Health care reform keeping lawyers busy
OLYMPIA – As Attorney General Rob McKenna prepares to convince the state Supreme Court why he can fight federal health care reform, a state legislator joined a group trying to tell a federal court that he shouldn’t.
McKenna is scheduled to be in the state's highest court Thursday morning, defending against a challenge by the City of Seattle, the governor and others to his decision to add Washington to a federal lawsuit trying to stop portions of the new health care law.
The state’s highest court will be asked to decide whether McKenna could make Washington state a party to the federal challenge to a law that Gov. Chris Gregoire and others contend is good for the state and its residents.
“The attorney general has gone forward over the objections of the legislative leadership and the governor,” state Sen. Karen Keiser, D-Kent, said Tuesday.
But it’s mainly the Democratic leadership who object....
...Republicans in the Legislature generally supported his decision, as did
U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers. In a recent filing with the state’s
high court, McKenna argues that as the independently elected legal
officer of the state, he and not the governor is authorized “to
represent the state in all courts in all legal matters in which the
state is interested.”
While the state Supreme Court is mulling those arguments, a federal
judge will be asked to expand the participants in the underlying federal
case in which McKenna and attorneys general from 19 other states are
challenging the new law.
Keiser, the co-chairwoman of the joint panel trying to figure out how to
implement health care reform in the state, said Tuesday she is joining
legislators from 25 other states in trying to intervene in the federal
case with a “friend of the court” brief. Gregoire and the governors of
Colorado, Michigan and Pennsylvania received permission last week to
file a friend of the court brief in the federal case.
The governors were mainly defending the federal government’s authority
to require people to obtain health care. The legislators will be arguing
the states aren’t being unconstitutionally forced into the Medicaid
system because it’s voluntary. They can opt out and give up the federal
matching funds.