On Friday heads rolled, to borrow a phrase from our own Republican state Sen. Michael Baumgartner.

Actually, just one head rolled: Lynn Peterson, the state's transportation secretary.

But why?

According to Mike Lindblom, of the Seattle Times, it was the ire of suburban commuters:

In the end, state Transportation Secretary Lynn Peterson wasn’t derailed by nearly $400  million in Highway 520 bridge overruns, or even the two-year delay in the Highway 99 tunnel, a pair of projects that she inherited.

Instead, the cardinal sin that Peterson and her department committed was to infuriate suburban motorists.

Senate Republicans on Friday ousted Peterson without warning, by voting not to confirm her, three years after Gov. Jay Inslee appointed her.

Blame a bumpy rollout of Interstate 405 express-toll lanes, which were meant to improve traffic flows in south Snohomish and northeast King counties. Instead, they moved some of the worst congestion from Kirkland to Bothell. And even though state data showed time savings southbound, the general lanes turned slower ­in the Bothell chokepoint — and 29,000 people endorsed an online petition to repeal the toll lanes.

Could be. But state Sen. Marko Liias, a Democrat from Edmonds who supported Peterson, suggested in a roundabout way it was Bertha, the moster tunneler currently digging a huge hole underneath Seattle. 

“Constituents in Seattle want to keep Bertha keep moving, and want to know that there’s someone at the agency running it from day to day and know there isn’t chaos at the ranks of one of our largest agencies,” Liias said, according to PubliCola.

The Seattle Bike Blog ruminated on the political nature of Lynn's ouster, and suggested some Republicans were being hypocrites.

I have no idea if the Republicans are being savvy or if the ploy will backfire. Politics is messy, and there’s election strategizing going on that’s way over my head. Maybe this is a brilliant move in the endless Democrats vs Republicans chess match that helps Republicans win the Governor’s mansion. Or maybe it blows up their faces and they lose their slim legislative majorities. Or maybe it has no effect other than to fire this one person and make everyone mad at each other. I guess we’ll find out.

But I do know that now-former Secretary Peterson was an asset for our state that we no longer have, and the reasons for firing her seem to have little to do with transportation policy or her management abilities. After all, she helped to craft a transportation package last year with the Republican majority leaders, a highway-centric package that Republicans seemed to like a lot more than us liberal Seattle bike supporters.

The Seattle Transit Blog used the occasion to shame WSDOT before whipping the "perfectly whipped" Republican caucus in the Senate:

This blog has been rather hard on WSDOT over the years, and there is certainly much to criticize on urbanist, environmental, and performance grounds.  The agency functions almost exclusively as a highway department, delegating transit funding and operations to local agencies. They have long had an excessive attachment to new highway capacity to the detriment of maintaining what we have. And of course, their project management – particularly on ill-conceived megaprojects like the SR 99 Tunnel and an unnecessary widening of SR 520 – has been particularly poor and occasionally scandal ridden.

But yesterday’s Republican exercise in brute power cannot be defended on any of the above grounds.

Finally, and back to PubliCola again, it was clear that Republicans said they simply weren't pleased with Peterson's leadership, and Democrats believed the out-of-the-blue firing was election-year shenanigans.(Read the whole dang post because you'll learn something.)

But we'll give the last word to Baumgartner, who was tweeting the whole controversy with his inimitable flair.

Today, after a press conference in which Gov. Jay Inslee lambasted the Republicans for the move, Baumgartner again turned to Twitter, calling Inslee a "backbencher from Congress" who was throwing a "temper tantrum."

"Golden opportunity today for Inslee to learn from Republicans and start new era of accountability in government. Leaders lead," he tweeted. 

Then:

"Or..could hold whiny press conference deflecting blame for numerous agency screwups and huff and puff about mean Republicans."

And then:

"Once again J Inslee demonstrates Gov too big a job for him. Should just focus on green stuff and let Rs actually run important stuff."