Nathan Key

It's like asking the citizens to pay for a 5 cent tootsie roll pop to save them from having to pay for a new 300 dollar vacuum cleaner every month plus give $50 of your own money for groceries to a jail inmate, an illegal alien and a welfare recipient you don't even know to enjoy. A worth while investment and anyone with common sense would need and expect someone with experience and know how such as himself to represent them...it is his job and is what is exactly described in his job description when he took that government position. Might I add he was elected not arrogantly assuming this role by public favor. And by the way he's not sueing. They are repealing sections of the bill.

I suppose one could argue that by electing McKenna in the first place, there was consent of the people to allow him to do what he wanted to protect the State, correct?

I guess my thought is, if you're using my tax money to fight over something, you'd better use it wisely. I'm all about using it to overturn bad laws (and in this case he'd have my support that this is a bad law), but from my experience in Washington (well, Seattle not actually Washington the State) most citizens there are really very supportive of Public Options and expanded Healthcare Regulations. When you have that kind of support for the healthcare bill and criticism from just about every other elected official in the local and state government- you might not be representing the wishes of the people.

I'm writing this from Florida, where I hear more people complaining about reform than supporting it, so I'd argue that our Florida Attorney General probably has consent to file an injunction or a lawsuit over this bill, and so an attempt to do so should go unthwarted.

I certainly see you position, and I don't mean to suggest that elected officials should ignore the will of their constituency. I suggest that when they do, we end up with things like this healthcare bill! But at the same time, we are in a republican democracy, rather than a pure democracy. We put our trust in our officials to make the right call. And if we don't like the calls they make, we elect someone else.

The question of the suit by the Attorney Generals is a little different question, though. Because this is not just a political question (is the healthcare bill a bad idea?), it is also a legal question (does the bill violate the US Constitution). Here, I suggest that the attorney generals hands are tied. If he truly believes that the healthcare bill unconstitutionally usurps the powers of the State of Washington, then he has a responsibility to fight it to uphold the laws of his own state. As attorney general, his primary focus must be upholding the law as opposed to the sentiments of the constituency.

All of this is not to say that the legal question itself is not wide open to interpretation as well. Many attorney generals likely don't see the healthcare bill as unconstitutional. But for those that do, I'm glad to see them standing for the law, at least as they interpret it.