The 1891 Legislative Session: A Partisan Pitfall
A scathing editorial from the Yakima Herald decries the 'reckless' and 'prodigal' waste of public funds by the state legislature, warning of a looming political disaster for the Republican party.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The legislators of 1891 have ceased by operation of law. The taxpayers of the state may well engage in thanksgiving and prayer for the cessation of the attacks upon overburdened pocketbooks. Extravagant appropriations, reckless increase of salaried offices, and a prodigal waste of public funds, with but little commensurate good, has characterized and stigmatized the second session of the Washington legislature. As a political body, it may be well described as a partisan mass meeting, in which a shrewd, combined and designing democratic minority persistently dug political pitfalls into which the credulous and blind republican majority have unhesitatingly plunged.
“The legislature of 1891 has died a natural death; would that some of its noisome memories might be entombed in the same sepulcher, beyond the possibility of dread of resurrection.”
This editorial captures the long-standing Washington tradition of intense partisan bickering over state budgets. Today's debates over tax reform and legislative spending in Olympia echo the 1891 frustration regarding how much public money is lost to political grandstanding.
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