Washington Gov. Jay Inslee may have an awkward time of it Monday as he is supposed to be meeting with President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C. on the heels of gloating about beating the president’s immigration order in court.
The awkwardness might be amplified by what is happening back home in “the other Washington.” The Seattle Times chided the governor last week over getting face time nationally for the Trump confrontation while two efforts to remove Inslee from office have now been launched.
One calls for his impeachment. The other is seeking a recall.
Inslee won re-election in November, and recently his stature has been growing with talk that he might be eyeballing a presidential run in 2020. All of this seems to have been precipitated by the liberal governor’s leap into the national spotlight on the immigration issue, for which Democrat Attorney General Bob Ferguson is also enjoying the attention.
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But Inslee appears determined to make as many enemies as friends with his executive order last week that essentially made all of Washington a “sanctuary state.” As the Seattle Times reported, his new order restricts state employees and agencies “from helping enforce federal immigration laws.”
This came on the heels of a Washington State trooper’s chance encounter of an illegal alien for whom the immigration authorities were actively looking. Now the trooper is under investigation for alerting the feds he’d found their subject.
At the petition site where the impeachment effort is trying to gather support (about half of the goal has been reached so far), there’s a message that accuses the governor of supporting a state income tax, and for taking credit for the accomplishments of others.
The Times editorial has a little more meat, noting that, “Inslee is also responsible for the ongoing mess at Western State Hospital, which has been a money pit of dysfunction for years.” In fairness, Inslee didn’t create that fiasco. It just might be the result of more than 30 years of single-party occupation of the governor’s office in Olympia.
The petition calls for Inslee’s impeachment. Not much chance of that with Ferguson sitting in the Attorney General’s chair and Democrats controlling the state House of Representatives.
Were it not for the reflexive Democrat vote in Seattle (the standing joke anywhere off the I-5 corridor is that Seattleites would support Charles Manson if he ran for office as a Democrat) Inslee might have had a hard time being elected in 2012, much re-elected last year.
Now that he’s turned the state into the far left version of Utopia with an executive order that can’t possibly make the president or his administration happy, the governor better hope nothing happens over the next four years for which he might need the president’s good will.
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