In Washington State, you can't amend the constitution by initiative. Which is why with today's landmark court ruling, the two-thirds legislative supermajority requirement for tax increases is dead, dead, dead.

Sure, armed-and-dangerous state Senator Pam Roach (R-Auburn) already had a two-thirds supermajority constitutional amendment bill in the hopper, and soon after today's court decision Senate Republicans quickly jammed it through the Ways & Means Committee. (They had earlier threatened to impose the requirement via Senate rules, but quickly abandoned that ill-conceived effort.) So it's on its way to the Senate floor. But even if they bully enough Democrats to get the necessary two-thirds support (unlikely), it's never going to see the light of day in the Democratic controlled House.

"It has to go through the House Finance Committee," state Representative Reuven Carlyle explained to me this afternoon. "I happen to know the chair pretty well, and I would say it's a heavy lift." Carlyle, of course, is the chair of the House Finance Committee. So that's pretty much that.

And that's the thing about supermajority requirements: They're supposed to be an awfully high hurdle. The framers of our state constitution understood that when they imposed a supermajority on some things—like passing constitutional amendments—while setting simple majority requirements for passing day to day legislation: For if you could amend the constitution by a simple majority, either legislatively or at the polls, then it really wouldn't be a constitution at all.

So barring a dramatic political realignment in Washington State—one which gives Republicans and their road-kill sympathizers supermajority control of both houses—a constitutional amendment imposing a two-thirds supermajority requirement for tax increases will never make it to the ballot. Which is the way this whole constitutional government thing is supposed to work.