On All Fronts: A Battle over the State's New Millionaire's Tax
As he signed Washington’s first income tax law in nearly 100 years, Gov. Bob Ferguson took great pains to remind everyone that the “millionaires’ tax” as written doesn’t apply to anyone who isn’t pulling down seven figures a year.
But the bill’s sponsor, Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, who was the biggest winner of the year in this year’s legislative session, embraced the moment as the beginning of a sea change in Washington politics, the opening of a political and legal battle to remake the state’s tax structure overall. That battle figures to be a doozy on at least three fronts.
Front One: The courts
At the heart of this fight is a challenge to the 1933 Washington Supreme Court case known as Culliton v. Chase, which found that your income is your property and therefore subject to the state constitution’s limitations on property taxation. The opponents of the tax, led by former Attorney General Rob McKenna, will hit the courthouse in a matter of days. It’s vanishingly unlikely that the current version of the Supremes will weigh in on the issue this year. Even so, opposition lawyers will want to get a case in play to tee it up for a decision sometime next year.
The pace of appellate jurisprudence is leisurely at best. The last time this issue was before the Supremes, after the Legislature approved the capital gains tax in 2021, the folks in the black robes took nearly two years to issue a ruling, and they ducked a chance to toss Culliton and adopted the Legislature’s rhetorical fig leaf that it the new tax was an excise tax.
https://www.postalley.org/2026/04/03/on-all-fronts-a-battle-over-the-states-new-millionaires-tax/