During the Senate Ways & Means Committee executive session on the proposed 9.9% income tax (SB 6346), Republican members offered a series of amendments that would have added basic taxpayer protections, improved transparency, and addressed glaring problems in the bill. Democrats rejected every single one of them, often without much explanation and on a voice vote. If the majority is confident this tax is good policy, you'd think they could at least agree to study its impact on middle-income families or let voters weigh in. These were the rejected amendments:
Amendment 20 - Replaces the out-of-state income tax credit with a complete tax exemption for income already subject to tax in another state.
A credit and an exemption are not the same thing. A Washington resident earning income in Oregon who already pays Oregon's income tax could still end up with a net tax hit here. If you want to avoid double taxation, you exempt the income. Period.
Amendment 21 - Delays implementation of the income tax by one year.
Washington has never administered an income tax. There are no forms, no systems, no enforcement infrastructure. None of it exists yet. Expecting all of that to be built while taxpayers simultaneously comply on day one is unlikely to happen.
Amendment 22 - Allows unused tax credits to be carried back or forward and removes the provision disallowing loss carryforwards for taxable years prior to the effective date.
Say you're a contractor who pours money into a construction project for several years before it's completed and turns a profit. Under this bill, you can't carry those losses forward, so you get taxed on the big payday with zero recognition of the years you were losing money.
Amendment 23 - Allows taxpayers to claim a charitable deduction equivalent to the amount claimed for federal income tax purposes.
Without this, a donor giving $500,000 a year to a local hospital foundation or university sees the effective cost of that gift jump significantly. It’s a direct incentive to scale back giving to the organizations Washington communities actually rely on.
Amendment 24 - Increases the standard deduction to $2 million for joint filers, removing the marriage penalty.
Two unmarried people each get a $1 million deduction. A married couple only gets that same $1 million deduction. Sen. Braun made the point well: rather than lining this up with the capital gains tax structure, why not just do the right thing and stop penalizing people for being married?
Amendment 25 - Provides a deduction for compensation derived from Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
A software engineer at Microsoft or Amazon whose comp package is heavily weighted toward RSUs could get hit with an enormous tax bill the moment those shares vest, even though they had no control over the timing. That's one more reason for employers to move those jobs somewhere else.
Amendment 26 - Provides a sales and use tax exemption for diapers.
The whole stated rationale for the income tax is reducing regressivity. Yet Democrats voted against removing the sales tax on diapers for babies and for elderly adults in nursing care. It's hard to square those two positions.
Amendment 27 - Requires JLARC to analyze the estimated change in household tax burden for households at or below 150% of statewide median income.
If a family making $80,000 a year ends up worse off because of indirect effects like job losses or shifted business costs, the legislature ought to know that before the bill takes effect, not after.
Amendment 28 - Removes the section stating that the bill is for the support of state government and its existing public institutions.
That language is there for one reason: it invokes the constitutional exemption that blocks voters from filing a referendum. Voters have rejected an income tax 11 times, so Democrats wrote the bill specifically to make sure the public have a harder time weighing in on this one.
Amendment 29 - Specifies that the bill is unconstitutional because it violates well-established state constitutional limitations on property taxes.
Washington courts have said repeatedly that income is property under the state constitution, which means any income tax must meet the 1% uniformity limit. Legislators would rather spend years in court trying to gain access to a new revenue source than deal with that reality.
Amendment 30 - Makes the act null and void unless voters approve a constitutional amendment by December 2026 capping the rate at 9.9% and setting the minimum standard deduction at $1 million per household.
If legislators actually believe this tax will never expand beyond $1 million in adjusted gross income, then letting voters lock in that cap should be the easiest "yes" vote of the session. The fact that they won't indicates where this is headed.
