Opinion ID: 1191734
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: Emergency clause suspect when standing alone

Text: A secondary consideration is what proof the court will consider to determine whether an emergency of the kind set forth in the constitution in fact exists. The concurrence states:  Our constitution in article II, section 1, empowers the Legislature to declare legislation necessary for the support of the state government and its existing public institutions or for the preservation of public peace, health or safety. Concurrence at 1069 (emphasis added). If the constitutional text empowers the Legislature to declare anything, it would take a vigilant jurist to find it since it must be written in invisible ink. Nearly 1,000 statutes on the books have boilerplate emergency clauses. I strongly disagree with the majority's safety in numbers or floodgates argument which essentially claims that if we were to protect our citizens' right to referendum we could do nothing else and, therefore, we shouldn't do anything. Majority at 1069 n. 12. We must be clear that our courts are open to hear these claims in discharge of our paramount duty to protect the constitutional rights of the people. The fact that the people's rights are being violated en masse is an even greater reason for judicial intervention than invasion by occasional inadvertent mistake. Moreover, these claims are not heard de novo in the supreme court. They originate in the superior court and reach the supreme court only by discretionary review. If there is a great deal of litigation over this matter, we have only ourselves to blame for not articulating the simple and mandatory rule that, in effect, the constitution means exactly what it says and that any legislative enactment which simply relies upon a boilerplate emergency clause, without also meeting the exacting constitutional criteria, is subject to attack. Repetition of this legislative conduct has been encouraged by the unwillingness of this court to discharge its constitutional duty. Frankly, I find the majority's argument on this point untenable. Accordingly, this court has always looked with disfavor on the Legislature's custom of attaching emergency clauses to all sorts of bills, many of which cannot by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as actually emergent.... State ex rel. Kennedy v. Reeves, 22 Wash.2d 677, 683, 157 P.2d 721 (1945). Once again our Court of Appeals persuasively observed [p]resumably to escape public scrutiny and the referendum process, the Legislature had begun to insert `emergency clauses' in a number of bills. Save Our State Park v. Hordyk, 71 Wash. App. 84, 90 n. 6, 856 P.2d 734 (1993). [14] When faced with an emergency clause, the court must independently determine whether an emergency actually exists and whether the challenged statute actually addresses it. State ex rel. Kennedy v. Reeves, 22 Wash.2d 677, 679-81, 157 P.2d 721 (1945) (Unless we can say that the act is, in fact, necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, or for the immediate preservation of the public health, or for the support of the state government and its existing public institutions, the relators are of right entitled to the writ prayed for. Id. at 682, 157 P.2d 721.). This is the essence of judicial review which is the constitutional responsibility of this court. Const. art. IV.