Rep. Jim Walsh - Is he preparing a run for Washington governor?

Washington Republicans are already looking ahead to 2028 as questions grow about who can build a statewide conservative coalition. Could Jim Walsh be the one preparing to lead that effort?

Rep. Jim Walsh serves as the State Representative for Washington’s 19th Legislative District. He joins the show to discuss whether he is considering a future run for governor, why he believes conservatives need a stronger statewide ground game, and what a coordinated Republican strategy could look like in Washington.

Transcript

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Welcome back to the Lawrence Larson Show. It's a pleasure to be with you on a Monday on the Radio Northwest Network and a real pleasure to take your calls. I'll get to your calls in a moment. But first, I got to make room for Representative Jim Walsh, who's chosen this show and this moment to announce his run for governor of Washington State. Representative Walsh, go ahead, make the announcement. You're going to get me in a world of trouble here. Maybe we need to get him on the air to announce for me. So that everyone is clear, I am a state legislator in Washington, and for now that's what I am. The governor has decided that I am his most likely challenger or opponent and is trying to make a deal out of this. And it's kind of silly. I'd love to debate the governor. I think we ought to have uh uh a Lincoln Douglas style series of debates where we we take on one issue at a time for an hour or two and talk about how we can fix what's broken in Washington, but uh I don't think the governor's gonna take up the challenge uh on this. I'll tell you what, if you can get Bob Ferguson on this program, I I think you could probably accomplish anything. I would be glad to have Governor Ferguson on if he was willing to answer a few questions. But I'll tell you what, I know you've thrown down the gauntlet to Ferguson saying, let's do some LD. I used to do Lincoln Douglas debate myself a long time ago. I'd love to have that, and I'll agree to host it and we'll we'll put it on around the entire state, in fact, around the entire region. If you can get Ferguson to agree to it, we'll agree to air it on the program. But I mean, I was only kidding, but if you're gonna run for governor, you really have to start a couple years out, don't you? Yeah, that's true. But I mean, we need to get through the midterms we got coming up this year first. We got uh we got some initiatives uh already on the ballot protecting girls' sports and restoring the parents' bill of rights, and we got a couple more initiatives out gathering signatures that may be on the November ballot. That would be to repeal the state income tax and require voter ID when people register. So we got all that going on. We got five, an unusually large number, five state Supreme Court judge positions up this November, and we've got uh a couple of hot Congress races and uh and the legislative races. So we've got a lot going on this year. I think we wait at least until this year's cycle is over before anybody announces or anybody files seriously about what will happen 28th. But to your point, yeah, increasingly in our system, uh you need to declare early. But but for 2028, early would be at the end of this year or early next year. You know what I'd love to see be one of the major issues, and it's less I mean, there's energy, there's timber, there are a lot of issues I'd like to see addressed by the governor's races. But I'd love to have this addressed in both Oregon and Washington, because we cover both on this show. Idaho doesn't have as many offensive things going on, but we cover them too. But there seems to be increasingly a we're going to do this, and the and we know the public hates the idea, and we're not going to let the public have any say. And I think that goes double in Washington State because they pass bills and then they say they're going to go into effect emergency-wise, you know, in emergency fashion, and we're not even going to let the public have a say about this. When did representative government end in the state of Washington? It didn't. And that's the reason that Ferguson and the Senator Jamie Peterson and some of the other far-left people are so nervous. That's why they're so scared and they're lashing out like they are. They know they're in the wrong, Lars. They know they're in the wrong. The Washington State Constitution is crystal clear that the people retain the right of initiative and referendum. That means they never gave it up. They never give to the legislature or the governor the right to make law with no say of the people. That right always stays with the people. And and Ferguson and Peterson and the state attorney general Brown, they're trying to pretend they can they can kind of lawyer their way around that, but they can't. And they are in the wrong and they know it, and I think that's why they're so so anxious and so uh so so lashing out in these kind of silly ways. I'm talking to Representative Jim Walsh, who is, as he points out, just a state representative, not yet a candidate for Washington governor, although I was pushing to see if I could get him to say it today. Uh, but I understand why you hold back. But one of the important issues is the Democrats have already made it clear, and you made this point, that they're not just passing a tax, an income tax on millionaires. They refused to actually limit it to that, didn't they? Yeah, there was a chance while the bill was being debated to make that ex they could have accepted an amendment that would have codified, make strong that this this millionaire threshold could never be taken out. But they they rejected that amendment. And as it stands in the bill, which is a long bill, it's 109 pages long. There is one paragraph that creates uh an exemption threshold on the state income tax. And importantly, Lars, that one paragraph is not structurally connected by reference or otherwise to any other part of the bill. So it would be very easy in the future for Ferguson and Peterson and the others to knock out that one paragraph, and then the state income tax is a 9.9% state income tax on every household in Washington. And that Senator Peterson has said that's his ultimate goal. He's been open about it. Well, in fact, Representative Walsh, when they said we have to hire 300 people to manage this tax that's gonna apply to a couple of thousand or a few thousand people in the entire state of Washington, aren't they already saying we're gonna build the infrastructure already to collect a tax? It's not just a millionaire tax, because if it was just a millionaire tax, how many people do you actually need to oversee something like that? Certainly not 300. That's correct. The state, the Washington State Department of Revenue has been historically a relatively smaller state agency. And as part of this new scheme, uh the governor is already building it up, so it's gonna be a state version of the uh Internal Revenue Service. It will be the IRS. They're staffing it up, they're gonna require people to fill out the paperwork, the tax returns, even if they don't pay the state income tax. The whole system is being engineered to be a state income tax on everyone, and and they're hiding in plain sight, Lars. They're it's clear to anyone who looks at it that that's their plan, and we need to we need to stop this. We need to repeal this. I mean, so they're gonna make everybody fill out the paperwork, whether they're millionaires or not. Uh, it it's it they've been very clever. The law doesn't speak to it, but it allows the state agency, the state Washington State Department of Revenue, to build up such systems as it needs to implement the state income tax. And so they will require people to show what they're making in order to know whether they're exempt or not from paying the state income tax. So it really is uh they're they're sort of defeated by their own logic and how they're trying to justify doing this. It's a bad deal, and we have that initiative out gathering signatures to repeal it, and I think that we need to strike fast. We need to get this thing over to the phone. I was up in Packwood, Washington the other day, and I signed the thing myself. I want to make sure this thing makes the ballot and the public gets a vote. That's Representative Jim Walsh. He'll be running for governor one of these days.