(The Center Square) – With Washington state Gov. Bob Ferguson signing bills into law, critics of the overuse of emergency clauses in bills are watching to see if the governor uses his veto power to remove any of those emergency clauses.
The 105-day legislative session concluded on Sunday.
An emergency clause on a bill allows it to become law immediately upon the governor’s signature, bypassing the standard 90-day waiting period before a bill takes effect. Essentially, it exempts the bill from a potential public referendum.
The purpose of the emergency clause is to allow the state government to respond to public emergencies, such as natural disasters or pandemics, but lawmakers have been attaching them to all sorts of bills that some contend are not emergencies at all.
“We did a little research, and we found out there are 183 bills,” Sen. Judy Warnick, R-Moses Lake, said when asked by The Center Square during a recent media availability event about the number of bills with an emergency clause.
Warnick said Ferguson has used his veto power to remove an emergency clause from at least one bill.
“If you recall, one of the first bills the governor signed included an emergency clause. It was a Democrat bill, and he took it off. He said it wasn’t an emergency,” Warnick said, noting Republicans would be watching with interest to see if more bills get the same treatment. “We tried to get those emergency clauses off with amendments, but they’re [Democrats] not interested. Everything is an emergency this year … so we’ll see what the governor does with those.”
As of late Tuesday, Ferguson had eliminated the emergency clause on Senate Bill 5577, which concerns Medicaid coverage for HIV antiviral drugs.
In Washington, the governor can object to specific sections or appropriation items within a bill while approving other parts of the same bill. However, the governor cannot object to less than an entire section, except if the section contains appropriation items.
Rep. Chris Corry, R-Yakima, also spoke about the liberal use of the emergency clause in legislation.
“I actually think the emergency clause is intentionally put on there to prevent a referendum,” he speculated. “I think that is highly offensive to voters in this state. They have a constitutional right to referendum. The emergency clause should have a very limited focus. None of these are true emergencies and can wait the 90 days once the governor signs them, or be subject to a referendum of the people.”
Todd Myers, vice president of research at the Washington Policy Center think tank, wrote a piece about the overuse of emergency clauses attached to bills during the legislative session. He told The Center Square he believes that a majority of Democrats are abusing their power to disenfranchise voters.
“Obviously, there has been a heightened attention to emergency clauses because of the initiatives that Let’s Go Washington and others were able to get,” Myers explained.
Voter advocacy group Let’s Go Washington gathered enough signatures to qualify six initiatives for the ballot last year. Lawmakers adopted three during the 2024 legislative session, and three others were on the ballot in November but were rejected by voters.
“A major purpose is to make it more difficult for voters to have their say because if there’s an emergency clause, you can’t put a referendum on that piece of legislation. You have to get an initiative, and the initiative takes twice as many signatures, and then also has legal challenges,” Myers said. “So that’s the game that gets played with a lot of these things.”
There are times, according to Myers, when attaching an emergency clause makes sense in a bill.
“There was a bill where there’s an emergency clause relating to how minors testify in court, to make it less traumatic for them. I don’t know that that’s an emergency per se, but certainly you don’t want to needlessly wait for months for that to take effect,” he said. “So, I don’t think every single emergency clause is disingenuous, but there are others where it’s obvious that they are afraid that if the voters have their say, that the voters will undo what some very ideologically-driven legislators have done.”
Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon, D-West Seattle, told The Center Square that attaching the clause to legislation is often necessary.
“When we’re dealing with budget matters, if an emergency clause is a difference between a cut taking effect in three months or a cut taking effect right away, that could be millions of dollars, and we had to really look at that,” the majority leader said. “In every one of these, there is a reason to make that bill take effect right away.”
Myers said he’ll be watching closely to see if Ferguson is willing to veto any additional emergency clauses in the bills he has yet to sign.
“Article 1 of the Washington State Constitution says that the people are sovereign and that the people make the decisions, not legislators,” he said, adding the State Supreme Court is unlikely to act on the matter as they’ve given legislators wide discretion in determining what they believe to be an emergency.
