Milwaukee Rising

State Reps. Robin Vos (R-Caledonia) and Scott Suder (R-Abbotsford) are leading the charge to make sure that Wisconsin residents who would benefit under health care reform don’t.

(Republican gubernatorial candidates Scott Walker and Mark Neumann also favor financial ruin caused by medical bills.)

Vos and Scuder sent a letter, which they said is signed by 32 other state legislators, asking State Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen to take action to block the legislation in Wisconsin.

Suder comes up with an interesting read of the U.S. Constitution: “The 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution clearly grants the states the sovereignty needed to opt-out of federal laws such as this,” he said in a prepared statement.

Oh, really? The 10th Amendment says that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Where is that opt-out provision? Why hasn’t it been used before?

The scary possibility is, of course, is that the ideologues running the U.S. Supreme Court right now will endorse the Suders of the world and come up with a Constitutional interpretation worse than the one that gave corporations such a large financial say in the electoral process.

Van Hollen, meanwhile, is taking a cautious approach. Three conditions are necessary for his office to take action, the State Department of Justice said in a statement.

First, the President must sign the health care overhaul into law.

Second, Governor Doyle or either house of the state legislature must authorize
the Attorney General to bring or join such a legal action. Absent such
authorization, he is prevented from doing so by state law.

Third, should the Governor or either house of the legislature make such an
authorization, Attorney General Van Hollen must independently conclude that
claims have a sufficient legal basis.

Van Hollen’s staff are in contact with lawyers in other states interested in challenging the law, the statement said. Van Hollen doesn’t like a lot of what is in the law, but doesn’t sound like he will be first at the courthouse door:

The role of the state attorneys general and the courts is not to veto
those policy choices made by elected officials – that would be decidedly
undemocratic – but to appropriately examine, in the context of a case, whether
the law is consistent with the Constitution of the United States. Even if specific
provisions of the health care law are held to be unconstitutional, a court may
determine that the rest of this massive health care overhaul is constitutional and
remains in effect.