Republicans file new lawsuit against Governor Inslee’s stay home, stay healthy orders

A grow­ing num­ber of promi­nent Repub­li­cans in Wash­ing­ton State appear to either have a wors­en­ing case of cab­in fever or are wor­ried sick that the eco­nom­ic fall­out from the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic will doom their par­ty’s elec­toral prospects this autumn. They’re des­per­ate for a return to nor­mal­cy — the same con­cept that Repub­li­can War­ren Hard­ing cam­paigned on exact­ly one hun­dred years ago.

That’s evi­dent­ly why a bunch of them have cho­sen to par­tic­i­pate in a law­suit chal­leng­ing Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee’s stay at home order. Those par­tic­i­pat­ing include Andrew Barkis, Chris Cor­ry, Drew MacEwen, and Bran­don Vick.

Oth­er plain­tiffs include:

• Fran Wills, who has declared that her lack of access to an ath­let­ic club, which is present­ly closed due to the stay at home order, denies her a ther­a­peu­tic means of exer­cise against Mul­ti­ple Sclerosis.
• Bruce Rus­sell, own­er of the Lake Bowl bowl­ing cen­ter, restau­rant and tap room, locat­ed in Moses Lake, who says his busi­ness has lost money.
• Lee Pfluger, who says his con­struc­tion busi­ness has lost income due to the stay at home order. Lee Pfluger is also Cap­tain of the Dou­glas Coun­ty chap­ter of “Lib­er­ty State”. 

For those unaware, “Lib­er­ty State” a seces­sion­ist effort that seeks to con­vert East­ern Wash­ing­ton into a dystopi­an theocracy.

It con­sists of a col­lec­tion of mil­i­tant, rad­i­cal right wing groups and indi­vid­u­als, includ­ing Matt Shea, who has spo­ken of estab­lish­ing a “theo­crat­ic redoubt” in the Inland North­west and who has fur­ther doc­u­ment­ed means of suveilling polit­i­cal oppo­nents, dis­cussed vio­lence and harass­ment favor­ably in chat rooms, and has embraced an armed youth group prepar­ing for “bib­li­cal war­fare.”

Repub­li­can Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Drew Stokes­bary, Kel­ly Cham­bers, Mor­gan Irwin, and J. T. Wilcox (the top House Repub­li­can) expressed sym­pa­thy with the plaintiffs.

Wilcox cit­ed “irre­triev­able dam­age being done to fam­i­lies, insti­tu­tions and com­merce… We were not meant to be gov­erned in the long term by emer­gency orders… It is good to test this constitutionally.”

The law­suit alleges that the stay home, stay healthy orders are depriv­ing Wash­ing­to­ni­ans of their First and Fifth Amend­ment rights.

You can read the suit below:

Gov­er­nor Inslee’s response that same day was direct and to the point.

“It would be a hor­rif­ic sur­prise to the over eight hun­dred fam­i­lies that have already lost a loved one already to this pan­dem­ic to think that this is not a crisis.”

“I believe that posi­tion is bio­log­i­cal­ly igno­rant and humane­ly heart­less… We can’t have a good econ­o­my with­out a healthy Wash­ing­ton and the mea­sures we have tak­en are designed to pre­serve health and life itself.”

Gov­er­nor Inslee rein­forced the point when, at his media event the next day in cel­e­bra­tion of Nation­al Nurse’s Day, he asked the nurs­es invit­ed to speak with him if, semi-rhetor­i­­cal­­ly, when they spoke with fam­i­ly mem­bers who had rel­a­tives being treat­ed for COVID-19, whether fam­i­ly mem­bers cared about them less if they were more than six­ty years of age. He lat­er stat­ed clear­ly that he had no tol­er­ance for any­one who con­sid­ered oth­ers liv­ing in the state of Wash­ing­ton as poten­tial­ly dis­pos­able peo­ple, and that such talk was moral­ly repugnant.

Tina Pod­lodows­ki, Chair of the Wash­ing­ton State Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, also con­demned the law­suit in a state­ment pro­vid­ed to NPI.

“This is yet anoth­er irre­spon­si­ble action from Wash­ing­ton State Repub­li­cans that jeop­ar­dizes the sac­ri­fices so many Wash­ing­to­ni­ans have made to save lives in the fight against this virus. As Democ­rats across all of Wash­ing­ton remain com­mit­ted to fol­low­ing the sci­ence and advice of pub­lic health experts to reopen our state safe­ly, Repub­li­cans con­tin­ue to be guid­ed by the most extreme parts of their par­ty, push­ing dan­ger­ous ideas like mass infec­tion and vio­lent rebel­lion.”

“Today and every day until this Novem­ber’s elec­tion, we’ll make sure Wash­ing­to­ni­ans know who was on their side and who put their lives in dan­ger to score cheap polit­i­cal points,” Pod­lodows­ki concluded.

The afore­men­tioned law­suit is the sec­ond in a series of legal maneu­vers launched by right wing Repub­li­cans in Wash­ing­ton against Gov­er­nor Inslee’s stay home, stay healthy orders. The first law­suit was filed May 1st by Franklin Coun­ty Com­mis­sion­er Clint Didi­er and con artist Tim Eyman.