Virginia’s gubernatorial election, is eight months away, but a leading anti-choice group is already spending big money to buy the governor’s mansion for Tea Party Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R-VA). Susan B. Anthony List — an anti-abortion group that launched a program early this year to teach Republican candidates how to talk about rape without using words like “legitimate” or “gift from God” — pledged at least $1.5 million to Cuccinelli’s campaign, an amount that approaches the entirety of its spending on federal races in 2012.

Cuccinelli has not been captured on film expressing the kind of career-ending gaffe about rape that kept candidates Todd Akin (R-MO) and Richard Mourdock (R-IN) out of the United States Senate last year, but his stance regarding the rights of women who are raped is more or less identical to Akin and Mourdock’s. In his first campaign for elected office, Cuccinelli said that he “opposes abortions that are not for the purpose of saving the mother’s life.” So women who are pregnant because of rape or incest are out of luck.

Rape survivors aren’t the only people who face a bleak future in Ken Cuccinelli’s vision for America. In a book he published last month, he endorsed the view that Medicare is “despicable, dishonest, and worthy of condemnation.” He claimed that Social Security, Medicaid and Food Stamps are attacks on people’s freedom. And he suggested that we should stop spending money on these programs because “[y]our government will never love you.”

Virginia’s tea partying Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) has a new book out today: The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty. Here are ten of the most bizarre ideas advanced by this book:

1) Medicare Is ‘Despicable, Dishonest, and Worthy of Condemnation’

Cuccinelli quotes a story about an “elderly woman painfully huddled on a heating grate in the dead of winter . . . hungry and in need of shelter and medical attention.” It would be wrong, according to this tale, for a mugger to “walk up to you using intimidation and threats” in order to steal money to pay for the woman’s care. And so, this story concludes, it must also be wrong for government to use its power to tax and spend in order to provide for a sick woman’s needs:

What if instead of personally taking your money to assist the woman, I got together with other Americans and asked Congress to use Internal Revenue Service agents to take your money? . . . Don’t get me wrong. I personally believe that assisting one’s fellow man in need by reaching into one’s own pockets is praiseworthy and laudable. Doing the same by reaching into another’s pockets is despicable, dishonest, and worthy of condemnation.

2) Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid and Food Stamps Are Deliberate Attacks On Americans’ Freedom

In what is already one of the most quoted lines in the book, Cuccinelli attacks the entire social safety net

One of [politicians'] favorite ways to increase their power is by creating programs that dispense subsidized government benefits, such as Medicare, Social Security, and outright welfare (Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing and the like). These programs make people dependent on government. And once people are dependent, they feel they can’t afford to have the programs taken away, no matter how inefficient, poorly run, or costly to the rest of society.

3) If We Don’t Tax People, They’ll Just Give All Their Money Away To Charity

“Your government will never love you,” Cuccinelli proclaims. Only “[c]hurches and charities can love you and nurture your soul.” So Social Security and Medicare are bad because they take money away that could go to charities that love you — “[i]f instead of spending all this money on social service programs, the government left all those dollars in the hands of the taxpayers, Americans would have more money to donate to private charities and churches.” It apparently does not occur to Cuccinelli that David Koch or Grover Norquist might do something other than fund a nationwide retirement and health care program if relieved of the need to pay taxes.

4) All Welfare Is Unconstitutional

“[P]ublic charity was never supposed to be a function of the federal government,” proclaims Cuccinelli, citing a single 1794 speech on the Constitution by James Madison. In reality, Madison led a minority faction during the early days of the Republic to shrink America’s power to govern itself more than the Constitution’s text permits. He lost.

5) Antitrust Law Is Unconstitutional

Cuccinelli also strongly implies that the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prevents monopolies, cartels and similar practices that allow wealthy corporations to exploit consumers, is unconstitutional — “For the first hundred years of our national existence, the Commerce Clause functioned just as Madison and the framers had expected. However, beginning with the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887 and the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, Congress began asserting more affirmative power under the Commerce Clause.”
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Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R), the apparent GOP candidate for Virginia Governor this November, told students at the University of Virginia this week that he had no problem with states experimenting with marijuana legalization.

The campus newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, reported that a student asked Cuccinelli about marijuana legalization as the Attorney General guest lectured in Professor Larry Sabato’s Introduction to Politics Class. “I’m not sure about Virginia’s future,” he responded, “but I and a lot of people are watching Colorado and Washington to see how it plays out.”

Sabato told the the Virginian Pilot that “Cuccinelli stressed he wouldn’t be recommending changes anytime soon. But he praised states such as Colorado for experimenting with marihuana legalization, saying this was federalism in action. He said twice his views were ‘evolving” on the subject.”

But this potentially libertarian approach is hardly indicative of Cuccinelli’s generally authoritarian views. He tried to get a college safe-sex fair cancelled (calling it “soft porn”), wants an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest, and opposed even allowing companies to voluntarily offer same-sex domestic partnership benefits fearing it might “encourage this type of behavior.” And even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case that such bans were unconstitutional, he still voted against repealing a state law making consensual sodomy a felony.

Justice Antonin Scalia is easily the Supreme Court’s most strident conservative. He defends torture and finds little wrong with executing the innocent. He once argued that the Constitution does not protect women from gender discrimination (although he’s since backed off this statement somewhat). Scalia compared same-sex attraction to murder. He believes our immigration law should look to antebellum laws excluding “freed blacks” from southern states for guidance. And he spent the much of the Supreme Court arguments on the Affordable Care Act parroting conservative talking points against health reform.

Yet, according to Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R), Scalia’s really just a squishy liberal:

At the annual gathering of the conservative National Review Institute, held at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, Cuccinelli appeared on a panel discussing the topic, “Does the Constitution Have a Future?” During the session, he criticized President Obama, suggesting the president had a malleable vision of the meaning of sin and of the Constitution.

“And really the way to fight back, given the governmental structure we have, the primary way is to get good judges who don’t accept what is wrong as right after a while,” Cuccinelli said, according to a video clip of the discussion. “Justice Scalia is in this category: ‘Well, we’ve been doing it wrong for a while, so now it’s part of the Constitution.’ I don’t buy that. I don’t buy that. And that needs to be reflected in the judges selected by the president, not this president, but the president generally, and approved by the Senate. They need to take that a lot more seriously than they do.”

To explain this a bit, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, conservative justices created new, artificial limits on the federal government’s power — such as saying that the Constitution did not permit Congress to regulate manufacturing, mining or agriculture. They then wielded these extra-constitutional limits to strike down basic workplace protections such as child labor laws or laws protecting the right to organize. The Supreme Court abandoned this misreading of the Constitution in the 1930s, and Justice Clarence Thomas is the only member of the current Court who embraces this misreading. Justice Scalia repeatedly refused to join opinions by Thomas pining for the days when manufacturing was considered immune to federal regulation and national child labor laws were considered unconstitutional.

Cuccinelli disagrees with Scalia on this point. He’s claimed that “[w]e want judges who will do nothing but apply the law as it was written and originally understood.” And, in one of his briefs challenging the Affordable Care Act, he tipped his hand to indicate a broader agenda to return to the days when child labor laws were tossed out because they exceeded Congress’ constitutional authority to “regulate commerce.” Cuccinelli’s brief embraces Thomas’ view that “the founding generation distinguished between commerce on the one hand, and manufacturing or agriculture on the other, as distinct things.”

Of course, Cuccinelli’s understanding of the Constitution’s history is dubious at best, but that’s beside the point. The point is that Cuccinelli thinks judges are bound by the founders’ understanding of the Constitution, and he also agrees with Justice Thomas that the founders would not have approved of child labor laws.

And so Justice Scalia is a villain, because he won’t join Thomas’ noble crusade against the most basic labor protections.

The Virginia House of Delegates subcommittee with jurisdiction over constitutional amendments killed a series of proposals Monday that would have restored the civil rights of persons convicted of a felony who have completed their sentences. This move come days after Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) endorsed changing the Virginia constitution to automatically allow non-violent felons to regain their voting rights after serving their time.

Virginia is one of a handful of states that prohibits all citizens convicted of felonies from voting, even after they serve their terms, unless they are granted clemency by the governor. A series of proposals by Democrats and Republican members of the Virginia House of Delegates were rejected, en mass, by the Constitutional Amendments Subcommittee of the House Privileges and Elections Committee. The subcommittee’s four Republicans unanimously voted to kill all of the proposals, Democrats Algie Howell (D) and Johnny Joannou (D) were the only votes in favor of any of the measures.

Both McDonnell’s Secretary of the Commonwealth Janet Vestal Kelly and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R) attended the hearing to speak in support automatic restorations. Had any of the bills passed through the Virginia General Assembly this year and again next year, it would have gone to a statewide referendum.

Deputy House Majority Leader C. Todd Gilbert (R), a former prosecutor who does not sit on the committee, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that he opposed automatic restoration because felons already get off too easy. “These are not people we ask of much … All we ask them is to show a little personal responsibility and fill out a simple application [for rights restoration].” Far from just simple procedural act, applying for clemency is no guarantee that whoever is governor will grant the clemency request.

Virginia’s Republican Party appears poised to nominate state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to be its candidate for governor in 2013 — embracing a man whose extreme political views bear striking resemblance to those of unsuccessful 2012 Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO).

With his fervent anti-science, anti-choice, and anti-LGBT, anti-federal government activism, Akin’s extreme positions were well known long before his infamous August pronouncement that victims of “legitimate rape” are unlikely to become pregnant helped derail his 2012 U.S. Senate campaign. Cuccinelli’s views closely mirror Akin’s in all of those areas.

Over seven-and-a-half years as a Virginia state senator and three years as the commonwealth’s attorney general, Republican Ken Cuccinelli II has been, in the words of the Washington Post’s editorial board, “the most overtly partisan attorney general in Virginia’s history.” Though he claims he is “best known for his efforts to preserve liberty and defend the US Constitution,” it is his opposition to liberty for women and LGBT Americans and his frequent court losses based on his flawed constitutional theories that have defined his political career to date.

While perhaps not as careless as Akin with his rhetoric, Cuccinelli has embraced many of the same extreme positions:

1. He wants an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. His 2002 campaign website laid out Cuccinelli’s abortion views clearly: “Ken believes that human life begins at conception, and that human beings should be respected and protected from conception to natural death,” it said. “Ken would seek to require sonograms to be part of a 24-hour waiting period with an informed consent requirement. Ken opposes abortions that are not for the purpose of saving the mother’s life.” Over his political career, he has pushed to defund Planned Parenthood and embryonic stem cell research. He pushed for a ban on third trimester abortions — making no exception for serious health risks on the woman — and for “safety” regulations for abortion providers designed to force clinics to close. He has also highlighted his opposition to RU-486 and his support for a “conscience” law protecting the “right of professionals to refuse to perform an action that is inconsistent with their moral convictions” — such as providing emergency contraception — “without losing their job.” Cuccinelli frequently attacks Planned Parenthood and has suggested that the fact that abortion clinics in Virginia are in urban areas with large African American populations is an example of white racism. His “ultimate goal,” he has said, is to “make abortion disappear in America.”

2. He does not believe LGBT people deserve legal protections. Cuccinelli has made it clear that he believes same-sex relationships are immoral. In 2009, he told a Virginia newspaper, “My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that.” After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case that such bans were unconstitutional, he still voted against repealing a state law making consensual sodomy a felony. He has actively pushed for state and federal constitutional amendments to prevent any legal recogntition of what he terms “what they’d like to refer to as ‘homosexual families,’” authoring a resolution calling for a federal amendment to invalidate any same-sex marriage, civil union, domestic partnership, or “other relationship analogous to marriage.” He has opined that “giving public sanction to homosexual marriage ends up redefining marriage and it’s certain to harm children.” He even opposed a state bill that allowed private companies to voluntarily provide health insurance benefits to employees’ domestic partners, warning it might “encourage this type of behavior.” His advisory opinion that Virginia’s public colleges and universities should rescind their non-discrimination policies was called “reprehensible” by a former Republican state legislator.
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Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) told a radio host he completely agreed with her assertion that investigations are needed to determine why President Obama lost “every one” of the states with photo identification requirements for voting, yet won re-election. Cuccinelli, who has lost most of the major legal cases he has brought since taking office in 2010, told the host she was “preaching to the choir.”

On WMAL radio, hosts Brian Wilson and Cheri Jacobus pressed Cuccinelli about why he has not opened a major investigation into what they suggested was wide-spread voter fraud in Virginia — an assessment they made based on receiving unproven allegations by email from listeners. Studies have shown Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud. Cuccinelli endorsed the idea of such investigations, but noted that he lacks the statutory authority to do launch an investigation.

Cuccinelli backed Jacobus on her conspiracy theories:

JACOBUS: There needs to be a way for people to be able to report this stuff and have it looked into. I mean, just across the country, we’re hearing so many stories. And people can talk about it, but nothing seems to be done. And, in fact in these states where voter ID is required to vote…

WILSON: Photo ID.

JACOBUS: Photo ID. Voter photo ID. Obama lost every one of those states. He can’t win a state where photo ID is required. So clearly there’s something going on out there and until there’s a way to have something done about it where when you report it, you know it’s going to be looked into, the other side just says “Oh, well, you’re just poor losers,” and that sort of thing.

CUCCINELLI: Your tone suggests you’re a little upset with me. You’re preaching to the choir. I’m with you completely.

Listen to the interview:

Of course, real voter fraud can be reported to local police authorities for investigation. And while just four states had strict photo ID laws in effect in the 2012 election — deep red Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, and Tennessee — seven more had some photo ID laws in effect. Of those, Obama did carry four (Florida, Hawaii, Michigan, and New Hampshire).

Cuccinelli announced in December that he will run for governor in November 2013.

A spokesman for the Attorney General later appeared to walk-back his comments, telling the Virginian-Pilot, “There is no question that President Obama legitimately won re-election. Ken was simply talking about the fact that there were problems on election day which need to be addressed.”