Republicans are cowards, Part 367

A number of Republican senators Tuesday either didn’t know or wouldn’t say if they consider the Voting Rights Act to be constitutional, even though many of them voted to reauthorize it in 2006 and the Supreme Court is currently considering whether to invalidate a key section of it.

As they entered and exited weekly party luncheons Tuesday afternoon, I and other reporters asked many GOP senators if they consider a centerpiece of the law, which was battered by conservative justices during Supreme Court oral arguments last week, should be upheld. Every one of them dodged the questions, some more artfully than others.

“Uh,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), before a long, awkward pause, “I haven’t even thought about it.” He laughed and said, “I’ll leave that to the courts. I’m having a hard enough time being a senator, much less a Supreme Court justice.”

I asked the same question to Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who, like Graham, voted to renew the law in 2006. “The Voting Rights Act?” he asked. Yes, I said. Should it be upheld? “Oh, I don’t know,” Inhofe replied. “I’ll let someone else answer that.”

ObamaCare violates the Constitution down to its “very DNA,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch in a speech on the Senate floor on February 9. “At its core, the law and its expansion of government are a threat to personal liberty…As the state controls more and more of our lives to further a political agenda, our freedom is put in greater and greater jeopardy.”

Graham: There is no constitutional right to get on an airplane without being screened that I know of and you know when the founders sat down and wrote the Constitution they didn’t consider flying. And I don’t believe that the Constitution protects any of us from being able to get on an airplane without being screened and here’s the big elephant in the room.

More than 100 congressional Republicans signed a brief Friday urging the Supreme Court to strike down the entire healthcare reform law if it finds the law's individual mandate unconstitutional.

The lawmakers joined an amicus brief filed by the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative advocacy group. If the Supreme Court strikes down the requirement that almost all Americans purchase health insurance, the brief says, it should toss out all of the Affordable Care Act.

"Congress would not have passed the ACA absent the individual mandate," the brief sates. "Without the individual mandate, the ACA’s remaining provisions cannot function properly. Thus, the unconstitutional individual mandate is not severable from the ACA, and the entire Act must be invalidated."