Back in the 1970s and ’80s various left-leaning localities became the butt of national ridicule for declaring themselves nuclear-free zones or taking other meaningless official stands on issues that most grown-ups recognized were the competence of the national government.
Now apparently it is the turn of right-wing loonies to fill this role at the local level. Loudoun County’s all-Republican all-ideological Board of Supervisors still does not quite equal the supervisors of Virginia’s Chesterfield County and their opposition to nefarious socialist plots to make us ride bicycles, or the county commissioner in Lubbock, Texas, who proposed expanding the sheriff’s department so that when President Obama “turns over sovereignty to the U.N.,” he can be prepared to resist: “He’s going to send in U.N. troops. I don’t want ’em in Lubbock County.”
But we’re trying! Led by deep thinker Supervisor Suzanne Volpe (R-Algonkian), the Loudoun Board recently passed a meaningless official resolution opposing a key component of Obamacare: an expansion of Medicaid so that a person earning less than $15,000 a year can obtain any health care at all.
Interestingly, many Republican governors are now quietly dropping their opposition to this provision, since it comes with a considerable increase in Federal funding to their states. However, Virginia’s right-wing headline-grabbing gubernatorial candidate Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is still manning the barricades (of course he also opposes Medicare and Social Security, which in his new book he says were programs created by “bad politicians set out to grow government in order to increase their own power and influence”).
The Loudoun resolution passed 8–0, with only Janet Clarke (R-Blue Ridge) abstaining. Guess we have a lot of Cuccinelli supporters on our Board, who are so eager to join the state and national political scene that they don’t have time to deal with mundane matters like funding the schools, making developers pay for the costs they impose on everyone else, or preserving Loudoun’s unique historical, scenic, and rural heritage.
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