How Justice Scalia’s Death Affects Politics in Washington State

Will the drama in the wake of the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia impact politics in Washington state? Undoubtedly.

In presidential election years, Democrats tend to nationalize state elections, turning out the vote by ramping up the heat on what’s happening nationally—abortion rights, the Iraq war, the stakes at the Supreme Court. It helps to mobilize the faithful. This tends to benefit the Democratic ticket for state offices—the D’s hold all but one currently, Secretary of State.

If national senate Republicans turn President Barack Obama’s appointment of Scalia’s replacement into an exercise in legislative monkey wrenching, as Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has pledged to do, they might successfully delay a new court appointee into the new president’s term, but they could also add fodder that will help fire-up Democratic outrage that could hurt them here where Obama has had significant support, having won the state twice, and where Democrats dominate in Congress.

Not only does the Scalia case offer the potential of giving local Democrats a rallying point, it feeds into a growing narrative that Olympia—where Republicans have control of the state Senate and are a slim minority in the state House—is turning into our own mossy version of legislative dysfunction.

The recent sudden and unprecedented firing of Gov. Jay Inslee’s choice of head for the Washington Department of Transportation, Lynn Peterson, was a brutal election-year shot across Inslee’s bow. As the governor is running for re-election, he is vulnerable on the issue of leadership. As a first-term governor coming from Congress, he has taken awhile to figure out how Olympia works and several major agencies have had problems—the Department of Corrections and Department of Social and Health Services. Now the state Senate has rejected the governor’s leadership on transportation, despite last session’s approval of massive new spending on roads and highways. The Bertha mess hasn’t helped either.

While many of the specific issues are legitimate—the instituting of tolls on I-405 was clumsy, the early release of prisoners was a systemic botch—the increasing partisanship in Olympia, the public execution with no warning of WSDOT’s boss, and continued gridlock on solving major problems like education funding—hint that what you hate about DC politics has taken up permanent residence on Budd Inlet.

The Republicans want to make it an issue of Inslee’s competence, or lack of it, and the Democrats are saying, hey, the GOP broke Congress, now they’re repeating those same tactics here. In other words, the national crisis is being recapitulated locally. If you’re a party that basically doesn’t like or trust government, break it further can help you make your point.

The state GOP has more moderate candidates who aren’t of that school—Bill Bryant, the former Seattle Port Commissioner running for governor and Christ Vance, former state GOP head, running for senate against Patty Murray. Vance has long criticized leadership in both parties in Olympia, especially during his tenure consulting for the State Superintendent of Public Instruction when he was frustrated by the inability of the state to come to terms with the McCleary education funding decision. Bryant is criticizing Inslee’s leadership and casting himself in the mold of Dan Evans, the state’s venerated moderate GOP governor from the ‘60s. The two will likely pound that theme until election day.

But their own party will be challenged to show leadership, too, but the behavior of the Senate in the case of the WSDOT firing simply does not bode well for dialing down contention and dialing up the politics. Inslee himself knows DC-style politics when he sees it, or practices it himself. He called the GOP action “scurrilous, underhanded, dishonest.”

The Scalia vacancy might also raise the profile of Washington’s Supreme Court races in 2016—three positions will be up for election. Conservatives have complained that the court has swung too far to the left in recent years and they believes that the court overstepped its bounds by dictating solutions on education funding in the McCleary decision that should be legislative issues, not judicial.

We’re lucky that we elect our court: can you imagine where we’d be if Inslee were in Obama’s shoes having to appoint justices for life? Still, in a state that trends Democrat on statewide offices, the Scalia replacement battle will likely remind Democratic and Republican voters of the importance of these judicial positions and the stakes involved in shaping a progressive or conservative court.