Lawyers just make arguments and no lawyer knew how the judges would come down. This is a lot of effort to keep the personal animosity going. Is the Goldy you want to present to the world? It's early. Still time to delete post.

@1 ... agreed. It's hyperbole.

Crappy lawyer? Not necessarily. Filthy, stinking liar? Necessarily. Anyone with the basic capacity for rational thought understands that you can't keep all the good stuff of the health care law and throw out the individual mandate. Nothing in life is free; it would be like starting a shop and saying, "You know what, everybody, take whatever you want--no need to pay for it unless you feel inclined." You wouldn't be in business long!

This republican BS line about "Oh we like coverage for pre-existing conditions and coverage for 26 year-olds and prescription help for the elderly. It's just that nasty mandate we don't like," is simply another way to fool their sheep in the base into thinking that they give a shit about people, when they know full well that they might as well say they like unicorn tears. Without a mandate, saying they LIKE all the benefits of the ACA is just as relevant.

@ 1 & 2, we all know what kind of person Goldy is. Like a hornet. But at least McKenna barring him got him off his "why aren't the local media covering Reagan Dunn's resume" kick. (Has the local media picked this one up yet? Slog's the only Seattle site I check out these days.)

I'm not sure you people quite understand the medium, let alone how to effectively use it.

Goldy, I wish you were Inslee's campaign manager. Enough of his campaign of smiles. He needs to be out defining McKenna in this exact manner.

@5 that's funny. I was thinking the same thing about you.

Speaking of the tired-yet-true, how about McKenna's remarkable resemblance to Uriah Heep?

@7 Thats funny. And here you are commenting on my posts, rather than the other way around.

@ 9, that doesn't even MEAN anything. It's like Charlie Sheen telling people "I got your money" on his "Winning" tour.

Now, for the sake of Washington, I DO hope this is doing damage to McKenna. But it will only do that if the rest of the media picks it up, and it's apparent that repeated Slog postings don't do the job. So what now?

Much as we try not to hate on criminals' defense attorneys, I find myself ok with McKenna challenging the legality of ACA.

I see it as a part of his proper role in the overall process.

ACA really needed to be reviewed by the Supreme Court. It was inevitable. And, since the D's passed it, it had to be the R's making the legal challenge.

I think McKenna's real problem is his lack of empathy. But the same could be said of most Republicans.

McKenna is a shitty lawyer - we knew that already. Unfortunately, WA AG is a party hack office, as his predecessor clearly demonstrated. He was doing party hack work.
Regardless of legal skills, lawyers file losing lawsuits all the time. There are only so many arguments you can choose from, and many of them may not be winners. Often, the whole point of the lawsuit is to start the discovery process, which can embarrass the other side even without a clear verdict.
This is a little different than spending most of your term in office constructing a settlement with an industry staffed by top legal minds, crowing about a huge victory, then pretending the settlement didn't get subverted to the point of being useless a decade later.

@5 - So it's some attempt at a McKenna "crappy lawyer" search bomb?

@10 I disagree. Repeated postings do have an impact. Not always, and not always in an easy to quantify way, but I've been at this game since 2004, and I can tell you from experience that this sort of relentlessness works.

I've never been shy about describing this approach as "whining to the ref." It's not that I expect the ref to change his call. But the next call might go my way. It's human nature. For example, you just wait on the Reagan Dunn resume story. Dollars to donuts it's not over yet.

Strategy aside, this idea that multiple short posts spread out over days or weeks is somehow more obsessive or hyberbolic than one giant article that appears in print is so 20th century. Datelines are artificial. News stories are organic things, their narratives evolving over time, and a blog provides a much more natural medium for covering (and framing) this narrative.

This post seems off a bit. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-574…

According to recent leaks from the SC (likely from Justice Kennedy), Roberts wanted to overturn the mandate initially, then changed his vote when he couldn't reconcile himself with the conservative block's desire to strike down the entire law. He believed the mandate was severable.

So we don't know the outcome on severability had Roberts decided the mandate was unconstitutional. Roberts seems unlikely to have voted for severability, so it would have only been deemed not-severable had one or more of the liberal block agreed with the conservatives that the mandate was not severable. This is all speculation of course, but I don't think its fair to claim McKenna is a crappy lawyer just because he thought the mandate was severable.

FWIW, I think McKenna is a bad fit for governor of this state and I think the mandate should have been read as constitutional under the commerce clause given the court's rulings in Wickard and Raich. I just don't think its fair to call McKenna a bad lawyer on this point, even if this series of "bad lawyer" posts are a bit in jest or have some secondary motivation.

@6 Inslees campaign needs to be out for blood and to skin McKenna like the damn Predator.

The fact he's not is infuriating. Burn McKenna to the ground with proverbial political white phosphorous.

Well, he got elected AG, so his lawyering credentials/skills are probably moot at this point. But he's pretty clearly a crappy liar.

@9 What was an initially interesting turn of events has now turned into you running it into the ground. That worked out well for Mudede vis a vis Amanda Knox. All of Slog waited with bated breath for each of those posts.

McKenna joined the other AGs' lawsuit; he didn't originate it. Roberts' vote doesn't say anything about anything because we don't know why he voted the way he did, although we can theorize. It certainly doesn't say anything about McKenna's legal skills, and it certainly isn't a "win" for anyone. A 5-4 vote, when the 5th vote could have gone the other way, is escaping disaster, not a win. The other consistently conservative Justices were ready to take this whole thing down.

@19 I'm still hoping for the next one. Go, Goldy! If you can reduce McK to Amanda Knox's current status (which is wha? where?), I'd say that's a win for WA and justice and truthiness.

His bouncer skills appears to be spot on, he was able to identify Toby and bar him from entering.

Goldy, stop fighting in the comments. Admit it. You come off as a blow hard. It is the truth, man. Don't deny and carry on.

@19 You are clearly under the mistaken impression that you are my intended audience.

@23: I for one like an author who isn't afraid to get dirty with the hogs once in a while, but I do think the repeated harping on this is getting a bit petty.

Either press charges and update us about it, but do not keep repeating essentially the same thing over and over. Even if you are 100% right, it is just tiresome.

Of course, it is just a blog after all.

So had Justice Roberts sided with the four other conservatives, the entire ACA would have been tossed

Not at all clear that this is true. Roberts, who obviously had some feelings on both sides of the decision, could have written a controlling opinion which found only the individual mandate to be unconstitutional.

That said, what @3 said - that without the mandate, it's unclear that the reform is meaningful in the first place.

McKenna shouldn't have tried to bar the the squeakiest wheel in Seattle from entering his press conference. Seems like he would have thought about how his actions would affect the future of the campaign.