Taxpayers have every right to question the logic of one branch of government suing another.

Yet Gov. Chris Gregoire seems to have had no other reasonable way to challenge a new federal rule – from which logic is absent – about providing health care to babies born to illegal immigrants.

Under the new regulation, which is temporary now but about to become permanent, states may not provide Medicaid coverage for the newborns in question until paperwork has been completed and approved to establish that they are U.S. citizens.

Given that the children were born in Washington state, the only paperwork that should be needed is a copy of the U.S. Constitution, which, as Gregoire has noted, makes anyone born in this country a citizen regardless of the parents’ nationality or legal standing. To single out infants based on their parents’ citizenship, or lack thereof, is discrimination, Gregoire contended.

State officials know the children were born here, the governor explained, “because we paid for the birth.”

The federal government has a couple of months now to respond to the action that was filed in U.S. District Court in Tacoma. And while the Bush administration has defended the action, Gregoire has sent Robin Arnold-Williams, secretary of the state Department of Social and Health Services, to Washington, D.C., to present the state’s case. Good choice. Arnold-Williams worked for U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt when he was governor of Utah. He thought highly of her then. Let’s hope he listens to her now.

Perhaps she can persuade him that if the policy is meant to punish illegal immigrants, taking it out on innocent newborn American citizens is the wrong way to go about it.

And she can remind him that depriving an infant of post-natal medical care only invites greater health problems later on.

She might also point out that while Medicaid funds can be withheld now, untreated health-care problems among low-income populations tend to show up in hospital emergency rooms. There, they can’t be turned away, and, if the bills aren’t paid, the costs get shifted to others in the form of higher health care bills and insurance premiums. Plus, emergency room care is far more expensive.

At a media briefing in Olympia this week, Gregoire noted that President Bush’s feelings about immigration reform coincide with her own. But the children involved are not immigrants. They’ve lived in the United States for all of their short lives, and, to reiterate, they are undeniably U.S. citizens. It’s not an immigration issue.

What it is, Gregoire stressed, is one more layer of cost and inefficiency on a health care system that already squanders a third of the overall cost on administrative overhead, including paperwork – about half again as large a percentage as in the rest of the world.

Sometime over the next 60 days, if Secretary Leavitt and others in the administration take another look at this puzzling new rule, surely they will withdraw it. That would be the logical thing to do.