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With COVID cases and hospitalizations dropping fast, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced Monday that the state’s indoor mask mandate will lift on Saturday, March 12, 10 days earlier than previously announced.
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Following in the path of multiple other states, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced Thursday that he will largely lift the state’s indoor mask mandate, in place since last August, on Monday, March 21.
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Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s big push to make it a crime for elected officials and candidates for office to incite lawlessness by making false statements about elections appears to have died in the state Legislature.
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Washington’s COVID-19 state of emergency is approaching its two-year anniversary. Under current law, the governor has broad emergency powers. But the Legislature is considering new restrictions on that authority.
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In a surprise announcement Thursday, the anniversary of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced that he's drafting legislation to make it a crime for elected officials and candidates for public office to make false statements about election outcomes with the goal of inciting lawlessness. Inslee said such a law could withstand free speech challenges and is necessary to guard against ongoing attacks on democracy.
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Washington Gov. Jay Inslee says the state is racing to expand access to testing, masks and vaccines, but has no immediate plans to impose new rollbacks, mandates or restrictions in the face of an unprecedented wave of new COVID-19 cases driven by the omicron variant.
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For the second time, Washington lawmakers are suing Gov. Jay Inslee over his use of the veto pen. In a lawsuit filed Monday in Thurston County Superior Court, the Legislature asserts Inslee exceeded his veto power earlier this year when he line-item vetoed parts of the state transportation budget and eliminated a subsection of a low carbon fuels bill.
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For months, minority Republicans in the Washington Legislature have called for limits on the governor’s emergency powers. But now even some Democrats are expressing concerns about the open-endedness of the COVID-19 state of emergency and the limited role of state lawmakers.
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Potential candidates to replace Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman are already stepping forward after Wyman, a Republican, announced she will resign next month to take an election security position with the Biden administration. Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, will appoint Wyman's replacement. That could spell the end of a nearly six decades Republican lock on the secretary of state's office.
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Roughly nine in 10 employees of the state of Washington are now vaccinated against COVID-19. Gov. Jay Inslee considers that a huge success and a win for public health. But his vaccine mandate has also led to the departure of hundreds of state employees. Now there are questions about the implications for some state services.