EIGHT COLLUSIVE CLAIM LAWSUITS -- BACKGROUND
A handful of Seattle lawyers regularly obtain from that court opinions saying what governments want despite laws and legal authorities to the contrary that should protect the public's rights and interests. This occurs in lawsuits implicating municipal governance, long-term bond contracts, and taxation powers. Collusive claims are brought, and the justices respond by handing out ad hoc case law.
The lawyers at the center of these lawsuits are from the law firms that represent local governments and the underwriters in connection with municipal bond issuances -- this 2016 Official Statement identifies them:
https://m.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/series-2016-green-bonds-official-statement.pdf
When these lawsuits are brought before them the justices overlook 1) the anomalies in the pleadings, briefings and court records, as well as 2) the lawyers’ conflicts of interest. The justices then disregard controlling legal authorities and invent aberrant decisional law from whole cloth. The primary reason for this behavior is banal: it ensures the justices' cakewalk reelections.
The Wikipedia entry about collusive claims is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusive_lawsuit
It references several other examples of collusive litigation.
Due to the opinions discussed below, and unlike anywhere else in the country, households of modest means here now are subjected to perpetual and heavy regressive taxing for transit. Households are harmed financially, and the people who can least afford it are harmed the most. There is no good reason for financing buses or trains as it is done here (numerous examples exist of vastly superior transit governance and infrastructure financing practices).
Background.
In 1990 a voting right over the councilmembers of a municipality based in Seattle that was taxing, issuing long term debt, and financing/operating transit was determined to be unconstitutional. That Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle voting right violated Americans' fundamental right to an equal vote to control who their local legislators are. The particular 14th Amendment limit on states’ powers 's voting right violated was the one-person, one-vote requirement of the equal protection clause. The state statutes that provided this voting right operated to render the votes of some of the districts' residents less effective than those other residents obtained.
Outside counsel for old-Metro included lawyers from Preston Gates and Foster Pepper. They wanted a new, fatter cash cow municipal entity. They prepared some draft enabling statutes, and in 1992 the state legislature adopted those. They called it Sound Transit. Its board was delegated more substantial governmental powers than old-Metro possessed. Problem is, the unprecedented-in-the-U.S. statute establishing the voting right over Sound Transit’s boardmembers provided an attenuated form of franchise right that fails to meet 14th Amendment standards.
In the lawsuits described below, collusive claims were brought to provide case law "cover" for the legal flaws with Sound Transit's voting right, certain of its taxing and other financing practices, and that government’s use of state highway infrastructure. The Justices eagerly delivered what the governments' lawyers wanted in these pretextual lawsuits.
