There must be a new Republican hero patriot for each week it seems. Last week it was Jim Bunning and now we’ve got State Senator Jill Holtzman Vogel.
Anything to obstruct health care reform, even if it’s unconstitutional:
Republican state legislator with close ties to the GOP operatives behind a slew of hardball tactics has sponsored and helped pass a bill — almost certainly unconstitutional — that prohibits the federal government from forcing the state’s citizens to buy health insurance.
The Virginia legislature last week passed legislation, based on a model created by the American Legislative Exchange Council, that declares unconstitutional any effort to require citizens to buy health insurance — as the health-care reform measures passed by both chambers of the U.S. Congress would do. In the state Senate, the effort was led by Sen. Jill Vogel.
TPMmuckraker readers may remember Vogel, formerly Jill Hotzman, from her work as a principal of Holtzman Vogel, the Washington GOP election-law firm that recently led a failed bid to undermine state laws against robocalls, on behalf of a shadowy conservative advocacy group.
Now, it appears, Holtzman is back. But the bill she sponsored would appear to itself be unconstitutional, since the Constitution’s federal supremacy clause makes clear that when federal and state law conflict, federal law takes precedence.
