One year ago, when Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli filed his lawsuit over the federal health care law just minutes after President Obama signed the reforms into law, many skeptics dismissed it as a long shot at best. But now Cuccinelli, armed with a December ruling that declared a key provision of the law unconstitutional, is pushing the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, while fast becoming a conservative hero both in Virginia and across the country.
“From the standpoint of expanding his political profile, he hit a home run — there’s no question,” said Dan Palazzolo, a political science professor at the University of Richmond. “He who gets there first is going to be looked at as the innovator.”
Indeed, Cuccinelli notably declined to join a separate, multistate lawsuit filed against the law in Florida, saying Virginia was set apart from the others because its General Assembly approved legislation declaring that residents don’t have to buy health insurance as mandated by the law.
U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson ruled in the Cuccinelli case in December that the provision requiring most Americans to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional, though he declined to strike down the entire law. The Justice Department has appealed the case.
But Cuccinelli is pushing for the U.S. Supreme Court to take the rare move of sidestepping the normal appellate process and hear the case directly.
“If this case does not satisfy that standard, it is difficult to see what case ever could,” Cuccinelli wrote in a brief released this week. “The issue is a pure question of law.”
Advocates of the new law maintain that it will eventually be upheld, pointing to the fact that three other federal judges — including one in Virginia in a separate case filed by Liberty University — have ruled the law constitutional, while two other judges ruled against at least part of the law.
They cite the law as a boon to Washington-area residents. In Virginia alone, 123,500 children with pre-existing conditions now can’t be denied insurance coverage, Families USA, a nonprofit health care advocacy organization, reported this week.
“The last thing we want to do is go backwards,” said Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va.
Regardless of how the courts rule on the health care law, however, the one winner so far appears to be Cuccinelli.
“This guy is ambitious,” Palazzolo said, “and who knows what his future is?”
