Snake Oil Salesman Eyman Tries to Revive Dead Initiative and Republicans

Perennial Con Artist Tim Eyman has something new he wants you to buy. No, it’s not a fraternity or sorority watch. He been digging in his graveyard of old money making initiatives and schemes and discovered that applying Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment to his scalp has really helped increase his mental acumen and insight. Or so he thinks.

He thinks it’s worked so well for him that he’s reviving another initiative to the people of Washington State that he has already failed to get support for in the past. (Initiative 807 in 2003). He’s been sending fundraising letters around the state telling people of his dead but now revived vision for Washington State without tax or fee increases. Seems all this snake oil could do was revive old Eyman schemes , not generate new ones.

He and his fellow traveling salesmen from Spokane – the Fagan Brothers – have filed an initiative today (Initiative 953) with the Washington State Secretary of State to give a minority of 1/3 of the State Legislature the ability to stop any tax and fee increases.

He thinks it’s a brilliant idea – just because the state voters overwhelming elected Democrats by a wide majority to run the Legislature and write and pass the state budget doesn’t mean that the losers still can’t win. Keep the faith. Rather than the majority passing the state budget, he wants a minority of 1/3 of our elected legislators to decide.

Yes, let a minority or one third of the state legislators decide what is or isn’t in the budget. That way the Republicans can still be in power to decide on the critical issues of what’s in the state budget and who and what gets funded or not. We all know Democrats stole the Governor’s race . It only follows that they must have stolen the Legislature also.

And all Tim has to do is convince you to do is sign and vote for his measure to put the Republicans back in charge. But he won’t tell you that it’s an attempt to overturn the vote of the majority and give a minority of 34 members out of 98 in the Washington State House of Representatives or 17 out of 49 members in the Washington State Senate veto power over running the state.

No he won’t be talking about this attempt to put the Republicans back in charge. His scalp treatments tell him that its not really what’s in the medicine you try to sell to people, it’s what you convince them to think is in it. Eyman is planning on come out with his own line of snake oil – Eyman’s Own Scalp and Hair Remedy

Rumor has it that Eyman has been trying to convince losing Republican Gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi to buy some bottles of Stanley Clark’s Snake Oil Lineament. Eyman says he has plenty in his garage but unfortunately for some of us he is restricting sales to Republicans only. Rossi wishes he had only started taking it before his last election.

Eyman’s previous attempt on this initiative was filed as I-807 filed in 2003. At that time we wrote how Eyman had printed up invalid initiative petitions that did not have the correct text on the back . He also tried to falsely sell the initiative as “No Income Tax”. The Legislature subsequently changed the law to stop petitioners from falsely representing what an initiative was about.

But let Eyman go ahead and try to con people again. The fact is that the initiative is patently unconstitutional and like others he has written, it would be thrown out in court.

Why? We also wrote about this previously  because any attempt to give one third of the Legislature veto power over the state budget is unconstitutional. Article II, Section 22 of the Washington State Constitution gives the legislature the power to pass laws by a majority vote. Eyman can not change the state constitution by initiative.