Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA) won’t face a recall election because of his Covid-19 emergency directives.
The recall backers were disgruntled by Inslee’s eviction moratorium, restrictions on public gatherings, conducting public agency meetings online, and other pandemic-related executive orders.
Last year, a lower court found their stated grounds for recall factually and legally insufficient; on Thursday, April 28, 2022, the Washington Supreme Court unanimously upheld that decision. (See story here, and read the court’s decision here.)
Recall is a way for voters to remove an elected official from office for misconduct or malfeasance before the next election.
Not a single one of the 9 justices thought Inslee broke any laws or violated citizens’ rights by using emergency powers granted by the legislature to keep Washington residents safe during the deadly Covid-19 pandemic that’s killed a million Americans nationwide.
Rightwing extremists and Republican politicians turned the Covid-19 crisis into a political football. They attacked scientists and medical experts, disputed the science behind Covid-19 public health measures and vaccines, refused to get vaccinated or comply with mask and social distancing mandates, and embraced false conspiracy theories and quack cures. They’ve acted like crazy people in response to the very real pandemic.
In a free country like ours, people have a right to be stupid, wrong, and crazy, until it harms others. In a democracy like ours, they have a right to debate public issues, and vote for the leadership and policies they want, including bad leaders and reckless policies. That’s what freedom is all about.
Washington voters had their chance to do that on November 3, 2020, when Inslee ran for re-election against a rightwing crank named Loren Culp, who made a name for himself by opposing a gun safety law while a one-man police department in a remote mining town near the Canadian border.
Inslee defeated Culp, 57%-43%; in previous elections, against more serious GOP opponents, he won by smaller percentages: 51%-48% in 2012, and 54%-45% in 2016 (details here). Voters decisively rejected Culp’s anti-Covid lunacy.
There’s little reason to believe a recall petition based on the same thinking would have fared any better at the ballot box. A recall election would merely have wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on a pointless election that changed nothing. But that’s not why the Washington Supreme Court rejected the petition. It flunked the legal tests imposed on recall petitions by state law.
It’s unknown, of course, whether Inslee will seek another term in 2024, but if he does, they can make their case to voters then.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee
Inslee (photo at left) is popular in Washington apart from his management of the Covid-19 crisis in our state.
A majority of the public supports him on that, too (notice the woman’s t-shirt slogan). Most of us wanted to be safe and survive the pandemic.
His popularity at home didn’t translate into national appeal when he ran a quixotic campaign for president in 2020 as a one-issue candidate seeking to draw attention to climate change.
He’s right on that issue, too, but mitigating climate change is a hard sell to many voters who fear change. And nationally, Democratic primary voters and caucus-goers had a bigger issue on their minds: Getting rid of Donald Trump.
In our three-branch system of government, the role of the legislature is to make society’s rules, the role of courts is to resolve disputes, and the role of the executive is to run government functions. In our pluralistic society, it’s a given that some people won’t agree with the decisions made. Our system of elections, laws, and legal dispute resolution provides an orderly process for working out those disagreements.
Some us believe that when our society faces a crisis affecting us all, we should all pull together for our common good. In the Covid-19 crisis, not everyone wanted to do that. That’s their prerogative, but I’m not sorry when they lose in the courts and at the ballot box. A basic principle of democracy is that the majority, not a noisy minority, gets to decide what we’re going to do.