Image courtesy of TVW
State lawmakers are in the home stretch of this legislative session, where a long list of bills comes to their chamber floors for final passage, and a couple of those got some pretty heated debate in the State Senate Friday – one of those, a climate bill, which are generally popular among Olympia Democrats.
House Bill 1181 is about future city planning with climate change in mind, including state guidance for cities on how they can reduce vehicle miles traveled, which had Republicans raising concern the state or your city could limit how much you drive to reduce pollution.
Republican Senator Phil Fortunato told the chamber Washington’s carbon contribution in a year is equivalent to China’s emissions in less than 3 days, so he says we’d be better off passing a resolution to ask China to reduce its emissions by the amount Washington contributes annually.
Democrat Liz Lovelett says there’s nothing in this bill that would restrict your driving. Lovelett says it’s about planning for a future when we’ll use our cars less often.
The bill passed on a 29-20 party line vote.
A bill to ban the sale of home sexual assault testing kits, House Bill 1564 passed the state legislature but not before it also got some strong arguments in the Senate.
A task force on sexual assault testing in Washington included Democratic Senator, Manka Dhingra, who says there’s a lot more to that testing than just a DNA swab and that allowing the home kits goes against the best practices guide on testing. Dhingra says we need to make sure kits that make money off people’s suffering and give them false hope are no longer sold in the state. She says sexual assault testing also includes looking for physical signs that force was used, like bruising and redness.
Republican Senator, Mike Padden, says if you accept the false hope premise, the debate is essentially over, but he says of the 70% of victims who don’t report sexual assaults, some of them still want information they can get from the tests they wouldn’t get if the kit sales were banned.
That bill passed by a 42 to 7 vote.
One of the big ones, the bill to require a 10 day wait and safety training to buy a gun is now a few last steps away from becoming Washington law.
House Bill 1143 was among the most debated bills this session with opponents raising concerns about whether, with 700,000 gun purchases each year, we could accommodate them all for training and that it violates the 2nd Amendment protection against “impairment” of the right to bear arms. Senator Fortunato says he believes this requirement is more about that impairment of the ability to buy guns than it is about increasing safety.
Democrat T’wina Nobles says with gangs and other young people, who think they need guns to protect themselves, she wants to see people trained so that they not only understand how to handle a gun safety but that they understand when the situation might actually require a gun for self-protection.
The 28-18 party line vote sends the bill back to the House for reconciliation before it goes to the Governor.
