Liberal group charges Corbett consulted GOP before filing suit over health care
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A liberal Pennsylvania advocacy group says the office of Attorney General Tom Corbett was in communication with a consultant for the Republican State Leadership Committee before he decided to join a lawsuit challenging the landmark health care reform package signed into law in March.
Those communications, according to Keystone Progress, lend credence to the accusation that the lawsuit was politically motivated, even though Mr. Corbett, a Republican candidate for governor, and the 13 other Republican attorneys general who joined the lawsuit said that the suit was about policy, not politics.
The suit "seeks to protect the citizens of Pennsylvania whose rights will be violated when the health care reform legislation [is] signed into law by President Obama," Mr. Corbett said at the time.
On Thursday, a spokesman for Mr. Corbett's office, Kevin Harley, said "the reason the attorney general joined the lawsuit was that the [part of the law] that requires citizens to purchase health care is unconstitutional, and in violation of the commerce clause" of the Constitution.
Keystone Progress distributed a small batch of e-mails on Thursday - communiques among attorney general staff members across the country, as well as Ben Cannatti, the former political director of the RSLC, which was a major contributor to Mr. Corbett's attorney general re-election campaign. Also CC'd on those e-mails were two employees in Mr. Corbett's office, though none of those employees actually issued any e-mails of their own.
In the e-mails, Mr. Cannatti and others are corresponding back and forth about the impending lawsuit, how many states would be involved, and the deadline for signing the original complaint.
First Published May 7, 2010 12:00 am
