Saslaw needs to ask Cuccinelli for a legal opinion on GOP power grab

( – promoted by lowkell)

Dick Saslaw needs to ask Ken Cuccinelli for a legal opinion on GOP power grab and whether it violates a 1980 AG’s opinion as seems to be the case from what I have been able to read in old newspaper clippings  (I can’t find the actual opinion yet, but I am looking.)

by Paul Goldman

Like it or not, Mr. Cuccinelli won the AG’s office fair and square. Since we are, or so Cuccinelli claims, a nation of laws and not ideologues, there is an 1980 AG’s opinion which apparently suggests – according to the Washington Post (I am looking for it) that what the GOP power-grabbing extremists want to do is well extreme and not what the people intended, as expressed in the Constitution of Virginia.

Now Mr. Cuccinelli says he is a strict constructionist, with big government politicians not having any more power than the people granted to well, those big power hungry pols.

Let’s put him to the test. Senator Saslaw needs to ask Cuccinelli to opine as they say on the various issues raised by King Bolling.

With all due respect to Professor Howard, he wasn’t elected to anything last I checked and anyway, his 1996 opinion, while well written no doubt, was written for a client not for the people.

True, he wasn’t paid $1.6 million like Newt Gingrich to advise Freddie Mac on how to keep their executives getting those bonuses while bubbling up the housing bubble and Great Recession flop, but Newt, as he will tell you, is a cut above the rest of us pea brains.

He did get the $1.6M, didn’t he for now apparent work he can produce on paper as of yet?

Back to Bolling: He and his GOP posse have decided to take the Senate of VA hostage.

Can they do it, should they do it?

 

Mr. Cuccinelli can’t rule on the shoulda part.

But on the issue of the powers of the LG, this would seem to be the kind of constitutional question he needs to address as the state’s top lawyer.

Moreover, for Democrats to put themselves in the best posture going forward – in the end, this is a classic political question – they need to check the boxes.

That means asking KC and his sunshine band over at the AG’s office for some legal light such as it is.

But you say: “Come on PG, you already know the answer.”

Maybe not, the AG may conclude that his rival for the 2012 GOP nomination can’t be trusted with power since he is hell bent on abusing it.

If KC were to rule for the people and conservative jurisprudence – that these powers from the people were placed in the hands of their 40 Senators – it would end the LG’s hopes of being Governor, and make Mr. Cuccinelli rather bulletproof from Democrats in 2013 on the extremist issue.

So maybe KC goes with BB, or maybe he doesn’t.

Saslaw needs to find out, so we can check the box and go to the next level.