DeWine heads for the anti-health care trough

DID YOU HAPPEN TO catch Mike DeWine's screed against the new health care law in the Sunday Plain Dealer? It was an op-ed counterpoint piece in his bid to unseat Democratic Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray. In brief, DeWine lauded those attorneys general in other states who are conspiring in lawsuits to repeal the law. And DeWine says that when (if?) he is elected he would heartily do the same.

Poor Mike. If he is half the lawyer that he says he is, he would heed the constitutional lawyers who say that any action to repeal the law is a fool's errand. As a politician who could blend easily into the wallpaper of any old house, he and the A-G's that he's longing to join are giving grandstanding a bad name. If his threat ever came to pass he would add Ohio to the Old Confederacy Republicans at a critical time when the state needs to root itself in an imaginatively progressive future. (There's also some rumblings from the earlier GOP knee-jerkers that the costs of such legal action couldn't come at a worse time for their states' enfeebled budgets.)

DeWine's been out of the show for awhile since his days as a U.S. senator, so I wonder if he's given much thought to the risks of killing health care reform. For one thing, the new law will enable young people to remain on their parents' health insurance until age 26.

The GOP may find them a little more difficult to add to the mix when it again, and again, and again swears that it wants to broaden the party's base.

I can only wonder who is giving him such antebellum advice on his campaign. Or maybe he just enjoys hanging out with his own crowd in hopes of raising campaign cash from the insurance companies. Surely there is something else more sensible that he can find to offer the state in which he wants to be its top legal brain. Jeez!