, either because of actual malice, stupidity or ignorance.
What happens if the judiciary finds that, unavoidably, the legislators as a body are incompetent in a specific field? Having found this in an official forum, what would the judiciary be compelled to do to address it? For the moment, let’s stipulate that the supreme court is not a partisan body with their own political agendas and they commute to work on unicorns.
The state judiciary usually defers to the state legislature on political questions. That is to say, assuming that the law is not unconstitutional on its face, and the execution of that law does not violate principles of equal protection and due process, the state legislature is allowed to make that law. Remember that the federal governments powers are enumerated and limited (HA!) and the state governments have broader powers where they do not conflict with powers reserved to the federal government.
So what would be the effect of the state judiciary, reviewing the entire legislative history of a law, determining that 35 out of 100 legislators in their state are not competent to write law on a subject, and are in fact so incompetent that they don’t have any advisors that are competent nor do they know (or take notice of) anyone that actually could be considered competent, and therefore any law passed by the legislature where these 35 legislators voted as a bloc is presumably stupid, harmful, and does not deserve the normal deference the judiciary affords the legislature?
Then return to the real world where the WA state judiciary is itself a bunch of partisan hacks with their own political agendas, and are not tightly moored to constitutional principles (federal or state) because the majority of the state population that votes for them wants it that way, and realize the damage that can be done overriding competent legislation in favor of the preferred incompetence.
Frustratingly, that means on many issues the contention will have to go through the entire state court system, get ruled against by the state supreme court, before it can be taken to federal court where, for the moment, there is a 4 justice bloc that is strongly pro-constitution, a 2 justice conservative-leaning (relative to the stature and authority of the SCOTUS) bloc, a 2 justice progressive bloc and one absolute loony that the other 8 find necessary to mock.
Time to invoke the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution. It is not assigned to any one branch so my position is that any branch can do it. Never been tested but it is time.
You’re talking about Article IV, Section 4? I read it slightly differently than you do.
First, the section: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.
True, it’s not assigned to any particular branch (else it would have appeared in Article I, II, or III), so any branch can take steps for it.
Where I read it different is where it says “The United States shall guarantee to every State…” [emphasis mine]. To me, that reads less like “any branch can do it” and more like “all branches are obligated to make sure of it.”
What does that obligation look like to each of the branches? I don’t know — it’s never been tested, to my knowledge — but by my reading (IANAL warning), the Constitution doesn’t leave any branch of the federal government the option of looking the other way.
I agree but if one or more branches fail to act the remaining one or two are obligated.
WA State bureaucrats do tend to get rather pissy when they mandate a specific curriculum, to be delivered by a live presenter, and that presenter prefaces most of the slides with “The State of Washington requires that you be told [X]. It’s not true, but they require it to be said.”
When the State of Washington requires a particular ‘informative’ poster be hung in a gun store, that creates a market for a frame to go around that poster, “Officially required posting. Truthfulness not assured by oath. Please do not harass staff about contents of this legally compelled posting.”
If they get to the point of saying, “Follow this script without deviation”, then you don’t really need a live presenter, do you? Just have them watch a video. If you bolt on an online quiz to provide some verification that people actually watched the video, be sure to put “Answer in accordance with the information provided in this training, without regard to its factual accuracy” in small text at the bottom or you’d have a challenge of ‘forced speech’ as a barrier to exercising an impaired right.
It’s like the magical “35 felonies” that would literally have required time travel to have committed – that it’s impossible doesn’t bother then in the slightest.
*Reality in general* doesn’t bother them in the slightest, as best I can tell.
They are Leftists — Totalitarians of whatever brand and flavor you want to call them. Their stock in trade is the idea they acquired in indoctrination school that they can make their own reality and compel others to believe it, too. 2 + 2 = 5. The chocolate ration has increased from 11 grams to 9 (or whatever the actual numbers were).