Washington's highest court threw out a ballot initiative that nearly two million voters approved to protect natural gas access, ruling the measure unconstitutional on procedural grounds while three dissenting justices argued the majority went too far.
The Washington Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Initiative 2066, which voters passed 52% to 48% in 2024, violated the state constitution's single-subject requirement. Chief Justice Debra Stephens, who authored the majority opinion, found the initiative contained "four constitutionally distinct subjects" and declared it unconstitutional in its entirety. The ruling affirmed a lower court decision and wiped out every provision in the measure, including protections for homeowners and businesses that wanted to keep using natural gas.
The decision hands a win to a coalition of environmental groups, local governments, and green-energy trade associations that sued to block the initiative after voters approved it. The plaintiffs included Climate Solutions, the Sierra Club, the Washington Solar Energy Industries Association, King County, and the city of Seattle, a lineup that tells you everything about who wanted this measure dead and why.
Greg Lane, executive vice president of the Building Industry Association of Washington, put the stakes plainly. He told KUOW:
"Today's decision represents a direct rejection of the clearly expressed will of Washington voters."
Lane added that the vote reflected a clear public preference for energy choice, not an abstract policy debate.
"Nearly 2 million citizens voted in favor of Initiative 2066 because they believed families and businesses should retain the freedom to choose the energy source that best meets their needs."
That freedom is now gone, not because the legislature repealed it, and not because voters changed their minds, but because six justices decided the ballot measure tried to do too many things at once. The court's single-subject rule requires that an initiative address only one topic. Stephens concluded that I-2066's provisions could not be separated, meaning the court could not save any part of the measure even if voters would have approved individual pieces standing alone.
Three justices dissented. They argued the majority could have struck the problematic sections while preserving the rest of the voter-approved initiative, a narrower remedy that would have honored at least some of what voters chose. The names of the dissenting justices were not identified in the ruling coverage.
The pattern is familiar. Courts have increasingly become the venue where progressive coalitions overturn ballot results they cannot win at the polls. Washington's Supreme Court overturning a voter-approved measure fits a broader trend of judicial intervention that leaves ordinary citizens wondering whether their votes carry any weight at all.
Chief Justice Stephens was appointed to the Washington Supreme Court in December 2007 by then-Gov. Christine Gregoire, a Democrat. She serves on the founding executive committee of the National Courts and Sciences Institute and helps convene the National Judicial College's "Dividing the Waters" program, which provides judges with education on water law and related scientific issues.
None of that amounts to a disqualifying conflict of interest on its own. But voters are entitled to notice that the justice who authored an opinion wiping out a pro-natural-gas initiative has spent years embedded in institutions focused on environmental science and resource policy. The ruling was framed as procedural, a single-subject violation, not a policy judgment. Whether that procedural framing fully explains a decision to void every word of a measure backed by a majority of the electorate is a question the court left unanswered.
Todd Myers, vice president for research at the Washington Policy Center, warned that the ruling will make an already difficult energy situation worse. He told the Daily Caller News Foundation:
"Washington state and the Pacific Northwest are facing a serious and growing shortage of electricity to meet growing demand. That is before any significant data center growth."
Myers connected the court's decision directly to the region's energy flexibility. While the ruling did not rest on policy grounds, its practical effect is to remove options for homeowners and builders at the exact moment the Pacific Northwest needs more of them, not fewer.
"The court's decision, while not based on policy, makes that situation worse by reducing the flexibility the Pacific Northwest will need to meet demand for electrification and home heating."
That is the core absurdity of Washington's energy trajectory. The state has pushed aggressive decarbonization mandates and green-energy building requirements while its electrical grid already struggles to keep pace with demand. I-2066 was voters' attempt to pump the brakes, to preserve at least the option of natural gas while the state figures out whether its grid can handle the load. The court just took that option off the table.
Courts across the country have played an outsized role in shaping policy outcomes that elected officials and voters thought they had settled. The Supreme Court's recent 7-2 ruling on mail-in ballot rules showed that even justices appointed by conservative presidents are willing to reach conclusions that frustrate the political right. Washington's ruling lands in similar territory, a procedural rationale producing a policy outcome that one side of the debate badly wanted.
Myers did not spare the state legislature or the previous governor. He argued that the underlying laws I-2066 sought to reverse were the real problem, and that the court's decision simply compounds the damage.
"Ultimately, the blame falls on the legislature and previous governor for this irresponsible law but by ignoring the will of the voters, the Supreme Court has ignored the very families who will end up paying the price for Washington's energy shortage."
The families Myers described are not abstractions. They are homeowners who chose natural gas for heating because it is reliable and affordable. They are builders who need flexibility to construct homes people can actually afford to live in. And they are the nearly two million Washington residents who went to the polls, cast their ballots, and watched a court erase the result.
President Trump moved in March to address this kind of regulatory overreach at the federal level. He directed federal agencies via executive order to target state and local policies his administration argues increase the cost of housing, including "green-energy building requirements" and "energy-choice restrictions." Whether that federal pressure will reach Washington's building codes in time to matter remains an open question.
The tension between federal deregulation and state-level green mandates is playing out in courtrooms and statehouses simultaneously. Separate Supreme Court orders have frustrated the administration on other fronts, and state courts have shown little hesitation in blocking measures that conflict with progressive policy goals, even when voters approved those measures directly.
The coalition that brought the lawsuit reads like a directory of Washington's green-energy establishment. Climate Solutions, Washington Conservation Action, Front and Centered, the Washington Solar Energy Industries Association, and the Sierra Club joined forces with King County and the city of Seattle to challenge the initiative. That combination, activist nonprofits allied with deep-blue local governments, assembled the legal firepower to overturn a statewide vote.
The single-subject argument gave the court a procedural off-ramp. It did not have to rule on whether natural gas bans are good policy or whether voters have the right to protect energy choice. It simply found that the initiative tried to do too many things at once. But the result is identical to what the environmental coalition would have achieved through a policy ruling: every protection in I-2066 is gone.
For voters who supported the measure, the distinction between a procedural loss and a policy loss is academic. Their votes produced the same outcome either way, nothing. And the organizations that opposed I-2066 at the ballot box and lost now celebrate a courtroom victory that delivered what the electorate refused to give them.
Judicial decisions that override the ballot box are not unique to Washington. The Supreme Court's repeated blocking of Missouri's redrawn congressional map showed how courts can reshape political outcomes that voters and legislators thought were settled. In each case, the question is the same: who actually governs?
The three dissenting justices in Washington offered a partial answer. They believed the court could have struck the offending provisions and preserved the rest, a remedy that would have respected both the constitution's single-subject rule and the voters' clearly expressed preference for natural gas access. The majority chose the more aggressive path and voided the entire initiative.
Washington voters passed I-2066 because they wanted a say in their own energy future. Six justices decided they do not get one. If the court's procedural reasoning is sound, the blame belongs to whoever drafted the initiative. But if nearly two million votes can be erased on a technicality while environmental groups cheer, the system is working for someone, just not the people who showed up to vote.
