– Olympia, WA
Five days before Donald Trump assumed the office of President of the United States for the second time, galvanizing his broad base and offering a staunchly conservative vision for the future of the nation, longtime Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson swore to uphold the Washington state constitution and the law of the land in his newly minted position as Washington’s 24th governor.
Ferguson, a Seattle-born native and University of Washington graduate who spent his early years after law school clerking for a Spokane county judge, has spent time on both sides of the state in his personal and professional career – a fitting metaphor for a man who has for the breadth of his political career tried to frame himself as a centrist, or, as he said speaking to the media and citizenry just days after his election victory “It has to be more than a cliché to say that I’d be a governor for all Washingtonians. It has to be a reality.”
That rhetoric certainly seems to be a major talking point in the early days of his ascendency to the state’s highest office. In his inauguration speech on January 15, 2025, Ferguson stressed his desire to balance Washington’s budget. He made no mention of new taxes or “taxing the rich.” In a surprise that drew loud applause from state republicans, he laid out an initial and vague plan to cut $4 billion from the state budget in the coming years.
Likewise, Ferguson touched on Washington’s homeless problem by signing two executive orders on Day 1 of his term aimed at deregulating housing permits and speeding up the process of building new housing developments.
In somewhat of a surprise, he even subtly managed to distance himself from his radically left-wing predecessor Jay Inslee, who pushed drastic climate change policies, protected illegal aliens to the hilt, and dumped millions of state dollars into expanding abortion rights in his 12 years in office. Inslee ramped up his ideological crusade in his final term after tyrannizing his constituents during abusive Covid 19 lockdowns.
Ferguson, mentioning his predecessor only once, appears to want to step outside of that dark shadow, and for one day at least, state republicans are applauding. Republican Sen. Mark Schoesler, of Ritzville, called it “the best inaugural address in 33 years because he focused on the real tasks ahead and avoided rampant partisanship.”
Do we trust a man’s rhetoric, or his actions?
Ferguson, who held the position of state Attorney General for 12 years – mirroring the length and breadth of Inslee’s governorship – also became infamous for filing suit against the Trump administration 99 times from 2017 to 2020, including seven days after Trump’s first inauguration.
The once former and now current president, in his first week in office, issued Executive Order 13769, halting all refugees and asylum seekers from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States for 90 days. The “Muslim ban,” as his opponents labeled it, was used in the wake of widespread movement out of Syria and other places still rife with ISIS leanings to stop the inflow of unvetted and unknown men, many of them of military age and without families, from flooding the nation’s borders.
Teaming up with Inslee to oppose the new president’s order, Ferguson filed suit on January 30, 2017 and won in a Washington district court. That opposing action became the norm for Ferguson in his never-ending battle to thwart the America-first policies of Trump’s first term. Ferguson leveled action against Trump for a wide range of issues, including immigration, gun rights, and abortion.
In the years since, Ferguson hardly tempered, pushing for the decriminalization of drugs in Washington state in 2021 and helping craft the “assault weapons ban” bill that passed in 2023, outlawing high-capacity magazines in the state.
Now, there is no reason to think that Ferguson, occupying the governor’s mansion in Olympia, will back away from his rabid defense of leftist dogmas. For all his fair words about bi-partisanship and governing for “all Washingtonians,” the early days of his tenure paint a different picture.
Ferguson has already signed an executive order on his first day in office aimed at “protecting reproductive rights.” What that means in practice is yet to be seen in totality, but the order’s directive is to establish a “roundtable of medical providers, reproductive health experts, and policy makers to recommend strategies for protecting reproductive freedom.”
In short, Ferguson is gearing up for a fight. His predecessor Inslee declared Washington a “sanctuary state” for those seeking abortions, even going to war against his eastern neighbor, Idaho, which had passed a law outlawing Idahoan women from leaving the state to murder their children. Inslee fought to protect those women and bring them into Washington for that very purpose. And Ferguson seems ready to go to war with the federal government to combat any limits on abortion that “would impact Washingtonians.”
Moreover, January 22, just one week after his inauguration, Ferguson, speaking at an abortion rally, prepared the people of Washington for another fight against the Trump orders regarding deportation of illegal aliens.
“We’ve been preparing for this for some time, right? When I was AG (attorney general), we spent a year preparing for Donald Trump’s possible presidency, going line by line through Project 2025. You saw the results of that with the lawsuit yesterday that was filed by the AG’s Office,” he said.
The niceties are over in Olympia. There is a showdown on the horizon in the west.
For a deeper dive into this topic and some thoughts about what comes next, see my follow-up article and thought piece: Let the Battle Begin.
