Washington's highest court struck down Initiative 2066, a measure voters passed to protect natural gas access, ruling it crammed too many subjects into one ballot question, and handing a win to the environmental groups and local governments that sued to block it.
The Washington Supreme Court issued its decision Thursday, invalidating the initiative in its entirety on constitutional grounds. Chief Justice Debra Stephens wrote the majority opinion for the six-justice bloc, finding that I-2066 violated Article II, Section 19 of the state constitution, the provision that bars lawmakers and initiative sponsors from bundling unrelated subjects into a single measure. Three justices dissented, arguing the court should have preserved the parts of the initiative that passed constitutional muster rather than throwing the whole thing out.
Washington voters approved I-2066 in November 2024 with 51 percent of the vote. The measure never took effect. A coalition of environmental organizations, the City of Seattle, and King County filed suit almost immediately, and a King County Superior Court judge agreed in 2025 that the initiative violated the single-subject rule. The state Supreme Court took up the case on appeal, and KIRO Newsradio reported that the high court sided with the challengers.
The Building Industry Association of Washington drafted I-2066 and partnered with Let's Go Washington, a conservative political committee, to collect signatures. The initiative spanned more than a dozen sections. Its backers framed it as a single-purpose measure: protect access to natural gas for Washington homes and businesses.
The court disagreed. Chief Justice Stephens wrote that the initiative contained four distinct subjects, protecting access to natural gas, restricting local air-quality authorities, changing statewide building-code requirements, and repealing the severability provision of the state's Decarbonization Act. That last item targeted a 2024 state law designed to accelerate Puget Sound Energy's transition away from natural gas.
Stephens wrote in the opinion:
"Article II, section 19 forbids combining separate subjects in a single bill or initiative, requiring instead that distinct subjects be enacted separately to protect against unconstitutional logrolling and to ensure transparency in the legislative process. I-2066 violates this single-subject rule because it includes several provisions with markedly distinct purposes and regulatory effects, embracing four distinct subjects."
The majority rejected arguments that the provisions could be treated as parts of a broader energy policy. And the court did not bother ruling on every other constitutional challenge the plaintiffs had raised, the single-subject violation was enough to kill the entire initiative.
Justice Sal Mungia wrote the dissent, joined by Justices Charles Johnson and Sheryl Gordon McCloud. Mungia argued that courts are required to presume initiatives are constitutional and should interpret them to preserve validity whenever possible. He said the unconstitutional portions could have been severed, cut away, while leaving the rest of the measure intact.
Mungia's dissent carried a pointed message about the role of judges:
"Although, as members of the judiciary, we at times may not agree with the policies behind an initiative, it is our job to maintain and uphold the law. Here, following our long-standing rules of constitutional interpretation, this court can uphold much of I-2066 as constitutional and should do so."
That language, "we at times may not agree with the policies", reads as a rebuke of the majority's willingness to invalidate a voter-approved measure wholesale rather than preserve its salvageable parts. Voters chose this policy by majority. The dissent says the court owed them more than a clean sweep.
Brian Heywood, founder of Let's Go Washington, issued a statement calling the decision "shameful." He framed it as something bigger than one ballot measure.
"Today's decision by the Supreme Court is shameful, not only because it punishes families making heating their homes more expensive, but because it appears to be a coordinated effort by all three branches of the government to annihilate the initiative process itself."
Greg Lane of the Building Industry Association of Washington, which drafted the initiative, told The Washington State Standard that his group had considered how the measure aligned with past Supreme Court rulings on the single-subject rule before putting it on the ballot. He said the court moved the goalposts.
"I think that the court has really stepped into the legislative process and changed it. This could mean laws approved by the Legislature won't hold up."
Lane's warning is worth pausing on. If the court's reading of the single-subject rule is as broad as he suggests, it does not stop at initiatives. Legislation passed by the state Legislature routinely bundles provisions across related policy areas. A strict application of Thursday's reasoning could expose existing statutes to the same challenge, a prospect that should concern lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, and one that mirrors a broader pattern of courts reshaping policy through procedural rulings.
The coalition that sued to block I-2066, Climate Solutions, Front and Centered, Washington Conservation Action, the City of Seattle, and King County, got everything it asked for. Kai Smith, the attorney representing the coalition, told The Washington State Standard that the constitution left no room for the initiative to stand.
"Every law, whether passed by the Legislature or through the citizen initiative process, has to comply with the constitution... and, today, I-2066 does not."
Gregg Small, executive director of Climate Solutions, called the ruling "a win for Washington families in keeping our energy affordable and clean." He added that the group welcomed "this timely ruling in support of clearer, more honest information on how initiatives impact our lives and communities."
Former Governor Jay Inslee, who championed many of Washington's clean energy policies during his time in office, posted his reaction on X. He called the decision "a major victory for the health of Washingtonians, for our clean air and water, and for our utility bills, prevailing over the deception of corporate special interests and big polluters."
Let's Go Washington fired back at Inslee on social media: "Jay thinks it's a huge victory for homes and small businesses not to be allowed to decide what energy they use to heat their homes and power their businesses, and it's a huge victory to overturn the will of the people. Whose team is he on?"
Strip away the legal terminology and the competing press statements, and the core of this case is straightforward. A majority of Washington voters approved a measure to protect their access to natural gas. Environmental groups and two of the state's largest local governments sued to stop it. A lower court blocked it. The state Supreme Court finished the job.
The constitutional single-subject rule exists for a reason, to prevent logrolling, the practice of packaging unrelated provisions together so that legislators or voters must accept all of them or none. That is a legitimate concern. But the dissent's argument is equally legitimate: when a measure can be partially saved, courts should save what they can rather than erase the entire vote.
The majority chose the more aggressive path. It did not sever the provisions it found objectionable. It did not preserve the portions that stood on their own. It struck the whole thing down. The result is that Washington families who voted to keep natural gas as an option are left with nothing, not even the parts of the initiative that three justices said were constitutional.
Courts across the country have increasingly become the venue where policy battles are won and lost, often overriding outcomes that voters chose at the ballot box. That dynamic has played out at the federal level on voting rules and on high-profile social questions alike. Washington's ruling fits that pattern.
Heywood called it a coordinated effort to destroy the initiative process. Lane warned it could unravel existing legislation. The dissenters said the majority abandoned its own long-standing interpretive rules. Those are serious charges from serious people, and none of them got a serious answer from the six justices who voted to wipe the slate clean.
When voters pass a law and the courts erase it on procedural grounds while three of their own colleagues say the reasoning doesn't hold up, the people who cast those ballots deserve to ask whose will actually governs in Washington State.