Critics of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s high-profile health care lawsuit have questioned the motives behind it – nearly inevitable, given its slog through Congress and Cuccinelli’s other endeavors as attorney general.
Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a consumer group that supported President Obama’s health-care reforms, said Cuccinelli’s argument in a Richmond court Monday “represented political extremism and requested judicial activism run amok.”
But Cuccinelli said after the summary judgment hearing on the case that he is simply trying to protect the law.
He said that, as attorney general, he is required to defend the U.S. Constitution, the Virginia Constitution, and state statutes, including a law passed this year by the General Assembly saying that no Virginians can be forced to buy health insurance, as the federal reforms would require.
“There’s a Virginia law at stake here, and there is also, of course, the Constitution to be protected, and we are doing both,” Cuccinelli said.
“Nothing that we do in an office run by an elected official…will go unquestioned from a political perspective,” he said. “I expect that discussion will go on for years, but our focus is on getting the law right – defending the U.S. Constitution and Virginia’s properly enacted statute in this case.”
