A letter published in the April 22 edition of the Kirkland Reporter, captioned “Bag ban is not equal in the City of Kirkland,” was absolutely correct.

The bag ban, as originally implemented, treated citizens unequally dependent upon their income, with EBT users exempted from the fee for bags. Now, with the City Council pulling an “Obama” by grabbing their pens and exempting a few select boutique businesses from the terms of the law, they have exacerbated the problem.

I don’t know why our City Council thinks they have a mandate to pick winners and losers. Further, I don’t know how they consistently ignore the root of our local laws and the Washington State Constitution (WSC). Have any of them ever read the WSC? How about just the first part, let’s say “Article I, Declaration Of Rights”?

Article I, Section 12 of the WSC is less than three-dozen words long and could be understood by any junior high student… just not by our City Council. It is titled “Special Privileges and Immunities Prohibited”, and reads: “No law shall be passed granting to any citizen, class of citizens, or corporation other than municipal, privileges or immunities which upon the same terms shall not equally belong to all

citizens, or corporations.”

It’s pretty simple. Laws should apply to all of us, or none of us. But with this state filled to the brim at all levels of government with progressives who want to micromanage our lives, there is little hope of that being the case. The solution: A media, including this newspaper, that starts asking politicians and those seeking political office tough questions about their philosophy of governance; about what should and

should not be the purview of government and what should remain the free choice of the people. Or we can go to the next step, just vote the bums out… from city halls to County Council rooms, to the legislature, the governor’s mansion, and our activist State Supreme Court. I can’t imagine that their replacements could do any worse.

Bruce Haigh, Kirkland