November 18, 2010
Private: Sen. McConnell Rallies Federalist Society in Fight to Bring Down Health Care Law
Bill McCollum, Federalist Society, Health Care Reform, individual mandate, Ken Cucinelli, Mitch McConnell, Simon Lazarus
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is striving to ensure that President Obama serves one term, is also feverishly working to repeal the administration's landmark health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act.
Beyond lodging a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum's lawsuit to repeal major provisions of the law, and threatening to scuttle funding of the law, McConnell, speaking at the Federal Society's annual "National Lawyers Convention," said he was counting on support of the organization "in helping us in our challenges to this affront," The Huffington Post reports.
McConnell (pictured), calling the Federalist Society "one of my favorite organizations in the whole country," blasted the health care law as "terrible" and claimed the law, if allowed to stand, would create an unwieldy, tyrannical federal government. "By preventing the accumulation of excessive power, the Constitution is designed to reduce the risk of tyranny or abuse from the state or federal government," he warned. "So fighting this mandate [the law's so-called individual mandate, which requires persons to purchase health care insurance or pay a penalty starting in 2014] couldn't be more important ...."
The Huffington Post's article also noted that the Federalist Society since its founding "has successfully shifted conservative legal ideas into the mainstream and helped young conservative superstars rise up in the system."
ACS Executive Director Caroline Fredrickson told The Huffington Post that the Federalist Society has helped to "pack our courts with right-wing zealots and changing constitutional interpretation to restrict the rights that most Americans consider so vital."
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is leading another legal challenge to the health care law, and on a CNN program yesterday reiterated the claims that the law is unconstitutional. Simon Lazarus, public policy counsel for the National Senior Citizens Law Center and author of an ACS Issue Brief on the constitutionality of the individual mandate, argues in this Newsweek commentary that Cuccinelli and other oppents of the health care law are employing misleading arguments to support their wobbly legal challenges to the law.
[image via Gage Skidmore]