For many years — a couple of decades, actually — the people of Washington State have been trying to achieve reasonable car tab fees (taxes).

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And each time the voters have tried, the leftists in the state have “judiciaried” the heck out of their votes (yes, this situation deserves a new verb). 

After trying since 1999, the people still don’t have the reasonably priced car tabs they’ve voted for repeatedly.

And now, with the help of a liberal judge (not hard to find in the state of Washington), the sore-loser Left may once again thwart the voters.

The original aim of citizen initiatives was to establish $30 car tabs. Not only has the state’s leftist power structure used the courts to keep $30 car tabs at bay, it’s increased the annual taxes to well beyond $30 — to amounts that are demonstrably unreasonable and unfair. 

Rather than the state’s basing a car’s annual tax assessment on its Kelley Blue Book value, the state starts its math with the vehicle’s MSRP (manufacturer suggested retail price). This is objectively outrageous.

KING 5 News spoke with a driver about his new tax bill back in 2016.

“I think this is why people are so confused,” driver Michael Martinez, who lives in Mukilteo and voted in favor of ST3 — Sound Transit 3 — told the news station. “It’s really kind of sad. It felt, at least from my perspective, that we were duped.”

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Say it ain’t so. 

Related: Will There Be a Citizen’s Arrest of the Washington State Attorney General Over Gun Laws? Not So Fast

And what caused Martinez’s sticker shock, you say? That would be a bill “three times what he had paid last year [2015].” 

ST3, or Sound Transit 3, is the third in a series of transportation taxes approved by voters in the years 1996, 2008, and 2016. This boondoggle has, as a part of it, a regional light rail system for which I have an apt anecdote. 

I was driving my patrol car through a road construction site in Seattle. An officer who was working off-duty directing traffic flagged me down. He asked me to guess why they had to delay this portion of the light rail project. I didn’t know. 

He told me construction crews had to dig up and remove rail tracks that had remained after a previous time the city got rid of “light rail” (the interurban). Now, they had to remove light rail tracks, so they could install — light rail tracks.

As with socialism, the Left feels it can make it work — this time. 

Anyway, the people have just voted for I-976: Limits on Motor Vehicle Taxes and Fees Measure, as they attempt again to reduce their tax burden. Perennial initiative-maestro Tim Eyman, a controversial political activist, was at it again. This time he tried to make sure this measure was written so it was “injunction-proof.” 

But with this new crop of radical Democrats, nothing is beyond judicial fiat.

Logic is no longer necessary when making judgments; only leftist ideology need apply.

Eyman and his supporters finally hoped to get the $30 car tabs they’ve been trying to achieve for what seems like forever. 

Eyman and a majority of the state’s voters got their wish. But their win may, once again, be temporary.

Essentially, I-976 passed everywhere in the state except for Seattle. No surprise there. Though Seattle’s voters overwhelmingly rejected the initiative, I-976 still won statewide with 53 percent of the vote — in what is otherwise a blue state.

And this was after the opposition spent $4.6 million to the proponents’ $694,000.   

So, almost immediately after losing the vote, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan joined with King County Executive Dow Constantine and other local government entities to sue to obtain a court injunction to stop the voter-approved initiative from taking effect. 

Both Durkan and Constantine are card-carrying “woke” leftists. And, as we’ve been seeing at the federal level, the Democrats are perpetrating ceaseless hoaxes against President Donald Trump because they lost the 2016 presidential election.

You see, Democrats are no longer allowed to lose — anything, anywhere, at any time. 

Democrats can’t lose the presidency and are doing everything they can to undo a legal election that would nullify the votes of some 63 million voters.

At the state level, the Democrat establishment cannot lose, either. 

So what if a majority of the votes cast by voters — who are tired of being ripped off by the state and the unelected bureaucrats at the corrupt syndicate known as Sound Transit — voted for $30 car tabs? They don’t like the way the vote went, so it cannot stand. 

Here’s the formula. If Democrats win, the vote was legitimate; it the Democrats lose, the vote was corrupt. There’s more Democrat math for you.   

As for lower tab fees, not so fast, voters. Washington’s — in particular, Seattle’s — Democrat bullies do not recognize your sacred right to vote, to cast a ballot. Democrats are always accusing Republicans and conservatives of trying to suppress these votes. You know, like going to the state’s liberal courts to overturn a vote of the people — would you call that voter suppression? If not, how is it not? 

We’re not talking about challenging a vote in court that infringes on or overturns a constitutional right such as free speech, equal justice, or gun rights.

We’re talking about a state deceptively and unfairly imposing exorbitant taxes on the people.

Maybe I missed a constitutional convention where they voted that people now have a “right” to have their government impose extortionist-level car tab fees on them. 

And it’s not only in Washington State. Democrat governments are doing this all over America.

As a foreshadow, Professor Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote about what liberals, using the judiciary, did to the people of the California after they passed Proposition 187 in 1994. 

At Townhall.com, VDH wrote, “Liberal groups immediately sued in federal court. Just three days after the measure passed, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing Proposition 187, which would deny social services for illegal immigrants, from going into effect. A month later, U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer issued a permanent injunction. Prop 187 never became law.” 

This is the formula leftists are now repeating in Washington State and in other places with more frequency.

Will the judiciary similarly back the Democrats’ attack on democracy?

Sadly, it’s likely they will — because it’s just a fact of life that the formerly liberal, and now socialistic, Democrats are no longer very democratic. 

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