McDonnell and some House Republicans oppose smoking ban
By JR Hoeft | Friday, February 6th, 2009 | PolicyLooks like all will not be smooth-sailing for Speaker William Howell in his capitulation to Gov. Tim Kaine over the purported smoking ban.
Apparently Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell and several House Republicans are opposed to the proposal.
According to Tucker Martin, McDonnell’s spokesman, McDonnell believes that the free market should be allowed to take its course. Additionally, Del. Lee Ware of Powhatan said the following on the House floor:
Today, through a feel-good surrender of another parcel of liberty to The Nanny State, we are chipping further away at the individual liberties and also the social bonds and institutions without which our people can not be free. And of course, predictably, it is in a seemingly “little thing” that this is occurring: the private citizens and private businesses of Virginia are to be compelled by government to ban the smoking of a perfectly legal substance that has for centuries been a cornerstone of our social, cultural, economic, and political life: the smoking of tobacco. And, to justify ourselves, we have first had to discredit (and of course to tax) a single class of people into an inferior status–those of our people who smoke.
AFP has also announced that it will target legislators who support the ban in primaries.
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Conservative to the core; liberal with his opinion! J.R. has been involved in politics for over a decade and has worked on several campaigns in Hampton Roads. He has served on the Executive Committee of the Republican Party of Chesapeake and the Central Committee of the Republican Party of Virginia. He is also the director of “Blogs United” in Virginia. E-mail J.R.. Follow J.R. on Twitter.
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2 Responses to "McDonnell and some House Republicans oppose smoking ban"
Any tax exempt political action committee (charity) that spends huge sums of money to hire lobbyists to make laws using INTIMIDITATION, LAW ENFORCEMENT, and SNITCHING to FORCE people to OBEY their guidelines will get NO DONATIONS from me. Here are the rest of them, all fed by the big pharma through the Robert J. Wood Foundation.
http://www.no-smoke.org/pdf/CIA_Fundamentals.pdf
I finally saw the bill, and it really looks smashed together quickly. Is it possible that it is not constitutional? I’m no lawyer, but it doesn’t seem to offer “equal protection” to small restauranteurs who have single room restaurants, or to owners of “restaurants” that are for all intents and purposes cigar or hookah bars.
It would seem to me that Del. Cosgrove’s original bill from which this was fashioned considered the constitutional implications in a way the current bill hasn’t.
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