Washington state governor Jay Inslee running for president in 2020?

by DCG

jay inslee and obama

Jay Inslee (r) and his buddy Obama

Demorat Jay Inslee has been governor of Washington State since 2013 and is a career politician. About his background, from Wikipedia:

“He served in the Washington House of Representatives from 1989 to 1993, and then represented Washington’s 4th congressional district, which included parts of the state around Yakima, in the United States House of Representatives from 1993 to 1995. Defeated for re-election in 1994, Inslee returned to private practice, and then ran for governor in the 1996 election, coming fifth in the blanket primary ahead of the general election, which was won by Democrat Gary Locke. Inslee then served as regional director for the United States Department of Health and Human Services under President Bill Clinton.

Inslee was elected back to the House of Representatives in 1998, this time for Washington’s 1st congressional district, which included Seattle‘s northern suburbs in KingSnohomish, and Kitsap counties. He was re-elected six times before announcing that he was running for governor again on June 27, 2011. He resigned from Congress on March 20, 2012, in order to focus on his campaign.”

Apparently some think he’s going to run for president in 2020. From SF Gate:

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee isn’t a household name outside the Pacific Northwest, but that could soon change — the 67-year-old Democrat is starting to be mentioned as a possible 2020 presidentialcandidate.

He’s got progressive cred as the head of a state that legalized same-sex marriage and recreational cannabis before California, although he was initially opposed green-lighting legal weed. Washington declared itself a sanctuary state before California, and Inslee and other state leaders were among the first to sue the Trump administration over its initial plan to ban travel to the U.S. from several majority-Muslim nations.

Now, as the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, Inslee travels the nation as one of its loudest critics of President Trump.

His central theme: denouncing the administration’s “eagerness to deceive the American public with what’s going on with their business. … (Trump) does it every day,” as he put it recently on The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast. “It is a threat to democracy when you have a president who is willing to use the bully pulpit to be a bully.”

Like other Democrats, Inslee argues that Trump is “grossly” and “repeatedly” exaggerating when he says his immigration crackdown along the southern border is necessary because of “an ‘infestation’ of MS-13 GANGS in certain parts of our country.”

Inslee recently visited an immigrant detention center in his state and said the people there weren’t members of the fearsome Salvadoran gang. “These are the victims of the gangs,” Inslee said. “These are the people who are most angry and fearful of the gangs. These are the people that American policy has provided a legal means of asylum. So yes, there is gang activity. And these are the people you should be embracing, not victimizing with your distortion of reality.”

He called Trump’s argument “a propaganda exercise that this administration has embraced and used as a tactic.”

It’s just the sort of red-meat rhetoric that could appeal to voters in the Democratic presidential primaries in 2020, which happens to be the last year of Inslee’s second term as governor. Is that thought running through his mind? “I’m focused on 2018,” he said. “If you’re thinking about 2020, you’re not doing your job.”


While the SF Gate article touts Inslee’s TDS, let’s take a look at some of the governor’s accomplishments, shall we?

Under Inslee’s leadership the psychiatric hospital, Western State Hospital, recently failed a federal inspection and the place is called ‘hell.”

From the AP article“Behind tall brick walls and secure windows, hundreds of patients at Washington state’s largest psychiatric hospital live in conditions that fail U.S. health and safety standards, while overworked nurses and psychiatrists say they are navigating a system that punishes employees who speak out despite critical staffing shortages.

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They don’t have enough staff to protect patients, or provide them with the bare minimum of care,” said Lisa Bowser, whose mother spent two years at Western State Hospital and suffered dozens of falls and assaults.

“Going there was like going into hell,” said Bowser, who has sued the state-run facility. “I honestly thought they would kill her before I could get her out.”

Read the whole AP story here.

Under Gov. Inslee, homelessness has increased in Washington State. From the Department of Commerce“After eight years of steady improvement, the number of people experiencing homelessness in Washington State began to increase in 2013.”

In November 2016, it was reported that the homeless population in Washington state increased by 7.3 percent. From the Seattle TimesWashington’s counts showed an increase of 1,408 people sleeping outside and in shelters — the country’s second-largest bump behind California. The state’s total number was 20,827.”

The homeless situation in Seattle is a crisis. I’ve done many blog posts about this: See herehereherehere and here.

Earlier this year, Gov. Inslee rewarded SEIU by signing SB 6199 which requires caregivers to pay union dues as a condition of serving Medicaid recipients. As reported by the Freedom FoundationThe move sets the stage for the union representing the state’s 36,000 individual provider home care aides (IPs), SEIU 775, to force all caregivers to again pay union dues as a condition of serving Medicaid recipients. Under current state law, IPs contract with the state to serve specific Medicaid clients and are considered public employees only for the purposes of unionization. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Harris v. Quinn established that, under this arrangement, caregivers could not be forced to financially support a union against their will.

About 4,000 IPs in any given month do not pay SEIU 775 dues, costing the union about $2.8 million per year.

However, by making IPs “employees” of a private company, SEIU and union-backed policymakers seek to subject caregivers to the federal National Labor Relations Act, which would arguably remove caregivers’ Harris protections and allow SEIU 775 to again force IPs to pay union dues and fees.”

In January of this year, Gov. Inslee proposed a carbon tax in Washington State.  Inslee is a big believer in climate change and wants more taxpayer dollars to address it. From the Seattle Times“Gov. Jay Inslee Tuesday urged Washington lawmakers to embrace his ambitious plan to tax fossil-fuel emissions in Washington state.

“It is time to step up,” Inslee told lawmakers at the Capitol. The impacts of climate change, he added, “will be carried by our children, our economy, our security and our quality of life.”

Inslee’s proposal would levy a $20-a-ton price on carbon emissions, said Reed Schuler, an Inslee policy adviser. That price would rise over time.

The state would start collecting the revenue in the 2020 budget year, with $726 million generated that year. The tax would raise a total of $3.3 billion over four years.”

gov insleee

Gov. Inslee ignores federal law and harbors illegal aliens. On July 4th he met with illegal aliens to hear their concerns about President Trump’s immigration policies.

In 2017 a Washington State Trooper helped ICE find a wanted criminal illegal alien with a warrant who had been deported FOUR timesWashington State Patrol then conducted an administrative review of the Trooper’s action at the request of the governor. From Breitbart“The governor’s office confirmed to the Olympian that an administrative review is underway. “The governor takes very seriously the need to make sure all residents of Washington feel safe in their interactions with the men and women in our state Patrol, particularly given the anxiety that many in our state are feeling right now,” Spokesperson Jaime Smith told the local newspaper.”

I could go on about the progressive tactics of Gov. Inslee and his partisan politics. If this is the best that demorats can offer in 2020, make way for more of this:

DCG

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