What Just Happened: A Report from Rep. Mary Dye on the End of the 2025 Legislature
Rep. Mary Dye // 26 April 2025 // OLYMPIA WASH — As we approach completion of our work in the Legislature on April 27, we face the daunting task of addressing a looming budget shortfall. Tax proposals must pass to fill a budget hole of $12 billion to $20 billion.
There will be a rough-and-tumble debate, and in the end, there will be little common ground between the two caucuses. It is unlikely that a more moderate spending proposal will come from this Legislature.
While reflecting on what just happened, I could be bitter at the people who crafted this budget, a statement of principle with which I fundamentally disagree.
It is loaded with moral hazards, tempting people to become dependent on government programs.
It fails to establish logical priorities, ensuring that those genuinely in need are not abandoned. Instead, the budget eliminates funding for the aged, blind, disabled, for babies born addicted, and it closes the residential hospitals for the most impaired.
It is a bad look for the caucus in power. I can see the train wreck coming to our communities, and it is tremendously difficult not to be upset.
But last week, exhausted from the long days and late nights, I received a stack of letters from a group of sophomore high school students from Sprague, requesting we make Holocaust education mandatory.
One student, in particular, wrote so eloquently about her experience with the study and extensive reading of history. Her extraordinary letter stated why it is relevant. Her reasons: “that faith has power, survivors should never be forgotten, and patterns of the Holocaust can be applied today.”
Through this study, she found that faith is essential to her personally. She concluded that the study of the Holocaust taught her not to hate, but to love and cherish everything and everyone she has in her life, and to be thankful.
Our little House Republican caucus has a spirit of hope and light that can only be described as faith. We have intentionally preserved relationships, not letting the hatred of the policy harm the people we serve alongside. We are human, with families and lives outside of the Legislature. Allowing hate to drive us apart will only hurt our communities.
In the crucible of human interaction, struggling against the eternal story of a world that tends to tilt toward evil, only the light of faith and belief in its meaning can set the course right.
EDITOR’S NOTE: First appointed to the House of Representatives in 2015, Rep. Mary Dye is serving her sixth term, representing the 9th Legislative District. She is the ranking member of the House Environment and Energy Committee and serves on the House Appropriations and Capital Budget committees.