Table of Contents:
Introduction
In the first test for a Republican Party that is still reeling from
the disastrous 2012 election, Virginia’s gubernatorial race could have
provided the GOP an opportunity to temper its
ultraconservative platform or restrain its
partnership with the Tea Party.
But the choice of state attorney general Ken Cuccinelli to be the
party’s presumptive nominee for governor indicates that the GOP is
moving even further to the right and letting go of any pretense of
moderation or bipartisanship.
Throughout his career, Cuccinelli has been something of a bellwether
for the course of the Republican Party. He won his first political
office in 2002, when he deposed a moderate, pro-choice Republican
incumbent in Virginia’s state senate, leading the incumbent to lament,
“The GOP picked someone whose thinking is so ancient, he would be an
embarrassment to Northern Virginia.” In 2009, he was on the front lines
of the Tea Party movement, winning election to the state attorney
general’s office on a wave of anti-Obama rhetoric and renewed
culture-war spirit.
As Virginia’s attorney general, Cuccinelli has become a right-wing
rock star. He’s picked fights with the Obama administration, scientists,
colleges and universities, and supporters of gay, immigrant and
reproductive rights, and strategically allied himself with birthers,
climate change deniers, Religious Right activists, Tea Party members and
the NRA.
Now, Cuccinelli’s gubernatorial candidacy may be a test of how far
the GOP is willing and able to take its recent lurch to the right. If
the choice of Cuccinelli to head the party’s ticket in Virginia is any
clue, the GOP has abandoned any pretense of reflection and
soul-searching and decided to go all in on its embrace of the Radical
Right’s policies and rhetoric. Whether he succeeds, and whether the
national Republican Party will continue to embrace Cuccinelli and the
extremism he represents, may tell us quite a lot about the future of our
politics.
Health Care
Cuccinelli emerged as a hero of the Tea Party movement when he filed suit against the Affordable Care Act
five minutes after it was signed into law.
While the Supreme Court ultimately determined the law to be
constitutional, Cuccinelli used the legal battle to gain national
attention and publicity,
especially after he won an initial challenge to the individual mandate
in a federal district court. In an interview with the Christian
Broadcasting Network about his challenge to the health law, Cuccinelli
suggested that God made him attorney general to save the Constitution from President Barack Obama. He
told the conservative website CNSNews that by signing the law, Obama proved himself to be a greater tyrant than King George III.
Not one for subtlety, Cuccinelli
told
Patrick Henry College students that the health care reform law was “one
of the greatest erosions of liberty in your lifetime or mine.” In a
column for the far-right
American Spectator, he
called the law an “onslaught on our liberty” that would lead to an
“enormous loss of liberty [that] is antithetical to America’s founding
principles.”
He bizarrely
asserted
that the Affordable Care Act could give the government the ability to
“order you to buy a Chevy Equinox.” At a 2010 rally, he went even
further,
saying
that the law might put people in jail: “If the federal government can
order you to buy anything with the penalty of going to jail, then you
are not a free man or woman in the United States.” There is, of course,
no provision in the law regarding jail time for people who do not purchase health insurance.
When the Obama administration ruled that under the ACA, health
insurers must provide contraception coverage free of copay, Cuccinelli
urged opponents to prepare to “
go to jail” rather than comply with the mandate.
He has even implicitly compared his fight against universal health
care and opposition to marriage equality to the civil rights movement,
citing Martin Luther King, Jr. in a speech to Virginia clergy.
Cuccinelli is an outspoken critic not only of the health care reform
law but also of social safety net programs like Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid. In his 2013 book,
The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty, he
claims
that people receiving such benefits are “dependent” on the government
and “feel they can’t afford to have the programs taken away, no matter
how inefficient, poorly run, or costly to the rest of society.” He
writes
that such programs were created by “bad politicians [who] set out to
grow government in order to increase their own power and influence” by
winning the support of the people who are “getting the goodies.”
Abortion Rights
In his 2012 commencement speech at Patrick Henry College, Cuccinelli
recalled that he “first got into politics” a decade earlier because he
objected to his Republican state senator’s support for abortion rights.
Cuccinelli went on to defeat that state senator, Warren Barry, in the
2002 Republican primary in his Northern Virginia district. Barry,
displaying some prescience about the future of the Republican Party,
endorsed Cuccinelli’s Democratic opponent, saying, “I don’t want to make
a habit of endorsing Democrats but, in this case, the GOP picked
someone whose thinking is so ancient, he would be an embarrassment to
Northern Virginia.”
Cuccinelli’s views on reproductive rights are indeed “ancient.” He has
argued
that the anti-choice movement is similar to the fight to abolish
slavery. “Over time, the truth demonstrates its own rightness, and its
own righteousness,” he said. “Our experience as a country has
demonstrated that on one issue after another. Start right at the
beginning: slavery. Today, abortion.”
He is a
proponent
of radical “personhood” legislation, which would classify zygotes as
“persons,” thereby criminalizing all abortions, several common forms of
contraception, stem-cell research and in-vitro fertilization. Such
“personhood” laws could even
prohibit doctors from treating life-threatening ectopic pregnancies.
As a state senator, Cuccinelli proposed a bill that would require doctors to
anesthetize the fetus before an abortion,
a procedure that could jeopardize the life of the pregnant woman. He
also sought to require any doctor performing abortions on a minor to
“preserve fetal tissue extracted” during the procedure and send it to
the state Department of Forensic Science “for the purpose of identifying
the father of the fetus and determining if a crime was committed.” [
PDF]
As attorney general, Cuccinelli
successfully pressured Virginia’s Board of Health to
overrule a previous judgment
and approve “TRAP” (targeted regulation of abortion providers) laws
that will likely result in the closure of the majority of the state’s
abortion clinics.
According to The Virginian-Pilot,
Cuccinelli “threatened Board of Health members that they could be
denied state legal counsel and have to pay for their own defense if they
again disregard his advice about relaxing controversial abortion clinic
rules and litigation ensues.”
Cuccinelli has
tried to defund Planned Parenthood in Virginia and has made the outrageous claims that the organization is
involved in sex trafficking and
targets the black community. He has also
praised and raised money for the radical anti-choice website LifeSiteNews and
spoken in favor of abstinence-only programs, warning that sex education promotes “
destructive” activities and is part of an “
anything goes agenda.”
Immigration
In 2010, Cuccinelli
signed on to an amicus brief defending Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant SB 1070 and
said that he was “stunned that the government has sued Arizona.” He even issued a
legal opinion
in Virginia that mirrors one of SB 1070’s most controversial
provisions, authorizing local police officers to check the immigration
status of people they stop, detain or arrest for any reason.
While in the state senate, Cuccinelli introduced a resolution [
PDF]
urging Congress to call a constitutional convention to rescind the 14th
Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. In addition,
Cuccinelli tried to amend labor laws [
PDF]
to allow employers to fire employees because of the “inability or
refusal to speak English at the workplace” and to disqualify such
workers from receiving unemployment benefits. He
twice opposed
bills that would allow undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition
rates at Virginia public colleges and universities. He even opposed the
immigration reform plan proposed by the Bush administration,
arguing that the bill was “something like amnesty” and represented “something of a ‘last straw’ for ordinary Republicans.”
Not only has Cuccinelli embraced the extremist policies of the
anti-immigrant Right, he’s adopted their dehumanizing rhetoric as well.
For instance, in a 2012 radio interview, Cuccinelli
compared the deportation of undocumented immigrants to pest control.
Gay Rights
Cuccinelli, who
voted in favor
of a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil
unions, used part of his commencement speech at the ultraconservative
Patrick Henry College to chastise President Obama for his endorsement of
gay marriage, claiming Obama thinks he knows “better than God”:
One [issue] I deal with is when the government and the media want to
assault our faith and try to convince the world that their way is better
than God’s way, like the president of the United States is doing this
week. Where are we going to stand? We’ve got to fight to protect
Christian values in a world that often tries to bury them, to say the
least.
He also
commended
the Virginia Christian Alliance for distributing a “Real Men Marry
Women” bumper sticker and warned that the “homosexual agenda” was a
threat to the family:
One of the things that I faced in the Senate when I would be defending
the continual assault, and it’s always going on, the homosexual agenda
is there every year and it’s carried forward every year and there is
this discussion of the word ‘family.’ I would tell you there are
elements of our society that aren’t real well-connected with the
dictionary; it’s a real problem for them.
He has argued that same-sex unions “
harm children” and
defended sodomy laws after the Supreme Court in
Lawrence v. Texas found them to be unconstitutional.
In March 2010, Cuccinelli sent a letter [
PDF]
to Virginia’s public colleges and universities directing them to drop
job protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity and
expression:
It is my advice that the law and public policy of the Commonwealth of
Virginia prohibit a college or university from including “sexual
orientation, “gender identity,” “gender expression,” or like
classification, as a protected class within its non-discrimination
policy, absent specific authorization from the General Assembly.
He
defended
his position by arguing that LGBT persons are not protected under the
14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause because categories like “sexual
orientation” would “never have been contemplated by the people who
wrote and voted for and passed the 14th Amendment.” Of course, in 1996
the Supreme Court found in
Romer v. Evansthat laws promoting anti-gay discrimination do indeed violate the Equal Protection Clause.
A year later, Cuccinelli reversed the legal opinion of his predecessor and
barred the State Board of Social Services from
implementing a proposal to allow same-sex couples to adopt children. He also
ended
a contract between the attorney general’s office and a law firm after
the firm refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act on behalf of the
House Republican leadership.
As a member of the state senate, Cuccinelli
opposed legislation that permitted companies to voluntarily extend health benefits to employees’ domestic partners and
condemned homosexuality as “intrinsically wrong” and “not healthy to society”:
My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts
are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural
law-based country, it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that.
... They don’t comport with natural law. I happen to think that it
represents (to put it politely; I need my thesaurus to be polite)
behavior that is not healthy to an individual and in aggregate is not
healthy to society.
Cuccinelli routinely works with anti-gay groups, including
Concerned Women for America,
Faith and Freedom Coalition and
Liberty Counsel, and with far-right activists such as
Del. Bob Marshall and Virginia Christian Alliance board member
Joe Ellison. His Religious Right bona fides were further confirmed when he tried to
censor Virginia’s Great Seal by covering up the goddess Virtus’ bosom,
a move for which he offered shifting explanations.
Voting Rights
Cuccinelli has spoken out against Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,
which requires the Department of Justice to review changes in voting
practices in states that have a history of state-sanctioned racial
discrimination, claiming that Virginia has “
outgrown” Justice Department oversight. As a state senator, he
voted against efforts to make it easier to cast an absentee ballot and
twice opposed efforts to restore voting rights to nonviolent felons before he switched his position to follow Governor Bob McDonnell.
Education and Church-State Separation
Cuccinelli wants to
abolish the U.S. Department of Education and has
endorsed tax credits that are a
back door for private and parochial school vouchers.
He is also a proponent of the conservative homeschooling movement,
which seeks to reject public schools and raise a generation of Christian
Right activists. (His own
five children are homeschooled.) In his 2012 commencement address to the homeschooling movement’s flagship
Patrick Henry College,
Cuccinelli offered up classic culture-war rhetoric, telling graduates,
“The fight is against the tide of political correctness, the
intelligentsia and the media.”
Cuccinelli, a Roman Catholic, has
lamented
that the Catholic Church’s emphasis on social justice and service to
marginalized groups has “helped create a culture of dependency on
government, not God” and made Church leadership appear “
soft and weak.”
He also
worked with
the right-wing Virginia Christian Alliance in 2011 to give advice to
pastors on how to get involved in politics without risking their
churches’ tax-exempt status and
fondly recalled
a time when candidates for public office “couldn’t of run for office in
most parts of this country if you weren’t known in your community to be
a man of faith.”
“The secular humanist attack is very real, very alive,” he warned the
VCA, telling members to “Google up the Humanist Manifesto” of 1933 to
“read the game plan for the other side, as if there is a vast left-wing
conspiracy, and you will find out there is. They had a plan eighty years
ago and if you read it now it reads like unfolded history, including
the attack on God himself.”
Cuccinelli told the group that it “drives me a little bit nutty” that the voter guide of the
Catholic Herald,
the newspaper of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Virginia,
lacks “discrimination between issues,” meaning that it doesn’t emphasize
stances on topics like abortion rights over those like combating
poverty and immigration reform.
Hostility to Science
Cuccinelli has created a hostile climate for the scientific community – which he criticized, along with the media, for being “
viciously secularized” – and has used the attorney general’s office to go on a
witch hunt against climate scientists.
As attorney general, Cuccinelli attempted to compel the University of
Virginia to hand over the emails and research documents of
Environmental Sciences professor Michael Mann for review under the
Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.
Both a county court and the state supreme court
blocked Cuccinelli’s request for what the
Washington Post described
as “five grant applications prepared by former professor Michael Mann
and all e-mails between Mann and his research assistants, secretaries
and 39 other scientists from across the country.”
Dr. Mann
said
in response to the lawsuit that Cuccinelli and other climate change
deniers have tried to make “targets out of individual scientists whose
work has played a prominent role in the discourse on climate change.”
Mann added that Cuccinelli was trying to “intimidate climate scientists”
and “chill the scientific discourse surrounding a topic that he
obviously feels uncomfortable about, human-caused climate change.”
Cuccinelli also
unsuccessfully sued
the Environmental Protection Agency for seeking to regulate greenhouse
gases under the Clean Air Act, arguing that the EPA based its decision
on the “
unreliable, unverifiable and doctored”
findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He pointed
to the so-called “Climategate” scandal to claim that scientists are
manipulating data to make the case for climate change. The scientists
implicated in the manufactured right-wing scandal have been
exonerated.
Conspiracy Theories
In a campaign town hall meeting, Cuccinelli
said that his family is considering not registering his son for a Social Security number “because it is being used to track you.”
Shortly after being sworn in as attorney general, Cuccinelli gave
credence to birther conspiracy theories when he said that President
Obama’s birth certificate “will get tested” once “someone is convicted
of violating [a federal law] and one of their defenses will be it is not
a law because someone qualified to be president didn’t sign it.” He
even said that it was “possible” that the attorney general’s office
would look into birther claims, maintaining that it “doesn’t seem beyond
the realm of possibility” that Obama was born in Kenya. In a
statement
after his comments leaked, Cuccinelli backed down, saying he was merely
offering a “hypothetical legal response” to a question and that he
doesn’t believe in the birther conspiracy theory himself.
Cuccinelli also backed the claims of two radio talk show hosts who
doubted the validity of President Obama’s reelection because Obama lost
the four states — Georgia, Tennessee, Kansas and Indiana — that have the
country’s strictest voter ID laws,
telling them: “You’re preaching to the choir.I’m with you, completely with you.”
He even
falsely claimed that the government of Washington, D.C., was working to deliberately displace rats to Virginia.
Gun Activism
A
close ally of the National Rifle Association, Cuccinelli has championed the concealed carrying of weapons in
bars, restaurants,
public parks and
churches. He called officials at George Mason University
“idiots” and “crazy” because the school prohibits guns in campus buildings, and he issued a
legal opinion
that “people with concealed carry permits are not subject to a
University of Virginia policy prohibiting individuals from bringing guns
into school facilities without permission.” As a state senator, he
helped defeat a bill that would have closed the gun show loophole on background checks.
Conclusion
Far from an aberration, Cuccinelli’s candidacy shows how far to the
right the GOP has moved in recent years. Many predictions about a time
of Republican self-reflection and moderation after the party’s 2012
defeats have failed to materialize. Instead, the GOP seems all the more
determined to elevate right-wing candidates like Cuccinelli, embracing
his attacks on everything from Social Security to the “homosexual
agenda,” and confirming that Tea Party extremism is now an entrenched
part of the Republican platform.
Note: More info is available at People For the American Way. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore
