With nothing else to hang their political hats on, the House GOP is still on their repeal kick [sub req].
In continuing their campaign against the new health care law, 28 Republican Representatives, including top GOP House leadership, Tuesday signed on to an amicus brief filed in support of Virginia’s constitutional challenge to the law....
Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio), Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.), House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (Ind.) and Conference Vice Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.) all signed on to the brief contending that the law’s individual mandate to buy health insurance is unconstitutional.
About that law suit.... Ian Millihiser at Think Progress evaluates it, and to say that it might be somewhat wanting is a bit of an understatement.
Normally, lawyers presenting arguments to a court focus on facts, legal sources, and legal precedent. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli prefers a different tactic. In an often-incoherent brief attacking the Affordable Care Act, Cuccinelli argues that a 236 year-old colonial boycott of British products somehow renders the new health care law unconstitutional:
[A]ll of the taxes except those on tea were repealed leading to the Boston Tea Party, the Intolerable Acts, and the First Continental Congress. Throughout the period from the Stamp Act forward, Americans responded with non-importation and non-consumption agreements. … In light of this experience, the founding generation would have regarded as preposterous any suggestion that Great Britain could have solved its colonial problems by commanding Americans to purchase tea under the generally conceded power of parliament to regulate commerce.
This argument is hardly a model of clarity, but Cuccinelli appears to be arguing that, because American colonists protested British taxes by boycotting British products, it somehow follows that the Founders would not allow Congress to pass a law which would prevent modern-day Americans from boycotting health insurance. Cuccinelli, however, needs a history lesson. The Founders did not boycott British products because believed in boycotts for their own sake; they did so because they were protesting “taxation without representation.
Commerce clause, taxation without representation, whatever. The colonists were pissed. About tea, or something. The teabaggers are pissed. Not about tea, but they want to be like the colonists, so the Boston Tea Party must be somehow applicable to the new health insurance law. Hell, it works for Boehner and Cantor, et al.
I don't what's scarier: that Cuccinelli is the chief legal officer for Virginia or that the Republican House leadership are actually in a position to make federal law.