Analysis: Scorecard for the 2009 Wash. Legislature

After several years of gleefully stoking their top priorities with state spending, the Legislature's Democratic majority flipped everything on its head in 2009.

Instead of dividing up the spoils, they were taking from nearly everyone, and running out of friends as quickly as they ran out of money. The abiding sense of doom made it seem like the session would never end.

Actually, it's still not over. Since the Legislature didn't clear up all the bills it needed to implement a new $35 billion, 2 1/2-year budget, leadership had to trudge down to Gov. Chris Gregoire's office around midnight on the final day to ask for overtime.

She plans to call lawmakers back in the next few weeks. In the meantime, here's a rundown of winners, losers and everyone else who was left shaking off the bad vibes when it was over - well, almost over.

- LABOR: The Democratic Party's foot soldiers felt like they got stepped on.

The state Labor Council's highest priority was a bill that would prohibit businesses from holding "captive audience" meetings with employees on religious or political topics, including unionization.

Democrats, however, set it aside after a union e-mail revealed crudely worded threats that labor would stop paying for the Democrats' elections unless the bill became law. Bad blood still boils: This week, the Labor Council's legislative wrap-up pined for the good old days of a few years ago, "when Democrats were Democrats."

The state's largest teachers' union, the Washington Education Association, also got run over when lawmakers from both parties and other education interests allied to push past teachers' objections over the massive overhaul of the state's basic education blueprint.

State workers' unions were torqued off even before the session started, when Gregoire nixed pay raises in their agreed-to contracts.

- BOEING: Not surprisingly, the state's dominant employer got its way. After a divisive Machinists strike last fall, and with big decisions about new production lines on the horizon, Boeing was looking for a "first, do no harm" kind of session.

The aerospace company got just that when Democratic leaders wound up with a good excuse for killing labor's top bill, which would have boosted union organizing efforts. Breakaway House Democrats also failed to stick union-friendly provisions onto a Boeing-backed bill that reformed and reduced unemployment taxes.

In both cases, the airplane guys apparently had a trump card in Gregoire. The newly re-elected Democrat said, after the fact, that she would have vetoed the organizing bill and called a special session to ensure the unemployment reforms were approved.

- THE GOVERNOR: She seemed absent during big swaths of the 105-day session, probably because she used her political capital at the beginning by proposing a no-new-taxes budget that sliced deeply into Democratic priorities.

Some Democrats expected Gregoire to use the bully pulpit mid-session, after the falling economy drained more money from the treasury. But she stayed mum, refusing to give the Democratic majority any political cover on the need for taxes.

Gregoire did show up down the stretch, conducting heavy shuttle diplomacy between the Senate and House in the final days. She was trying to break political logjams and get her last few priorities through the turnstiles, with mixed success: legislators dropped an aerospace study bill and her watered-down climate change policy didn't get a Senate vote.

- HOUSE VS. SENATE: Political battles between the Legislature's two chambers, even when both are controlled by the same party, are par for the course.

This year, the two sides sparred over differences in their budgets, with the Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, prevailing on several education financing decisions and House Speaker Frank Chopp, D-Seattle, winning on a welfare program for single, childless people who can't work.

The final clash was over a Senate priority bill, which would have given electric utilities more leeway in meeting the clean-energy portfolio requirements of voter-approved Initiative 937. Environmentalists didn't like it, but cut a deal.

Then things really started to unravel. House lawmakers from the Tacoma and Vancouver areas refused to support key bonding bills unless their hometown utilities got more wiggle room under the clean-energy bill.

That caused a huge traffic jam in the final days, and when the I-937 changes finally died in the House, there wasn't enough time left to finish the required measures. Hence the upcoming special session.

- TIM EYMAN: Legislative enemy No. 1 watched his Initiative 960 have the intended effect - making it difficult to raise taxes.

Democrats don't have the two-thirds supermajorities needed to increase taxes under the initiative, and faced the prospect of sending any tax hike out for voter approval. In the end, there were no general tax increases, although a broad array of fees were increased, including big hikes in college tuition.

Eyman, of course, was quick to take credit, promptly declaring it "the I-960 session." The initiative's constant presence in policy decisions makes that hard to argue with.

Interest groups in the Democrats' base already plan on pressing the Legislature to suspend I-960 in January, when the two-year ban on altering new initiatives has expired. But that will be an election year.

- READ THEIR LIPS: From the beginning, a coalition of interest groups including hospitals, clinics, education boosters and unions was planning for a tax-hike referendum to raise money for services the coalition considered uncuttable.

As time wound down, pieces of the coalition began to fall away. In the final month, it was down to just health care interests, who were studying a sales tax increase of three-tenths of a penny to pay for medical subsidies and state health insurance programs.

They even got a bill introduced, but voter research showed a lukewarm response to taxes, and lawmakers didn't even try to put it on the ballot.

- INITIATIVES: When the Legislature gets into a crunch, any voter mandates that cost money are often the first things to get tossed overboard. So it was a no-brainer that lawmakers would save hundreds of millions of dollars by suspending the mandates that teachers get regular raises and schools get more money to hire those teachers. The Legislature also delayed implementation of an initiative from last fall, which called for more training of long-term health care workers.

- GAY RIGHTS: Without a whole lot of fuss, the Democrat-dominated Legislature granted committed gay and lesbian couples "everything but marriage" in an expansion of the state's domestic partnership law.

The bill opens up all legal rights and responsibilities that previously were conferred only to married couples under state law, essentially making the label "marriage" the only difference between domestic partners and heterosexual married couples.

Some federal conflicts remain: health benefits and recognition of the unions in other states, for instance. Gay marriage opponents are now trying to get a referendum on the ballot to roll back the domestic partnership expansions. If the voters agree, the bill would go away.

- PARK IT: Plans to shutter or sell some of the state's beloved parks were halted, at least for a while, with a new $5 fee on car registrations.

Drivers will have to check a box if they don't want to pay the fee, and the state budget assumes enough money from that scheme to keep parks open. However, if the dough runs short of expectations, the policy may have to be revisited.

-EDUCATION REFORM: After 30 years of piecemeal changes, the Legislature stepped up to a mammoth policy task by passing a phased-in overhaul of the state's program for basic education.

Washington's constitution declares that amply providing for basic education is the state's paramount duty. But the definition of what constitutes "basic" is left to the Legislature.

The bill starts the ball rolling on major changes to that definition: A longer school day and the option of more credits for high school students, all-day kindergarten, a new scheme for sending money to schools around the state, and performance standards for teachers.

No money is included, however, and lawmakers have tossed around estimates of an additional $2 billion per biennium or more as the possible price tag when all of the bill's elements take effect.

- KEEP THE CHANGE: The Oklahomans who bought and relocated the former NBA Seattle SuperSonics could have been on the hook for another $30 million if legislators had approved tax subsidies for a basketball arena overhaul.

There was barely a public whimper about this idea until the very end. In reality, it never had a chance.

Two Seattle senators claimed at session's end that they would try during the upcoming special session to "continue conversations" about the bill, which is usually code for "we have given up."

- INCOMING: Even bringing up the supposedly taboo topic of a state income tax is a politically bold move, and Senate Democrats brought it up a lot. They pitched "high-earners" income tax plans of varying levels, saying it should apply to millionaires, or half-millionaires, or even quarter-millionaires.

The much-studied topic generated excitement on the political left, which has dreamed for years of adding a more progressive tax to the state's revenue portfolio. But it was never really going to happen.

- CELEBRATION TIME?: The Legislature didn't actually finish its required work, leaving a couple of bills in limbo for a special session that will probably come in the next few weeks. The things they did accomplish left plenty of scorched earth.

But why let that stop the celebrating?

As time ticked down early Monday morning, hangers-on packed the House and Senate floors to watch the annual adjournment ceremony.

Cheers and applause erupted. Backs were slapped. Snapshots were taken. Soon, loud rock music signaled that Lt. Gov. Brad Owen's usual office party was well under way.

Rep. Eric Pettigrew, D-Seattle, apparently shaking off well-publicized worries that health care cuts would cause people to die, threw his own shindig down on the first floor.

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On the Net:

Legislature: http://www.leg.wa.gov

Governor: http://www.governor.wa.gov