Sooner or later, someone is going to have to pay for the dogma-saturated legal forays of Kenneth Cuccinelli, Virginia’s firebrand Attorney General.
It’s a shame because hardly any of Cuccinelli’s high-profile legal actions seem to be worthy cases that protect citizens of the Old Dominion. Instead, his actions are aimed at firing up the hard-right fringes of the Republican Party and maybe dragging some in the center along as congressional elections approach this fall and General Assembly races follow next year.
Meanwhile, “The Cooch’s” legal initiatives are getting some substantial push-back and they are far from litigation slam-dunks.
The Feds have come back hard against Cuccinelli’s politically-motivated lawsuit against the health care reform act just passed that ends such one-sided and harmful practices as denying people health insurance because of a “pre-existing” condition as defined by private sector lawyers and insurance bureaucrats. The next shoe to drop comes in federal court in Richmond in August.
“Cooch” is also getting strong push-back from The University of Virginia as he pursues his fishing trip in the form of “civil investigative demands” to hound a former Hoo professor and global warming researcher Michael Mann.
To fight off the attorney general, the university’s Board of Visitors has hired a tip-top, white shoe law firm, Hogan Lovells. The firm is the newly-merged entity formed by one of Washington’s most prominent law firms and Lovells of London. The new firm has 2,500 lawyers in 47 countries. I am told they can get up to $1,500 an hour , depending upon how many lawyers they throw on a case. They have been defending U.Va. since May and will deal with some 40 pages of legal papers Cuccinelli has filed. The next court hearing is in August.
Irrepressible Cuccinelli has been dancing in other courtrooms, too. He has filed an “amicus” brief supporting Arizona as it defends its racist immigration law against federal lawsuits.
So how much is the busy Cuccinelli going to cost us taxpayers? A spokesman says that in the federal lawsuit case, they paid a $350 filing fee for the lawsuit and than none of the lawyers in the attorney general’s office is being taken off other, routine work. He did not know how much the U.Va. case would cost.
A university spokeswoman told me that the school is not using public money in the Cuccinelli-Mann matter but has been accepting contributions from alumni and others. One individual, worried about academic freedom issues, stroked a check for $5,000.
As the struggle goes forward, holes in the “Cooch’s” global warming case are starting to show. He is using evidence that surfaced in a British controversy over the University of East Anglia that caches global warming research for the United Nations. E-mails by some scientists were claimed to prove that some global warming research is fraudulent.
That claim is red meat for Cuccinelli and he’s trying to pin it to Mann, who left U.Va. for Penn State in 2005 and is involved in some of the East Anglia emails.. A couple of new wrinkles might make that hard. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a lobby group of science researchers, says that some of the emails that Cuccinelli is pursuing have nothing whatsoever to do with Mann. In recent weeks, a British probe has found no evidence of fraud in the East Anglia flap. By the way, Mann was probed and found innocent of any bad science by Penn State.
This, of course, means nothing to the rightist global warming deniers, including the individual who runs this blog and his allies who take their cues from the Cato and American Enterprise Institutes and other conservative think tanks in the area of Washington which they all claim to so despise.
One wonders, however, what the legal bill for all of this really is. And if the cases get tossed out of court, a very real possibility, one wonders if the fraud here is really Cuccinelli’s doing.
Peter Galuszka
