Progressives tried to use the courts to make a quiet end run around a popular set of conservative reforms.
It was a Friday afternoon in early August when Brian Heywood received a call from a local reporter. The Washington Supreme Court was slated to decide in a matter of hours whether a series of conservative initiatives he’d invested millions of dollars in would be removed from the November ballot — did he have a comment?
Heywood’s response was, essentially: Umm, what?
For more than a year, Heywood and his allies have been crafting the initiatives aimed primarily at protecting taxpayers from Democratic overreach in deep-blue Washington State. Heywood, the chief executive of a Kirkland-based investment fund, spent $6 million of his own money to gather enough signatures to get them on ballot. He is the leading force behind the Let’s Go Washington political committee advocating for the proposals.
Yet he was unaware of the two emergency legal challenges before the court on August 9.
The two union-backed legal challenges were not technically targeting Let’s Go Washington; they were aimed instead at the secretary of state’s process for verifying signatures. But they mentioned Heywood and his group, and suggested that they had “engaged in allegedly unlawful signature gathering tactics.”
No one notified Heywood, he said — not the leaders of the left-wing groups aiming to strip the initiatives from the ballot, not the secretary of state, not Washington’s Democratic attorney general, Bob Ferguson, a vocal opponent of the initiatives who was nonetheless tasked with defending them in front of the state’s supreme court.
“Everybody knows that we should have been notified,” Heywood told National Review. “If we would have known about it we would have filed to defend ourselves.”
The effort to remove the initiatives from the ballot ultimately failed, but it shows how far opponents of the initiatives are willing to go to defeat them and, if possible, prevent the public from voting on them in the first place.
Heywood was in the middle of a company party when he learned about the court hearings. He went into emergency mode, he said, reaching out to his legal counsel to figure out how this “stealth” challenge got so far without their knowledge.
There wasn’t much they could do. The challenges were being heard behind closed doors. Heywood had to trust that Ferguson, the Democratic candidate for governor who’d received financial backing from some of the challengers, would do his job and defend the secretary of state’s signature-verifying process.
To get on the ballot, Let’s Go Washington needed more than 320,000 valid voter signatures for each initiative. The group turned them in late last year.
The challengers, the left-wing organization Defend Washington and the Washington Conservation Action Education Fund, argued that each of the ballot initiatives had been “certified by a very narrow margin,” criticized the secretary of state’s statistical formula for validating petition signatures, and charged that that “the Secretary did not adequately determine that each signer was in fact a legal voter.”
The Washington supreme court unanimously ruled against them. Four of Let’s Go Washington’s initiatives will be on the top of November’s ballot, Heywood said.
“They come before the president,” he said. “We’ve got this incredible placement, the way it’s designed.”
National Review first reported on the Let’s Go Washington effort in December.
Heywood, the founder of Taiyo Pacific Partners, a fund that specializes in investments in the Japanese market, decided to move his business from California to Washington in 2010 to flee the Golden State’s high-tax environment. But while Washington does not have an income tax, the state has been moving farther and farther to the political left, and its Democratic leaders have leaned hard into leftist policies and politics in recent years.
Heywood contends that Democrats in Washington have become so comfortable and arrogant in their power that they no longer worry about the political ramifications of their decisions or their impact on voters.
Heywood and his allies initially proposed six conservative ballot initiatives: a repeal of the state’s cap-and-trade system, which has driven up the cost of gas; a repeal of the state’s new capital-gains tax; a proposal to prevent government bodies from instituting a backdoor income tax; a proposal to allow Washingtonians to opt out of a union-backed long-term insurance scheme; an end to state restrictions on police pursuits; and the institution of a parental bill of rights.
Heywood said he’s engaged in an effort to “put common sense back on the ballot.”
The six initiatives initially went to the legislature, meaning state lawmakers had first crack at rejecting or approving them as is. Any initiative the legislature didn’t approve would go on the November ballot. The Democrats in Olympia weren’t expected to back any of them.
“What’s interesting was, their first statement was ‘these are MAGA, rightwing ideas; we’re never going to touch them, they’re crazy,’” Heywood said. “Then they did their own polling and went, ‘Oh no, we’re going to get screwed in November if we don’t do something.”
During the legislative session, Washington lawmakers approved three of the initiatives — the state income tax ban, the parental bill of rights, and the police pursuit proposal — with bipartisan majorities, part a Democratic strategy to keep them off the ballot.
Three others — the cap-and-trade repeal, the capital-gains tax repeal, and the long-term care tax opt-out — will still be on the ballot.
But earlier this summer, Heywood and his allies managed to get another initiative approved for the ballot: the rollback of a new state law aimed at requiring Puget Sound Energy to transition its natural-gas customers to electricity.
The bill, HB 1589, a priority for governor Jay Inslee, was approved by lawmakers in the middle of the night on one of the last days of session.
Republicans called the law unconstitutional. Opponents, including the Building Industry Association of Washington, called it “cruel” and said it would drastically increase energy rates and require many households to spend tens of thousands of dollars to convert their heating systems and appliances to electricity. It was all “to achieve carbon reductions for our state that will barely be measurable,” the building industry said.
The building industry teamed with Let’s Go Washington to offer voters an initiative that would prevent state and local governments from banning, restricting, or discouraging gas and gas appliances in their homes and businesses.
“In 48 days we got 546,002 signatures,” Heywood said.
A recent poll of 708 likely voters found 54 percent of respondents certain to vote for the natural-gas initiative, and only 21 percent certain to vote against it, according to the Seattle Times. The initiatives only need a majority of 50 percent plus one to pass. Heywood said his organization’s polling shows about 80 percent support for the natural-gas initiative.
Heywood said he’s optimistic about their chances heading into the fall. “The polling that we’ve seen puts us ahead on all of [the initiatives],” he said.
But there are several hurdles ahead.
For one, there’s the 2022 law that requires that initiatives include a financial disclosure on the ballot if they would cause a net change in state revenue. Republicans have called the disclosures Democratic “warning labels” intended to scare off voters.
Let’s Go Washington is also facing aggressive and well-funded opponents. Defend Washington, the lead left-wing opponent, has described the Let’s Go Washington effort as a “dangerous” plan by “big corporations and the wealthy to avoid paying what they owe.”
They’re trying to scare voters, alleging that the initiatives would harm the environment, reduce education funding, and hurt middle-class and low-income families and frontline workers. Let’s Go Washington has countered with a simple slogan, “Vote Yes, Pay Less.”
Defend Washington’s biggest backers include the Service Employees International Union, the Washington Education Association teacher’s union, and left-wing activist groups Campion Advocacy and Civic Ventures, a Seattle-based advocacy group of “political troublemakers” aimed at building social change with “disruptive ideas.”
Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, the company’s former CEO, are among the left-wing billionaires who have vowed the fight the initiatives.
Heywood said his opponents are trying to tag him as a greedy and deceptive villain.
“It’s isolate, demonize, make me the bad guy,” he said. “Here’s their tactic: there’s this rich guy who did this stuff and he’s stealing our democracy. Don’t listen to him. Listen to our billionaires who have spent more money to tell you why he’s wrong.”
In the end, Let’s Go Washington and its allies may be outspent, outgunned, and demonized in the press and in TV ads. That’s okay with Heywood.
“I’ve been joking that we’re the American revolutionary army, we’re going to shoot from behind the trees,” he said. “It’s a remake of the American Revolution.”