Candidate threatens to evoke Tenth Amendment against EFCA

Has any member of the right-wing brain trust even read the Tenth Amendment?

The Tenth Amendment protects state and personal autonomy from federal power grabs. If a state wants to use its power to protect the rights of its citizenry, it may.

This should have been useful for fighting the Bush regime's "preemption" fetish, in which Bush tried using federal force to gut state laws on things like consumer protections or other regulations on Big Business.

The Tenth Amendment does not prohibit federal laws that safeguard constitutional rights or legally protected activity, or pose no threat to state autonomy.

But don't tell that to Ken Cuccinelli II, the extremist nut who's running as the Republican candidate for Virginia Attorney General.

A word about Virginia Democrats: They're so inept that they can barely win a statewide election even when victory seems like it should jump right in their laps. Although President Obama won Virginia, the Democrats at the state level are an illegible mimeograph of the Republicans. So the GOP's bullshit goes largely unchallenged in Virginia.

Cuccinelli says that if he's elected, he's going to use the Tenth Amendment to pull the state out of the Employee Free Choice Act, a proposed federal law that would make it easier for workers to unionize.

Seriously. He really did say this.

He actually thinks he can allow his state to defy a perfectly legal federal law that protects perfectly legal activity (namely, unionization).

Cuccinelli also attacks the Democrats for supporting "heavy regulation" - but in the same statement, he pledges to protect Virginia's draconian work-for-less law.

If anything is excessive regulation, it's work-for-less laws. These laws hamstring unionized workers by forcing them to subsidize nonunion labor.

Ken Cuccinelli sounds like he wants to turn the Old Dominion into his personal right-wing fiefdom where he can defy any law he doesn't like.