Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said yesterday that he no longer thinks Virginia should be required to submit its plan for redrawing legislative districts to the federal government for approval.
"I do not think, in this day and age, that we need pre-clearance from [the Department of Justice]," Cuccinelli said, referring to a provision in the Voting Rights Act that has required the commonwealth Virginia and other Southern states to submit their plans to the Department of Justice since 1965.
"Remember who has to be discriminating here — the General Assembly, the Senate or the House, and the governor," Cuccinelli said during AP Day at the Capitol, an annual gathering of journalists a month before the General Assembly session.
"And I don’t see any of those bodies now or any time in the future returning to the kind of history that Virginia is rather infamous for.
"I don’t for a moment mean to suggest that we don’t still have to contend in our society and in Virginia with bigotry. We do. ... I just don’t think Virginia needs that oversight at this point."
Cuccinelli spoke during a lunch-hour presentation to reporters gathered at the Capitol in Richmond for a pre-General Assembly briefing sponsored by The Associated Press.
The attorney general also said he supports keeping the provision of the Voting Rights Act that allows individuals to sue if they think boundaries have been drawn in a racially discriminatory way.
Virginia lawmakers will redraw legislative and congressional districts next year, an exercise that follows the census every 10 years.
The attorney general also said it is worth "looking at the numbers" to determine whether Virginia would be better off withdrawing from its partnership with the federal government in the Medicaid program, as Gov. Rick Perry has suggested in Texas.
"I would say that if we could move away — even if we spent the same amount of money — but moved away from the government dictation of how it’s going to be spent ... then I believe that we would start to see some improvement in the costs of health care," he said.
"I wouldn’t expect anybody to do anything precipitous," Cuccinelli added. "It is a lot of money that comes from the federal government. That’s not a mandate — nobody’s ordered to do Medicaid or Medicare," he noted.
"No state has turned down that big pot of money yet, but it’s gotten to the point where it’s bad enough that states are looking at it, and I think that’s a healthy thing."
The attorney general also said his legislative agenda for the upcoming assembly session that will focus on granting law-enforcement powers of his health-care fraud unit, protecting private-property rights from government claims of eminent domain and improving treatment options for the mentally ill.
Cuccinelli also predicted that by the beginning of the year, as new attorneys general are sworn in around across the U.S., more states will file legal challenges to newly enacted federal health-care legislation.
Virginia is awaiting a ruling on its challenge to the constitutionality of the law, which is expected in the next three weeks.
jnolan@timesdispatch.com
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