Inside a packed Olympia meeting room, Representative Ross Hunter (D-48) struggled to keep control of his House Ways and Means Committee hearing and then, eventually, gave up. Members of the Occupy movement, part of a mass of more than 1,000 protesters who had descended on the state capital as a budget-cutting special session opened on November 28, were banging on the room's doors and shouting, "Let us in!"

Washington State Patrol officers tried to keep the occupiers out, but couldn't. The protesters stormed in, shouting about looming cuts to education and social services and, in the case of Garfield High School teacher Jesse Hagopian, attempting to make a citizen's arrest of the entire legislature for being derelict in its "paramount duty" to appropriately fund state education. (As it turned out, Hagopian himself was arrested, hustled out of the room by the state patrol as Representative Hunter temporarily suspended the proceedings.)

"Many people are wondering why we're disrupting this meeting when many people want to testify," one of the occupiers shouted, mic-check-style, with the others repeating each phrase in order to amplify it for the larger crowd. "The reason we're disrupting this meeting is that many of us over the last three years have testified, and lobbied, and voted—and the governor and the legislature have given us no choice... This is what we have to do for them to listen to us."

It was a dramatic example of the frustration felt by those who have watched with growing alarm as, over the last three years, $10.5 billion has been cut from the Washington State budget due to the Great Recession, with relatively little being raised in revenue to try to offset those cuts. The protesters at the Ways and Means hearing—and four others who were arrested and three who were tased while trying to occupy the Capitol building rotunda that evening—were saying they simply won't abide the $2 billion in additional cuts that Governor Chris Gregoire is proposing to cover the latest recession-related state revenue shortfall.

But if the halting of the committee hearing signaled that, what happened next showed how hard it is to actually turn the giant, lumbering ship of state.

After the meeting was suspended, people who had come to testify about important budget matters began urging the protesters to let public business continue, pointing out that some of the committee's business involved things, like trying to save education funding, that protesters want to see happen. In response, the occupiers eventually left the room—and, in short order, the hearing picked back up again, with lawmakers considering a $42 million loan to the City of Wenatchee to keep it from defaulting on payments owed for its ill-considered Town Toyota Center. (The loan passed out of the committee easily, based on concerns that a default by Wenatchee would harm the credit ratings of other cities in Washington. "It is a balance between causing damage to other cities in the state and the moral hazard of bailing someone out," Hunter said.) Then the committee heard details of Governor Gregoire's proposal to "buy back" certain basic state services—such as care of the disabled, a full-length K–12 school year, and higher-education funding—by sending voters a referendum to temporarily raise the regressive state sales tax by half a penny.

The ship of state, in other words, continued right along its current path. "I think shutting it down and other over-the-edge activities are cool in the short term," said committee member Reuven Carlyle (D-36). "This is what democracy looks like... But in the long term, we need to function."

Protesters appeared divided on whether the path toward a temporary sales-tax increase—which would essentially make poor people pay more (as a percentage of their income) to help themselves—is really the one to follow. A number of other ideas certainly got a lot of lip service and mentions on protest signs around the capital that day: a higher-earners income tax, new bonds, a new capital-gains tax. But state senator Ed Murray (D-43) pointed out that even if there were the two-thirds majority required to pass those measures (which there isn't), none of them would get money into the state treasury right now. On the other hand, the sales tax, which is collected constantly, would. "The sales tax is immediate," Murray said.

Students from across the state prepared to head back to Olympia for more large rallies planned for Friday, December 2. The Washington Bus, a political youth-advocacy group, is busing down with students to sit in on the senate's Higher Education Steering Committee meeting. More student and labor groups are also slated to occupy the Capitol on Saturday, December 3, when the house's higher-ed committee discusses "efficiencies" and the state's Higher Education Master Plan.

In advance of the lobby days, University of Washington students announced that they can live with Gregoire's sales-tax-increase plan. "The governor's proposal is a good short-term solution," the students said in a statement. "Desperate times call for desperate measures."

Most of the Olympia protesters—and a lot of legislators—agree with that last sentence, at least.

Additional reporting by Dominic Holden and Cienna Madrid.