Imagine for a moment that you have an emergency plan in case of a fire in your office. And you have a safety officer appointed to ensure that when the fire alarm goes off everyone in the building is evacuating in a safe, orderly fashion—according to that pre-defined plan.
So you are at work one day when you hear the piercing sounds of the fire alarm. Because of the noise and general activity, everyone assumes an actual emergency is in-progress. But as you are making your way to the nearest stairwell to get out of the building you happen to notice the appointed safety officer.
He is wandering around muttering “safety first” like a mantra to anyone he comes across, but it isn’t clear that his actions are lining up with the defined safety plan. Granted some of the things he is ordering people to do might fit the plan, but many of his actions are questionably related.
Even more telling, there are some very specific rules that he is supposed to follow during a fire emergency and these ones he is ignoring completely. While is quick to tell you that he is in-charge during an emergency, he isn’t performing a number of the specifically-prescribed tasks required of him in that emergency.
You stop to ask him, “Hey man, is there actually a fire right now? I mean, if there WAS one, shouldn’t you be following all of these procedures that are a part of the emergency?”
He replies with another chorus of “Safety first. I’m in charge. Safety first.” Then he shuffles off to do something else questionably related to what you would expect him to do if there WAS an emergency going on.
He knows these rules. He simply isn’t following them.
You would be forgiven for believing that the safety officer, with his purposeful decision to ignore the rules for an emergency, doesn’t actually believe there IS an emergency.
A month has gone by and the safety officer still insists on running the fire alarm non-stop. There may have been a risk of fire at one point, but it has long since been under control. The safety officer is leaving the fire alarm running much to the detriment of the business and the people in it (ears are bleeding and the company’s productivity is bottoming out) because he believes that it is important for him to have the perceived authority to tell people how to act as long as the alarm continues to sound.
Meanwhile, there are aspects of the emergency plan that he still has never—not once—put in to action. Does he really believe there is an emergency? Is his definition of “emergency” at odds with the actions that the plan requires of him in the event of an ACTUAL emergency?
This is Washington State.
There are dozens of criticisms of the current Washington Governor’s leadership during the last 12 months. This article will dive narrowly into just one point:
The Governor of Washington has been ignoring specific state laws that are to be enforced during a state of emergency.
This is a quick and easy point to make because the evidence is common knowledge, even if the laws in question are not. Let’s take a look at the state laws that have been ignored. There are multiple, but they are short.
People have spent the last 12 months trying to figure out if https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=43.06.220 allows the Governor to do what he has been doing. While much can and should be debated there, we’re going to skip to the lesser discussed RCWs that come afterwards.
Here come the images and text so you can see what should have been going on since February 29th, 2020 (the date that Proclamation 20-05 set a state of emergency in every county in Washington). Stay with me here, it isn’t much and it isn’t complex.
Ask yourself: during this year that we have been in a state of emergency, has destruction of property been treated as a class-B felony with a minimum 2-year sentence? Has violent, threatening behavior been punished by up to a year in prison? Have personal and property crimes committed by 16 & 17 year-olds been prosecuted as adults?
Of course not. Unless you took your social distancing to extreme levels and literally did not leave your closet through 2020 it is obvious that property damage, violent behavior, and personal injury have NOT been treated with enhanced penalties during the state of emergency. They’ve largely been given a pass and not even been prosecuted with the ‘regular’ requirements.
Understand that according to state law, in the areas where the emergencies exist if you break a window it is a felony and a minimum of 2-years in prison.
“shall be imprisoned” is unambiguous.
Since the current Governor has kept all of Washington under a state of emergency for nearly a year now, every instance of property damage anywhere in the state should have been prosecuted as a felony. There is, after all, an emergency going on and order must be maintained.
Now, I think actually doing that would be absurd—not because I don’t believe that order must be maintained during an emergency, but because I don’t believe the situation we are currently in can be treated as a legal emergency anymore. Certainly state law tends to agree with me, since those laws would not be in-place unless the vary nature of the emergency that they had in mind when writing those laws required that type of response.
One could plausibly argue that if those heavier penalties are not needed in our current situation then our current situation isn’t exactly an emergency according the laws’ own intentions.
Jay Inslee is fully aware of these laws. He chooses not to enforce them. Instead he makes his own rules via Proclamation, pretends that those are laws, and then sends various government bureaucracies out to try to enforce them.
Like the fire safety officer we started our story with, Jay Inslee demonstrates with his actions that he does not believe a legal emergency exists. He never did.
If he did, he would be following the pre-defined laws required of him in a legal emergency.
As we approach the 1-year anniversary of the day that the current governor suspended the Washington republic it is important to keep in mind that our state’ emergency powers laws did NOT have what Jay Inslee is doing in mind. Our government is not meant to work like this. It is time for the emergency declaration to be terminated.
The current governor knows that to be true. But it is good to be king (if you can scare enough people into giving you the job).