More than 60 members of the Washington state legislature have asked President Joe Biden to reconsider the Department of Justice’s challenge to an “overwhelmingly bipartisan state law to provide industrial insurance coverage to workers made sick” while doing cleanup work at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site.
In 2018 the legislature easily passed HB 1723 that grants a presumption of workplace exposure for specific diseases and conditions for Hanford workers, the lawmakers said in a Wednesday letter addressed to Biden.
The law withstood challenges in federal district court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Then last month the Justice Department asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its challenge of the appeals court’s 2020 ruling in favor of the law.
“We are proud that our bipartisan state law has withstood extensive legal scrutiny and ask that you review this matter and the Department of Justice’s request for Supreme Court consideration,” the Democratic Party lawmakers write in the letter.
Attorney General Bob Ferguson plans to file a brief opposing Supreme Court consideration of the case by Nov. 15.
