A Judge Ruled on One Sentence. Washington's Income Tax Fight Now Heads to the Supreme Court.

A Thurston County judge ruled Friday that Washington election officials can keep a one-sentence fiscal warning on this November's ballot, dealing a setback to the campaign trying to repeal the state's new tax on income above $1 million. Superior Court Judge Chris Lanese found no constitutional violation in language state officials attached to Initiative 645, rejecting open-government activist Arthur West's bid to strike or rewrite it. The ruling did more than settle West's case. It also knocked out a second, separate hearing that Initiative 645's own sponsor, Let's Go Washington, had scheduled the same day before a different judge, a procedural collision that left the group's founder, Brian Heywood, publicly furious that his organization's arguments never got their own courtroom. Both sides now expect the fight to move to the Washington Supreme Court within days. The initiative asks voters to repeal a tax the Legislature passed in March, and the sentence at the center of the dispute is the only description of that tax's consequences most voters will see before they mark a ballot.

What Judge Lanese Actually Decided

The disclosure at issue is a single sentence the Attorney General's office attached to Initiative 645 on July 23: the measure "would decrease funding for public K-12 education, higher education (including universities and community colleges), and human services (primarily healthcare)." West sued to have it struck entirely, arguing that letting the state attach argumentative language to a citizen initiative after signatures are already collected violates both Washington's election-neutrality statute and the constitutional right to petition. His theory was that once the state starts describing a measure's downstream budget effects, it has stopped summarizing and started campaigning. Lanese disagreed. Pressed on whether identifying the state's largest budget categories amounted to taking a side, the judge said the framing itself was not the problem: "If we're looking at the issues of what's the biggest expenditures or most impacted, that's still neutral," he said, according to the Yakima Herald. He also rejected West's argument that the disclosure amounted to the state campaigning against a citizen initiative, characterizing it instead as a way to make sure voters understand the trade-offs involved before they vote. West said Friday he intends to file an appeal directly with the state Supreme Court as soon as Monday, arguing his neutrality claim still has merit even after the loss in Thurston County and that a single Superior Court ruling should not settle a question with statewide implications for every future tax initiative.

How a March Bill Signing Turned Into a Ballot Brawl

The fight traces back five months. Gov. Bob Ferguson signed Senate Bill 6346, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, on March 30, imposing a 9.9% tax on household wage income above $1 million starting in 2028, with the state not collecting revenue until 2029. Democratic lawmakers wrote a "necessity clause" into the bill declaring the tax "necessary for the support of state government and its existing public institutions," language that, under Washington's constitution, blocks voters from challenging a law by referendum rather than initiative. Secretary of State Steve Hobbs cited that clause when he rejected Let's Go Washington's referendum petition that spring, and the state Supreme Court upheld that reading on May 4, with Chief Justice Debra Stephens writing that the tax "undisputedly generates revenue for the state's existing institutions." Heywood called the ruling a "blank check" for lawmakers to raise taxes without a public vote, according to Lynnwood Times. With a referendum foreclosed, Let's Go Washington pivoted to the only remaining path: a full repeal initiative, which requires far more signatures than a referendum but cannot be blocked by the same necessity-clause maneuver, since it repeals the law outright rather than merely suspending it pending a public vote. The income tax also did not arrive in isolation. It followed a 2025 legislative session in which Democratic lawmakers already assembled a separate tax package projected to raise about $9.4 billion over four years, a sequence Washington Policy Center's budget analysis points to when arguing Olympia has repeatedly turned to new revenue rather than spending reductions.

511,408 Signatures and a Fight Over One Sentence

Let's Go Washington submitted 511,408 signatures on July 2 for Initiative 645, well clear of the 308,911 required to qualify, according to Seattle Red. The disclosure requirement itself dates to a 2022 law requiring the state to append a "public investment impact disclosure" to any initiative that would repeal or shrink a tax, a statute passed specifically to give voters fiscal context they would not otherwise get from an initiative's own summary. Once Attorney General Nick Brown's office approved the K-12, higher-education and healthcare wording on July 23, two separate lawsuits followed within days: West's neutrality challenge, and a second suit from Let's Go Washington itself asking a court to rewrite, not delete, the disclosure so it would instead note that repealing the tax frees up general-fund money the state could spend elsewhere. Washington State Republican Party Chairman Jim Walsh, who has pushed to reform how these disclosures are written statewide, called the current wording "deceitful" and "misleading." The Wall Street Journal's editorial board weighed in on July 30, accusing Brown's office of "writing language designed to sink the measure," a national-outlet intervention that turned what began as a Thurston County procedural dispute into a talking point in the broader debate over state income taxes. Three weeks passed between the July 2 signature submission and the July 23 approval of the final wording, a gap both campaigns used to lobby the Attorney General's office over specific phrasing before either side ever filed suit.

'A Civilian Who Does Not Represent Us'

The two lawsuits were supposed to get two separate hearings Friday, West's before Judge Lanese, Let's Go Washington's before Judge John Skinder. Once Lanese ruled the disclosure language constitutional, Skinder's hearing was canceled, since the underlying legal question had already been decided by a court of equal standing. Heywood said his group never got to make its own case. "We came prepared to make our case," he said. "Instead, a civilian who does not represent us was invited to argue issues from our challenge, and then the court shut the door." The complaint points to a structural quirk of Washington's disclosure law: because West and Let's Go Washington were contesting the same sentence on overlapping legal theories, one judge's ruling on neutrality effectively mooted the other case, even though Let's Go Washington wanted the language rewritten rather than removed and never got a judge to weigh that narrower request on its own terms. Not every outlet framed Friday's outcome the same way. The Northwest Progressive Institute, a group aligned with the tax's supporters, called the ruling a "critical victory for transparency," while the free-market Washington Policy Center argued Lanese had overstepped. Policy analyst Ryan Frost wrote that the judge's own courtroom remarks about Washington's "downward regressive spiral" in tax policy showed he was applying his personal views rather than neutral statutory interpretation, according to Washington Policy Center.

Where the Case Goes From Here

West's planned Supreme Court appeal is the more immediate legal question, but it is not the only one still open. Let's Go Washington has not said publicly whether it will separately press its own rewrite request in front of a different judge, or fold its objections into whatever West files on Monday. Either path likely lands at the state's highest court before ballots are printed for the November general election, since Washington's compressed initiative calendar leaves little room for a slower appeal process to play out. A Supreme Court that has already ruled once against Let's Go Washington this year, in the May referendum case, is not a guaranteed win for the group, though a ballot-language neutrality claim is a legally distinct question from the necessity-clause fight it lost in the spring, turning on statutory interpretation rather than constitutional referendum power. Because Washington's county auditors need finalized ballot language well before ballots are mailed each October, whichever court hears the next round faces real pressure to rule quickly rather than let the case drag past the printing deadline. Washington Policy Center's analysis noted that the state's operating budget has grown from $33.6 billion in the 2013-15 biennium to roughly $80 billion now, a 139% increase before adjusting for inflation and about 55% after, the underlying fiscal backdrop both campaigns are arguing about even though only 5% of the new tax's future revenue is dedicated to a specific program and the rest flows to the general fund where lawmakers decide its use year to year.

What Kitsap Voters Actually See in November

For a Kitsap County voter, Friday's ruling means the ballot language framing Initiative 645 is very likely the language that ships to mailboxes this fall, appeal or not. Courts rarely halt a ballot measure's printing over language disputes this close to an election unless a stay is explicitly granted, and neither West nor Let's Go Washington has asked for one yet. That single disclosure sentence will sit next to a repeal measure most voters will otherwise know only from campaign mailers, since the tax itself does not touch anyone earning under $1 million and has generated zero dollars in actual revenue so far, with collection not beginning until 2029 even if the repeal fails. The deeper tension in this case is one neither side fully resolves: the disclosure is factually accurate about which budget categories are largest, but it says nothing about whether repeal would actually cut spending on schools or healthcare, since 95% of the tax's eventual revenue lands in the general fund where a future Legislature, not this initiative, decides how to spend it. That gap between "could theoretically be spent on" and "will be cut" is exactly the distinction Frost's critique and the Northwest Progressive Institute's defense argue past each other on, and it is likely to be the same gap voters are asked to navigate on their own in November, regardless of which court rules next.