From this morning's P-I, on Governor Gregoire's decision whether to veto Washington's toy safety bill because of its various ambiguities and unintended consequences:
"The bill is flexible enough to allow the governor to provide the necessary guidance to the Department of Ecology to make sure those concerns are taken care of in the rule-making process -- that's the purpose of the rule-making process, it allows the department to implement the law in a way that makes sense," [the bill's main lobbyist proponent] said.
This is an interesting theory of lawmaking.
Perhaps the response ought to be: Flexibility -- ambiguity -- in laws creating liability for commercial conduct is no virtue, and drafting legislation so it may be, by its own terms, "implemented in a way that makes sense," is no vice.
