There are two provisions of the Washington State Constitution intended to protect private property rights:
Article 1, Section 3 which states that “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Article 1, Section 16 which requires that no private property shall be taken or damaged for public or private use without just compensation.
The Inslee Lockdown deprived people of their liberty and their property for over two years without due process of law. To make matters worse, he based his Lockdown on a PCR test with a Cycle Threshold of 37 that is known to be wrong 29 times out of 30.
https://springforbetterschools.org/1-clean-up-olympia/how-corrupt-politicians-misused-the-pcr-test
There was no scientifically credible basis for the Business Lockdowns or the School Closures or the Social Distancing or the Mask Mandates or the Shot Mandates or the Rent Moratorium.
Millions of business owners and property owners all across Washington lost their jobs and their property and suffered billions of dollars in damages.
Yet on September 28, 2023, the Washington Supreme Court issued a ruling against the Landlord’s Association – a group that had file a complaint against Inslee for his Rent Moratorium – which cost the landlords billions of dollars. The Supreme Court in a 5 to 4 decision ruled for Inslee based on the false claim that he did not “actually take their property.” See Washington Landlord Association v. Inslee
https://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/1009925.pdf
Inslee imposed a moratorium on rent from March 2020 through June 2021 – a total of 16 months. Assuming an average rent of $2000 per month, hundreds of thousands of landlords lost an average of 16 times $2000 or $32,000 in rental income.
Many if not most of these landlords were retired people living on a fixed income who were still required to make their mortgage payments and state property tax payments even though they had been deprived of their rental income. Some landlords lost even more than that. They were forced to sell their rental property in a down market just to make ends meet. Their losses could have exceeded $100,000. The total number of people who failed to pay rent was about 790,000. Therefore total losses by landlords was in the billions of dollars.
But these were not the only ones damaged. Over 1.6 million people in Washington needlessly filed unemployment claims between March and December 2020. The cost to business owners in terms of future employment taxes to restore the Unemployment Fund will be billions of dollars.
The Court claimed that Inslee’s order was not a taking without just compensation under Article 1, Section 16 of the Washington State Constitution – because the government did not actually take the landlord’s property. The Court was wrong. The billions of dollars in lost rent was also the landlords property and it was taken by government stupidity. In addition, the Constitution does not require actual taking. All that is required is damaging property for there to be the need for just compensation.
Sadly, there was no public benefit to this robbery of business owners and property owners. Sweden did not lock down and had no moratoriums. Studies have now confirmed that there was no increase in fatalities in Sweden compared to countries and states that did lockdown. Instead, the Inslee Lockdown was one of the most monstrous property rights violations in human history.
At some point, Inslee, Reykdal and Ferguson all need to be held accountable for the crimes they committed. We the People need to defend the Constitution ourselves by also holding the five Justices who failed to uphold our State Constitution accountable for this despicable ruling. Here are the five Justices who need to be voted out of office: Gonzales, McCloud, Yu, Stephens and Montoya-Lewis.