RICHMOND -
Virginia Attorney General
Ken Cuccinelli said he will file
a formal response as early as this
week to the federal government's
attempt to dismiss Virginia's legal
challenge to Obamacare.
In an exclusive interview with Heritage,
Cuccinelli said the federal government's
motion to dismiss, released last Monday,
was mostly predictable.
He said the attorney general's office
had already anticipated the government's
arguments and will have its response ready
on or before June 7.
"What they filed last Monday
was very much what we expected,"
Cuccinelli said in an interview
at his Richmond office.
"You never know exactly
how they're going to present it,
but we did expect them to move
to dismiss the case."
The legal maneuvering
puts Cuccinelli at the center
of the Obamacare court battle.
In addition to Virginia's lawsuit,
20 states have joined a legal
challenge from Florida.
Virginia is pursuing its own strategy
because its legislature adopted a law
protecting its citizens from
the individual mandate.
Cuccinelli said the stakes are high
and he expects Virginia's case -
and probably Florida's - to end up
before the Supreme Court within
the next two years.
"We are doing what the founders
expected states to do," Cuccinelli said.
"We are a check
in the checks and balances system
that was laid out by James Madison"
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/05/28/cuccinelli-on-obamacare-lawsuit-we-are-doing-what-the-founders-expected/
A little over a month into
the Gulf of Mexico oil spill,
the American public wants
answers- from the Obama
administration, from Congress
and from BP.
While there are still
many more questions
than currently available answers,
President Obama answered a few
and dodged others in his speech
last week .
He made a resounding push
for clean energy legislation and
referenced the House cap and
trade bill passed last year and the
one recently introduced in the Senate.
He also suspended or canceled a
number of lease sales off the coasts
of American waters and extended a
moratorium on deep-sea offshore oil
drilling permits.
The Gulf oil spill certainly presents
an unprecedented economic and
environmental disaster and challenge,
but it should not be used as an excuse
to ban offshore exploration and cancel
leases outright or to overreach and make
drilling prohibitively expensive.
Furthermore, it should not be used
to push clean energy agendas forward
that will impose a significant burden on
American families, American businesses,
and the American economy.
Similar to Rahm Emanuel's
"You don't ever want a crisis
to go to waste" statement, President
Obama urged both Democrats and
Republicans to move quickly to pass
cap and trade legislation.
This is not the solution
to America's energy needs
because cap and trade will
raise energy prices, kill jobs
and contract the economy.
If "clean energy"
legislation moves forward,
higher energy costs will spread
throughout the economy as producers
everywhere try to cover their higher
production costs by raising their product
prices, further impacting Americans.
The result will be
a much slower economy
and lost jobs at a time when
the top priority for Americans
is economic growth.
There are billions of barrels
of oil and trillions of cubic feet
of natural gas under these waters
that could possibly create tens of
thousands of jobs as well as create
revenues for financially strapped state
governments and increase revenues
for federal governments
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/05/28/obama%e2%80%99s-oil-spill-speech-overreaches-on-cap-and-trade-cancelled-drilling/
In my opinion it was
labor union sabotage that
may have caused recent
mineing accidents & accidents
involving oil rigs .
When it comes to labor unions
I put nothing past them,
including sabotage .
