Most of us are aware of the legal challenge Virginia Attorney General Ken "the Cooch" Cuccinelli is threatening if healthcare reform is passed on Sunday. We Democrats who campaigned against him last November because of his extreme positions on social issues, realized that he would be a force to be reckoned with in terms of how he would try to use his office, but speaking for myself, I didn't fully appreciate the extent to which he would use it to oppose President Obama's policies. Although not as newsworthy, this is not the first time he has called into question the President's authority as he has already filed a legal challenge to greenhouse gasses regulation.
Elections do have consequences. I wonder how many non-teabagger Virginians who pulled the voting lever for Cuccinelli thought about the power he would have to promote his strange far right-wing views on states rights and against
any growth of the federal government. I fear too many people merely voted straight Republican ticket without thinking through how activist "the Cooch" is and will be for the next four years in promulgating his and the Republican doctrine. In less than two months, he has already filed one legal challenge and is threatening another. Despite Virginia's dire fiscal condition, he has not been shy about spending
our money to file expensive suits against the President's policies.
Now for what some of you might consider the conspiracy theory: I fully grasp and accept the Cooch's ideological bent. However, he
is a Republican. And, although he has since clarified his stance (due to pressure from McDonnell) he earlier played to the birthers when one of them questioned whether he could "do something" about a non-American being elected president. He went so far as to lay out a "hypothetical" case for challenging Obama's birth certificate. So let's never forget that he is a member of the party of "NO", the obstructionist party, the Republicans. And, let's never forget that they are very disciplined, marching lockstep against Democrats, especially when Democrats are in power. Case in point--has even one Republican in the U.S. House or the Senate broken with the party to support health care reform? My question is this--how much of our AG's latest tactic is being done to cripple the Obama administration? It's not only the Cooch who has decided to file suit, but also 13 other Republican AGs have acted similarly. Soooo....I think this idea to file suit probably is not all be a figment of Cuccinelli's delusional ideological imagination; indeed, I think it's more the reality of lockstep standard operating procedure of the obstructionist Republican Party to oppose (and attempt to thwart) anything President Obama promotes.