INTRODUCTION AND RELIEF REQUESTED

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INTRODUCTION AND RELIEF REQUESTED

Based on modest delays in their pending civil cases amid a global pandemic, Plaintiffs ask this Court to commandeer funding decisions from the branch constitutionally entitled to make them—the Legislature. Neither Plaintiffs’ novel interpretation of the Washington Constitution nor their unprecedented requests for relief can withstand scrutiny. The courts’ prerogative is to resolve legal disputes and “say what the law is,” not to compel the Legislature to create and fund a host of judicial programs or to supervise the Legislature’s budgeting for the entire Washington judiciary, as Plaintiffs would have it. No court, in Washington or otherwise, has ever countenanced such an inversion of foundational separation-of-powers principles. This Court should not be the first. Plaintiffs each have civil cases pending in other courts—one in Grant County, one in Pierce County, and two in King County. Their respective trial dates were continued because of COVID-19 and other scheduling issues and complexities. Plaintiffs have not challenged those continuances in their pending cases. Instead, they filed this collateral challenge, asserting purported violations of the right to have justice administered “without unnecessary delay,” Const. art. I, § 10, as well as the “[t]he right of trial by jury,” id., § 21. On behalf of a putative class of civil litigants, Plaintiffs seek “reasonable and adequate funding to the courts” in eighteen categories, ranging from “[c]ivil legal aid in urban and rural locations,” to “[a]dequate information technology and security,” to “additional judges and court staff.” First Am. Compl. (“FAC”) ¶¶ 10.3, 10.4.

MOTION TO DISMISS Case No. 21-2-06462-7 SEA 1

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