King County executive Dow Constantine was allergic to controversy for his first eleven and a half months in office. He defined himself as a quiet, deft administrator while bargaining with several unions to forgo concessions. Unlike Mayor Mike McGinn's style of making media fanfare, Constantine made the proverbial trains—or in his case, the proverbial Metro buses—run on time.

Until the actual buses risked running late in mid-December and he couldn't dodge controversy anymore.

When the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign wanted to run ads on buses accusing Israel of "war crimes," Constantine had two options: He could run the ads and endure the wrath of thousands of batshitcrazy callers who think the First Amendment is hunky-dory until it conflicts with their own ideology—who did, in fact, call by the thousands asking the county to prohibit the ads, says Constantine spokesman Frank Abe—or block the ads and endure the wrath of an inevitable lawsuit. He had to pick one of those fights.

Constantine caved to the angry callers, thereby picking a fight over the First Amendment.

The official reasoning from his office, however, doesn't quite add up. "The county's job is to provide bus service that is efficient and reliably meets public expectation," says Abe. "Metro's existing policy restricts advertising that can reasonably be foreseen to cause disruption of the transit system."

But what was the actual disruption the ads would cause? Like, are phone calls and emails slowing down the buses?

Abe could not cite any disruption to service, saying, "the national vitriolic response introduced a new risk of disruption of the transit system for the public." Huh? "The decision was based on the unacceptable risk of disruption to service."

And "risk" may be the key word here (not the disruption of the calls that already came in). Did the county receive threats that running the ads would result in violence? "I want that to come out in the hearing," says Abe. Can he confirm the county didn't receive threats over the ads? Abe would not confirm, repeating, "I want that to come out in the hearing." (Ironically, King County Council member Peter von Reichbauer complained that the ads could incite violence against Jewish people, but it also seems possible that this "risk" was violence was not against Jews, but by extremely pro-Israel Jews.)

But, by banning the ads—and instituting a moratorium on all noncommercial advertising—Constnatine got the county sued in federal court yesterday for a decision that "violates the First Amendment of the United States Constitution." And not by anyone. By the ACLU, which is unarguably the most successful litigator in the nation on free-speech issues and has a striking number cases that percolate up to the Supreme Court. Now the county will have to fight that case, which is clearly a disruption to the county (to Metro administration and the county's civil division of attorneys). So it was one disruption or another.

Why did he pick this disruption—this fight?

Perhaps he wanted to avoid the controversy of announcing a threat, opting instead to let it come out—maybe—in court. But curtailing speech to avoid another controversy would just be chickenshit. Or perhaps he was afraid of getting more angry calls. That too would be chickenshit. Or maybe he thought he'd take on the ACLU over the First Amendment, because avoiding angry calls is more important than running ads regardless of their politics. Picking that fight is ballsy, for sure, simply because the ACLU is such a formidable legal force. But Constantine's office hasn't identified any actual disruption or legitimate threat of disruption, so even if he's picking a ballsy fight, it's the wrong fight for the wrong reason.