As you may well know, the ballot you will receive in just a few short weeks will have democrat races, republican races, and the independent races. To vote in the Democrat or Republican primary, you must declare yourself as a member of that party, and you cannot vote for candidates from the other party in those partisan races.
But for the independent races, you can vote for whomever you wish.
The most important races on the primary ballot happen to be independent.
Don’t get me wrong, when the people of Washington State wrote their constitution, they provided for a government of checks and balances, with the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Each branch has power over the other, and each is checked in their powers. Arguably, the most powerful branch is the legislative. However, with a runaway judiciary, the other two branches become moot.
The Washington State judge races have been traditionally liberal-slanting. This is because Democrats are better at getting people to vote in the primaries. (Republicans are far less willing to vote for someone they don’t know.) The net result is that we either end up with one liberal candidate in the Fall, or worse, a choice between liberal and more liberal judges.
The problem with liberal judges is that they don’t read the law and the constitution the same way the people do. We look at those documents, think they mean what they say, and follow them precisely. They feel they have the right to interpret the documents, add in a few sentimentalities of their own, and allow for a progressive slant.
I’ll cite three instances.
In the one, the supreme court decided that if you assaulted someone and killed them, then you obviously didn’t commit murder unless it can be proved that you wanted to kill them. This meant that hundreds if not thousands of murderers are set free into our public. Right now, they are probably wandering the streets. The law was quite clear in the matter—killing someone is murder if it is done by assault. The legislature, thankfully, turned around and almost immediately passed a law telling the Supreme Court that they were wrong and that the law really said what they said it said.
In the other, the Supreme Court allowed a government agency to exercise imminent domain (the taking of property by force, with compensation) and sell it to private entities. Practically, what happened is that the government took property to build a monorail, and then sold that property to someone else to build whatever they wanted. This is obviously wrong, and we were reassured after the Kelso decision that our constitution was quite clear on this matter. It turns out that our constitution was; our judges weren’t.
Yet another example needs to be mentioned. When the issue of homosexual marriage–banned explicitly by law, voted into law by the people, no less–appeared before the court, 4 out of 5 of the judges decided that the law was stupid and the people were wrong. Is this the kind of supreme court we want, one that hears the voice of the people through the polls, and then ignores it?
I don’t know about you, but I was told that the powers of government don’t come from a document—they come from the people themselves. The document, the constitution, is merely our contract with our government. “This is what you can do,” we said, “and this is what you can’t.” To have the Supreme Court justices stand up and defy the will of the people is as absurd as having your employees defy the stockholders and members of the board.
We simply cannot let our ballots fall into the trash can this year. We must vote in the judicial races, and we must vote for conservative candidates who will read the law as it was written, and judge righteously.
