Gov. Jay Inslee addressing the Washington Legislature for the last time on Jan. 14, 2025. (Jacquelyn Jimenez Romero / Washington State Standard)
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee used his final address to a joint session of the Legislature on Tuesday to frame a 12-year legacy that spanned a pandemic, historic natural disasters, unmatched expansion of government and a quixotic bid for president.
The three-term Democrat told members of the House and Senate that serving in the governor’s office had been his “life’s honor.”
“Man, I do love this state,” he said in the speech delivered in the House chamber. “In this moment, I see a state that is evergreen and ever going forward.”
Inslee will hand the gubernatorial baton to Democrat Bob Ferguson on Wednesday, exiting the political stage onto which he first strode as a state lawmaker 35 years ago.
Mostly unknown outside the state in two tours in Congress, Inslee constructed a national profile as Washington’s 23rd governor on the strength of his boundless energy as a climate warrior and snappy jabs at Republicans.
He fired such a verbal arrow Tuesday at incoming Republican president Donald Trump, with whom Inslee tangled in the president’s first term.
“Our state will work with anyone on policies that are positive for Washington. But we will not bend the knee to a would-be authoritarian’s worst impulses,” Inslee said.
The remark incited a half-dozen GOP lawmakers to walk out.
House Minority Leader Drew Stokesbary, R-Auburn, said afterward that he thought the governor knew his comment would get that reaction.
Rep. Chris Corry, R-Yakima, and Rep. Jim Walsh, R-Aberdeen, who is also the chairman of the state Republican Party, were among those who left the House floor after the comment.
“I wasn’t going to listen to the man who was the last to give up emergency powers in the nation, and fought any legislative checks on his power, make false inflammatory claims about our incoming President,” Corry posted on the social media site X.
Inslee referenced some of the tragedies in his tenure.
In 2013, the Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River collapsed, dumping vehicles and people into the water, after a truck carrying an oversized load hit the structure. A year later, a massive landslide east of Oso in Snohomish County killed 43 people. And Washington suffered damaging and deadly wildfires in Twisp and Malden.
What was believed to be the first COVID-19 death in the nation occurred in Snohomish County in February 2020. Inslee, in an effort to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, used his emergency powers to mandate the wearing of masks, shut down schools and businesses, limit how many people could gather together in churches, and eventually require state employees to be vaccinated.
Republicans accused him of overreach. But Inslee said the actions led to fewer people dying from the disease in Washington compared to other states.
“If the rest of the country had adopted our approach to the pandemic, close to half a million lives would have been saved across America,” he said Tuesday.
The state of the state
Inslee devoted much of his speech to cataloging his proudest accomplishments: a climate law that requires companies to pay for their air pollution, a capital gains tax, paid family leave, the working families tax credit, a ban on semiautomatic guns, abortion rights protections, and added support for early childhood education.
He said the work was full of “tremendous milestones” and pressed lawmakers and his successor to protect that progress as they wrangle over how to solve a sizable budget shortfall.
“In 12 years, we have built a strong engine of increasing justice and increasing health for our residents. We can’t knock it off the tracks just as we’ve started rolling forward,” he said.
Inslee noted the budget he proposed in December contained $2 billion in reductions. “Pruning significantly more than that I would consider a slide back,” he said, a veiled jab at Ferguson’s call last week for $4 billion in additional reductions.
Inslee’s spending plan counted on billions of dollars from a new tax on the state’s wealthiest residents. Ferguson voiced skepticism that the “wealth tax” — envisioned as a 1% tax on an individual’s wealth above $100 million — can be relied on to balance the budget.
In his speech, Inslee encouraged legislators to keep an open mind as they consider the best path forward.
“There are influential people and organizations that have your phone numbers, who are going to work those contacts hard this session,” he said. “Before you take that vote, I hope you think about the voiceless — the Washingtonians who don’t have your cell numbers.”
Stokesbary, meanwhile, found Inslee’s speech a little too rosy.
“I wish I could live in Jay Inslee’s Washington. In the real Washington we’ve got a lot of problems,” he said, reeling off concerns such as high prices for gas, groceries and housing and public safety problems. “He didn’t address any of those which was really disappointing.”
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