HorsesAss.Org

One can make a strong argument that over the past six years, Attorney General Rob McKenna has proven the most adept politician in Washington state. Cautious, pandering and downright relentless in his pursuit of publicity, McKenna has simultaneously managed to privately court far-right, anti-tax, anti-government, anti-choice forces while successfully maintaining a public persona as one of those mythical “moderate” Republicans. Yet as tight a rope as he’s had to balance, I’d never seen him slip.

Until now.

For a politician presumed to be running for governor in 2012, McKenna’s participation in a multi-state lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of health care reform seems baffling on its face, especially considering its stature as little more than a legal stunt. McKenna’s electoral strength is that, unlike most Republicans, he doesn’t do too badly in King County, winning it by a comfortable margin in 2008, and losing by less than 5 points in the much more closely contested contest from 2004. That, combined with nearly guaranteed landslide Republican margins in Central and Eastern Washington has made him the putative favorite in the 2012 gubernatorial race against nearly any Democratic opponent.

As long as McKenna maintains his moderate facade — and you know damn well the Seattle Times will do everything in its power to help him out in this regard — he’s damn hard to beat. So why would McKenna so very publicly throw in his lot with with Tenthers and Teabaggers and other far-right-wingers of that ilk?

The only thing I can think of, other than a hard night of drinking or a minor stroke, is to better position himself for a tough primary battle. And the only Republican in Washington state with the stature to keep McKenna off the November 2012 ballot is Dino Rossi.

So that begs the question: does Rob McKenna know something we don’t know? Is Rossi planning yet another run for the governor’s mansion? And has Rossi privately made his intentions clear?

I posed my theory to a handful of Republican lawmakers who were willing to talk with me — off the record — and while none had any first-hand knowledge of Rossi’s intentions, all seemed equally baffled by McKenna’s lawsuit. “This has gotta hurt Rob in King County,” one fellow GOPer told me, lamenting the damage to McKenna’s gubernatorial ambitions.

Yeah… no shit, Sherlock.

So the question remains, why? McKenna’s not stupid, so why would he risk alienating King County moderates for the sake of shoring up his support amongst the Teabagger/Tenther crowd? A stroke of political genius, or just your run-of-the-mill stroke?

AND FYI…
Over 5,800 6,100 Washington citizens have already joined the Washington Tax Payers OPT OUT of Rob McKenna’s Lawsuit Facebook group in less than 24 hours. Wow.

If there are any good lawyers out there willing to file a suit pro bono, seeking to bar Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna from using state funds to participate in a lawsuit seeking to toss out health care reform, I’d be happy to play the part of the plaintiff.

As per the post on Publicola, I fail to see where McKenna has either the constitutional or statutory authority to unilaterally join such a suit on behalf of the citizens of Washington state, and while some might question the legal grounds for just some guy seeking an injunction to bar the AG from action… well… isn’t that ironic considering the bullshit Tentherist arguments on which McKenna and his Republican allies are basing their challenge.

In the meanwhile, over 4,200 people have already joined the Facebook group, Washington Tax Payers OPT OUT of Rob McKenna’s Lawsuit, and I urge you to join as well. The King County Dems have also created an online petition, Stop the Health Care Lawsuit, and I urge you to sign that too.

And oh yeah… call McKenna’s office, (360) 753-6200, and give him a piece of your mind. I understand the phone is ringing off the hook with angry callers; let’s keep it that way.

UPDATE:
There is another petition, sponsored by Fuse, that has already collected over 3,000 signatures. Sign up there too!

John Boehner and Michael Steele should be a little more careful in their choice of words. As ridiculously hyperbolic as the assertion is, I understand what they’re trying to say when they describe health care reform as “Armageddon,” but if the Republicans’ far-right Evangelical base takes the word literally — as they are wont to do — the GOP could lose a big chunk of its support.

After all, there are a lot of Republican Christianists out there who would not only welcome the End Times, but are actively working toward it. So if they believe that health care reform really is Armageddon, won’t they just support it with open arms, and then ready themselves for the Rapture?

If you happen to be stuck at the office this morning with nothing to do, you can watch President Obama sign the health care bill on this webpage (at 8:15am). And if you’re really bored at work today, you can stay on that page and at 11am it will be showing (not advertised, of course) Vice President Joe Biden, Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske, and others laying out for the first time the Obama Administration’s National Drug Control Strategy.

It may not be obvious from seeing my blogging, but there are a number of topics for which I could potentially find agreement with their strategy today (on greater funding for drug treatment, effective education programs for dangerous drugs, even smarter advertising campaigns aimed at warning children about the dangers of drugs like meth and heroin). Unfortunately, the religious adherence to complete prohibition as the only way to deal with certain drugs discredits them right out of the gate, and makes it far more difficult for them to get any of their more sensible initiatives taken seriously.

Well, not exactly friends. More like about 1,800 people who have joined a Facebook group in the last ten hours or so to tell Rob McKenna that they want to “opt out” of his lawsuit against the health care reform package. Um, I realize Facebook hasn’t been around that long, and I’m a late adopter of new things, but I’ve never seen anything like it.

As for the possibility of a McKenna lawsuit against health care reform, several legal scholars quoted in The Seattle Times seem to think it wouldn’t fare very well. For example:

“There is no precedent whatsoever that would call this into question,” said Mark Hall, a professor of law and public health at Wake Forest University.

Hall said the Constitution’s Commerce Clause can apply broadly to allow the government to regulate health insurance and that courts have shown “a very strong presumption in favor of the validity of whatever Congress does.”

States can sue, “but I can’t imagine a scenario in which a judge would enjoin the implementation of the federal health-care bill,” said Lawrence Friedman, a professor of constitutional law at the New England School of Law in Boston.

“Federal law is supreme,” he said. “There’s really no room for doubt that federal law controls.”

And what about the argument that the health care reform package will violate the tenth amendment? Well, maybe not. From The Los Angeles Times:

States often require those who buy cars or homes to purchase insurance. But opponents of the federal healthcare bill argue that those who those purchases do so willingly, while the health insurance requirement affects all Americans regardless of choice.

But Mark Tushnet, a constitutional law expert at Harvard University, said that the central premise relied upon by the bill’s opponents—that Americans who choose not to have insurance aren’t involving themselves in the nation’s commerce—is incorrect.

“The failure to have health insurance doesn’t mean the person won’t be consuming health services,” Tushnet said. Once they receive care, he said, they have become involved in commerce and are subject to the federal government’s regulation.

Not being an attorney, I can’t really say if McKenna’s lawsuit would sink to a standard of “frivolous” required for the state bar to take action against him. But I bet there are several attorneys (or more) among McKenna’s new Facebook pals who are busily exploring such things, and who will start all over again in the morning. It sure sounds like McKenna is on thin legal ice here.

For now I’m leaving aside the repeated calls for impeachment or recall, that’s another kettle of fish, but if McKenna persists in his folly I’d imagine that’ll get explored some more too. Yeah, those tools are very hard to use in our state, but that’s how mad a lot of people are at McKenna. And then, of course, there is the Legislature and then there is Governor Chris Gregoire, who rightly blasted McKenna today.

Wow:

On Monday McKenna, the state’s Republican attorney general, said he’d join GOP colleagues and sue to stop the Democrats’ comprehensive health care reform law from taking effect. President Barack Barack Obama is expected to soon sign the measure passed by his party in dramatic fashion Sunday night.

“I believe this new federal health care measure unconstitutionally imposes new requirements on our state and on its citizens. This unprecedented federal mandate, requiring all Washingtonians to purchase health insurance, violates the Commerce Clause and the 10th amendment of the US Constitution,” McKenna said in a statement.

So let me get this straight. When the federal government implements a requirement that all people buy into a health care system that we all use and benefit from, this is an unconstitutional violation of the Commerce Clause and an egregious imposition on our state and its citizens. But when the Supreme Court says that a voter-approved Washington law allowing for sick people to grow marijuana plants for their own medicinal use can be nullified under the Commerce Clause, Rob McKenna not only enthusiastically endorses that argument, but also uses attorney-client privilege to cover up the fact that he was using it to undermine the state law and prevent sick people from having access to medicine.

If you believe that the federal government telling a terminally ill patient being advised by a doctor that he or she can’t grow a pot plant on their property, not sell it to anyone, and then use 100% of it by themselves – in a state that has legalized this by popular vote – is something that can be regulated by the Commerce Clause (as was decided in Raich v. Gonzales), then you have absolutely no leg to stand on when you turn around and claim that individual mandates within a national health care system are unconstitutional. That’s so blatantly hypocritical, it should completely discredit Rob McKenna from ever seeking elected office in this state again.

This man is a complete fraud. He’s a political opportunist who can hold two completely contradictory legal opinions at the same time, without a care in the world for the lives he needs to destroy in order to keep up the facade. Hopefully, Washington voters – and the media – will finally regard this man as the extremist and shameless hypocrite that he’s always been.

I cut my teeth as a blogger covering the recount and legal contest following Washington’s excruciatingly close 2004 gubernatorial election, playing the role of Democratic yin to Stefan Sharkansky’s paranoid, mean-spirited, conspiratorial, Republican yang over at (un)Sound Politics. But for his part, Stefan was already an old hand at this blogging thing, having cut his online canines as a paranoid, mean-spirited, conspiratorial critic of his Bay Area congresswoman, Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

And so it was with some curiosity — and admittedly, more than a little swagger — that I wandered over to u(SP) to read Stefan’s well considered take on last night’s historic passage of health care reform legislation:

AND MAY THEY ALL BE BOILED IN OIL
National News
by Stefan Sharkansky, 08:43 PM

219 Democrats voted tonight to wreck the U.S. health care system.

May their victory be Pyrrhic, short-lived and reversed.

Speaking of which — the RNC has a new website “Fire Nancy Pelosi”, where you can donate to support this year’s Republican House candidates.

So how does it feel Stefan, to know that the congresswoman you hate most, has managed to achieve what other Speakers only dreamed of over the past century? Since you started your personal crusade against Pelosi, she not only rose to become our nation’s first female Speaker, but within a few short years managed to make her indelible mark on history with an extraordinary legislative accomplishment that will shape U.S. policy for generations. How’s that feel?

Does it sting? Does it burn?

I sure hope so.

When Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna decided to spend our tax dollars joining nine other Republican AGs in a lawsuit that challenges the constitutionality of the recently passed health care reform legislation, who the hell was he representing?

The 58% of Washington voters who cast their ballot for Barack Obama and his promise of health care reform? The 6 of 9 Washington congressional districts who overwhelmingly elected Democrats and their promise of health care reform? The 57% and 55% of voters who last reelected Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray respectively, and their promise of health care reform? The 500,000 Washingtonians who will be added to the state’s health care rolls?

Or, is Rob McKenna merely representing the interests of AWB and BIAW and other monied, special interests?

Washington is a state that supports health care reform and that benefits from it, yet McKenna is spending our tax dollars in the hope that an ultra-conservative U.S. Supreme Court will put aside a century of legal precedent and toss out this historic legislation. So I hope this puts to rest any notion that he is in someway a “moderate” Republican… a political animal that simply no longer exists.

Representatives Dave Reichert and Jay Inslee both spoke briefly on the floor of the House during yesterday’s health care reform debate; not surprisingly, Reichert spoke out in opposition to the bill, while Inslee spoke in its support.

But it was interesting to see both Republican Reichert and Democrat Inslee make freedom of choice a lynchpin of their divergent arguments:

Putting aside the obvious irony of Reichert making a pro-choice appeal, the fact that opposing sides could make the same basic argument in service of competing causes, shows just how muddled, confusing and hopeless this debate really is. If Democrats and Republicans can’t even agree on the meaning of the word “choice,” how can they possibly agree on something as complex as health care reform?

Of course, they can’t, which is why the mythical beast known as bipartisanship was never going to rear its head in this debate.

For the past few years Democrats campaigned vigorously on health care reform, and the American people rewarded them with control of both Congress and the White House. As a result, the American people were going to get a Democratic health care plan if they were going to get anything at all, whether the Republicans chose to constructively participate in the process or not.

The Republicans lost this debate not yesterday, not last week or last month, or even during the long year in which this bill has made its torturous way through Congress. No, the Republicans lost this debate in 2006 and 2008, when voters resoundingly decided to place their confidence in Democrats, not Republicans, to solve our nation’s most pressing problems.

These are the voters to whom Congress fulfilled a promise yesterday, and if voters in 2010 and 2012 aren’t happy about it, they will be free to toss the Democrats out. And that is a definition of “choice” on which I hope both sides can agree.

Writing on the Washington State Insurance Commissioner’s official blog, Rich Roesler explains what yesterday’s passage of federal health care reform means for us here in Washington state:

The health care reform bill passed by the U.S. House Sunday will cut the number of uninsured in Washington state by more than 500,000, provide better coverage to those with insurance, and save $500 million in uncompensated care – health care that’s delivered in Washington state but not directly paid for.

Which makes it hard to explain why Republicans Dave Reichert, Doc Hasting and Cathy McMorris-Rodgers would vote against it. Unless, of course, their votes were purely ideological and/or political.

So we finally find out what Denny Heck thinks about health care. He urged passage the weekend the vote was happening in the House.

Talk about the worst of both worlds. The Tea Party/Republicans will attack him anyway, and by not taking a stand until the 11th hour he’s shown that he’s afraid of the heat. Not exactly what voters are looking for this year, IMHO. Then he complains in his “open letter” about politics? Geebus. How’s he going to handle the right if he can’t handle the left?

UPDATE (Goldy):
Let’s be clear, State Sen. Craig Pridemore came out unequivocally for health care reform well before the vote, at a time when it wasn’t at all clear that Democrats had enough votes to pass it, whereas Heck waited until it was pretty much a done deal. I’ve got nothing against Heck, but I’m personally convinced that politics as usual is a losing ticket for WA-03 Democrats this November, and that’s what he brings to the table, while Pridemore is the kinda populist go-getter who really connects with voters.

Locked in special session, and unable to devote himself full time to campaigning and fundraising, Pridemore sure could use your help.

Bill Clinton couldn’t do it. Richard Nixon couldn’t do it. Neither could Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, nor Franklin or Teddy Roosevelt.

But sometime today or tomorrow, President Barack Obama will sign health care reform into law, delivering on one of his top campaign promises.

I’m just sayin’….

The yeas have it, 219-212, without, of course, a single Republican voting for it. More later, but for now, what Josh Marshall said:

If the bill passes, and should the worse befall the Dems and they wake up on November 3rd having lost both houses of Congress, they can look back on all the work in the 2004, 2006 and 2008 cycles and say, it wasn’t wasted and it wasn’t for nothing. This bill will be by far the most significant piece of social legislation in almost 50 years and will achieve, albeit imperfectly, something progressives have been trying to achieve for going on a century. If the Dems lose their majorities in November, they’ll be able to say: we worked this hard, we built these majorities, and this is what we did with it.

Even more though, I come back to the central lesson of the Social Security battle in 2005, which was the realization that the key condition of political success is almost always a genuine willingness to lose well.

[…] A genuine willingness to lose means just that: you might lose. You might lose big. And the dynamics of a mid-term election, amidst crippling unemployment and an energized right, have certain unavoidable implications. But I suspect the effect for the Democrats of actual passing this legislation will be considerably more positive than people realize.

The Dems spent some political capital, and the result was history.