chris koster – Moe Lane

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Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster says he will join more than a dozen other states in suing the Environmental Protection Agency to block rules meant to rein in climate change-causing carbon emissions.

Sure, they get around to mentioning Koster’s Democratic status in paragraph 2 – for people following at home – but there was a passage later that really made me grin: “The Democratic attorney general from another state where coal plays a big role, Kentucky, is also part of the legal efforts aimed at the EPA rule.” That would be Jack Conway, who is absolutely desperate to not have his name associated on the national level with fighting the EPA. After all: national Democrats hate coal now. They’re not going to be happy with a governor of any state that doesn’t toe that particular line. Continue reading Democratic AG Chris Koster stabs Barack Obama in the back over coal.

He’s not fully joining the fight against Obamacare – Koster has issued an amicus curiae brief in modified support of the Florida Obamacare lawsuit, instead of joining it – but he’s easily the most prominent Democrat on the state level to break with his party on Obamacare. This is partially probably due to Missouri’s emphatic rejection of Obamacare last year (in the form of Proposition C), and partially probably due to Koster’s own desire to survive politically; Koster switched parties in 2007, when it looked like the promised forty-year dominance of the Democratic party in America might actually last, well, forty years. As it stands, Koster is up for re-election next year, and as it’s promising to be a bad year for Missouri Democrats who like Obamacare… well.

Do read the brief, as it represents the Democratic party’s somewhat frantic desire to resolve the problem that they’re having with Obamacare right now. To wit: the individual mandate is clearly unconstitutional, given that it requires people to engage in commerce, whether they want to or not. Unfortunately, the same Geniuses From Beyond Space And Time that put that provision into Obamacare also neglected – willfully – a provision that explicitly stated that the various parts of Obamacare are severable from each other; so if the individual mandate goes it’s well within the court’s purview to declare the whole thing unconstitutional as well. That would be… problematical for Democrats, given that they wasted a year on Obamacare in the first place.

Continue reading Missouri AG Chris Koster’s (D) cynical fight against Obamacare.