Spokane City Council member says progressives on council tried to silence conservatives

The Spokane City Council has been in the process of drafting its new procedural rules for 2025 and the conservative minority said they were targeted.

Spokane City Council members Jonathan Bingle and Michael Cathcart said the proposed rule changes would effectively make their presence on the council superfluous.

“Number one, they were going to move the day to where I couldn’t attend,” Bingle told “The Jason Rantz Show” on KTTH. “Number two, they were going to make it to where you had to have three sponsors to bring something forward, which effectively would have silenced the conservative minority and any one district, they were reducing the time for public testimony from three minutes to two minutes.”

Bingle said he’s certain the rule changes were intended to silence conservatives.

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Bingle also said the rule proposal prevented them from criticizing policies past or present.

“Also, they were going to make it where we couldn’t question motives, and we couldn’t bring up any prior council action,” he explained.

Bingle said it would present a potentially “overbearing majority” that James Madison warned about in Federalists 10 and 51. However, thanks to the conservative minority sounding the alarms, he said they received a wave of grassroots support to strike the rule changes down.

“We have a lot of community organizations that have risen up in the last year and a half, and they have gotten very loud,” Bingle shared. “And I think they were feeling the pressure, because they walked back literally every one of those things to say, ‘OK, sorry, sorry. We didn’t mean it.'”

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Bingle said this incident highlighted the importance of civic engagement and holding your elected officials accountable.

“Public shame is a tool that’s underused, and we’ve been wielding it very well,” he said.

You can listen to the full interview with Bingle here:

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