Yep, the same Dick Saslaw who doesn’t believe Virginia needs any stinkin’ ethics laws, who is well known to despise progressives and environmentalists (aka, his “base”; can you imagine Tommy Norment constantly dissing his right-wing base like this?!?), who recently called the Sierra Club “crazy,” who has presided over Democrats losing control of the Virginia State Senate (and the pissing away of much of the money he raised), is at it again. This time?
That’s right, Saslaw’s latest cause is to ensure that “information relating to the identity of…compounding drugs for use in executions and all documents related to the execution process are confidential, exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, and not subject to discovery or introduction as evidence in a civil proceeding except for good cause shown.”
Now why might Saslaw be doing something like this? Well, for starters, he’s a supporter of the death penalty. Virginia also has a “problem,” if you think not being able to execute people is a “problem,” in that it has some lethal injection drugs, lacks anesthetic (“the department does not have in stock either thiopental sodium or pentobarbital – anesthetics used as the first in the three-drug lethal injection protocol developed by the Department of Corrections.”). Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to rule on the constitutionality of an execution “drug cocktail,” with death row opponents contending “that the drugs being used are untested, experimental drug combinations that can cause great suffering, in violation of the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.”
Now, if the public doesn’t know what is IN Virginia’s execution “drug cocktail,” it will be kind of hard to challenge it in court. Of course, the public should have a right to know this information, as the state is arguing for the right to put people to death using our tax dollars. In short, Dick Saslaw is wrong both on the merits of the issue here as well as on the right of the public to know what’s going on. So when is someone going to primary this faux “Democrat?”
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