John Braun: Budget trouble here means federal shutdown will hit harder
Friday, October 10, 2025
Those behind the shutdown of the federal government had to know how their actions could be especially painful at a national level for low-income women with children, the elderly and our military women and men.
Sadly, it looks like that possibility will become reality.
The consequences of the federal budget fight are even harder on a state like ours, where the record-breaking package of tax increases Democrats approved this year is already making life more expensive.
Washington families deserve the truth about the reasons for the shutdown.
Unfortunately, they aren’t getting it from Gov. Bob Ferguson.
The statement he issued Oct. 1 is carefully worded to imply Republicans are solely responsible for keeping the government running because they control the White House and both chambers of Congress.
That’s misleading, because the governor left out a critical fact: For the past 50 years, a U.S. Senate rule has effectively required 60 votes to approve legislation other than “reconciliation” bills like the one passed in July to protect taxpayers.
While Republicans have a 53-seat majority in the 100-member U.S. Senate, they need cooperation from Democrats to get to 60 votes — meaning 60% approval. That explains how Democrats are able to keep the shutdown going and exposes Ferguson’s call for the White House to “quit playing games” as nothing more than political rhetoric.
This concept is not unique to Washington, D.C. As Ferguson knows, our state also has rules that effectively give the minority party the power to block legislation.
It takes a 60% yes vote in our state Senate and House of Representatives to approve bills that add to the public debt by enabling the sale of revenue bonds. These are commonly attached to the capital budget and new transportation packages.
Also, amendments proposed to Washington’s constitution don’t move on to the general-election ballot unless they get a two-thirds yes vote in each chamber.
Fortunately, the rules here don’t enable the minority party to block the passage of an operating budget, the way they can in Washington, D.C. — yet our state government could still be shut down by a budget fight. We know that because of what happened in Olympia only a dozen years ago.
Republicans and two breakaway Democrat senators had formed a bipartisan majority to take over leadership of our state Senate at the start of the 2013 session. Democrats still controlled the state House and the governor’s mansion, but like their national counterparts today, they were bitter about the shift in power.
Jay Inslee, in his first session as governor, and the majority House Democrats both proposed operating budgets that required more than a billion dollars’ worth of tax increases. They knew that wouldn’t fly with Republicans in the Senate, and sure enough, the 105-day regular session and a 30-day “special” session went by without a budget deal.
During our second special session, and more than two months since the House had taken a budget vote, Democrat leaders and their political allies outside the Capitol grounds began ramping up the “Republican shutdown” talk. With the state budget to expire on June 30, which was less than 10 days away, they lamented how state law would soon require the sending of layoff notices to state workers.
That was too much for former Sen. Ann Rivers of Clark County, then a member of our caucus leadership team.
“There is no need for anyone to send out pink slips or continue the silly talk about a government shutdown,” she told the news media. “This isn’t Washington D.C., and we don’t play those Washington D.C. games with our valued state employees.”
With just two days to go in the budget cycle, a compromise was reached and approved by strong bipartisan votes in each chamber. Besides averting a shutdown, the final budget put a billion more dollars toward K-12 education and gave middle-income families a break by freezing tuition at Washington’s public colleges, without all the big tax increases Democrats wanted.
As it turned out, the adoption of new two-year operating budgets in 2015 and 2017 followed much the same pattern as we saw in 2013.
Republicans, viewing tax increases as a last resort, focused on working within the available revenue toward things that would be good for Washington families. They included the historic tuition cut of 2015 and the overhaul of K-12 funding in 2017 that was aimed at providing equitable educational opportunities for children regardless of their ZIP code.
House Democrats, meanwhile, dragged state government even closer to the brink of a shutdown both times before dropping their tax dreams and siding with us on a more responsible approach.
In fact, the budget passed in 2017 wasn’t signed until less than an hour before a shutdown would have been triggered. But the more significant aspect of that budget was its bottom line: $43.7 billion appropriated over two years. Democrats regained control of the Senate the following year, and eight years of one-party rule later, the operating budget has soared to nearly $80 billion.
The overtaxing and overspending behind the state budget signed into law this year make the current federal-government shutdown even harder to take, as the interruption in federal support will add to the financial trouble already facing Olympia. The political games being played in Washington, D.C. do not make our state better.
•••
Sen. John Braun of Centralia serves the 20th Legislative District, which spans parts of four counties from Yelm to Vancouver. He became Senate Republican leader in 2020.