Cliff Owen/AP Photo
Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli addresses a rally sponsored by Catholic Vote and Fight for Schools, in Leesburg, Virginia, October 2, 2021.
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
Over the past 15 or so years, the far-right faction of the Republican Party has fully taken over the party, and in the process managed to center the conservative political imagination on gleeful, vindictive cruelty. Back in the early Obama years, the so-called Tea Party rose to prominence supposedly as an angry backlash to his hesitant attempts to rescue Detroit and underwater homeowners—but the “birther” conspiracy theory claiming Obama was not a real citizen indicated deeper, more visceral roots of their grievance.
The rise of Donald Trump removed any pretext. As journalist Adam Serwer pointed out in his essay “The Cruelty Is the Point,” Trump and his supporters rejoiced in the utter depravity of his actions. Very often, this meant altering the Emma Lazarus poem to institute “merit based” immigration or a plan to end the Constitution’s promise of birthright citizenship.
Aside from Trump himself, there is no greater example of conservatives wallowing in cruelty for its own sake than former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
From his humble beginnings as a Fairfax-area state senator, known for his belief that LGBTQ folks were trying to “get education about homosexuals and AIDS in public schools,” to his stint as the state’s top cop working to prevent same-sex marriage, to his callous response to the deaths of a migrant father and daughter, time and time again Cuccinelli engaged in the politics of cruelty and was rewarded for it. These days, Cuccinelli is back in the news for his role at the Trump-aligned Center for Renewing America (CRA). At CRA, he has egged on the intensifying Texas border disputes, after originally concocting the idea of using the National Guard to wage war against migrants in 2021. It’s worth looking back at how Cuccinelli became a trailblazer for today’s distinct flavor of cruelty politics.
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In 2010, while serving as Virginia’s attorney general, Cuccinelli joined a coalition of nine Republican state attorneys general in support of then-Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s racist and essentially unenforceable immigration law. Dubbed the “toughest bill on illegal immigration” by The New York Times, the legislation authorized law enforcement to detain people they thought were in the country illegally. As the law all but openly welcomed racist profiling, unsurprisingly, it was hard to enforce. Despite this, Cuccinelli was eager to grant Virginia police officers similar authority, stating, “It is my opinion that Virginia law enforcement officers, including conservation officers may, like Arizona police officers, inquire into the immigration status of persons stopped or arrested.” The Supreme Court eventually struck down most of the law in 2012, arguing that state laws cannot supersede federal immigration law.
Cuccinelli was rewarded for his bigotry by President Trump, who appointed him (illegally) to be acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). While fighting the “surge” of undocumented immigrants is evergreen in conservative politics, Cuccinelli took this a step further by diminishing the public resources available to immigrants who are in the country legally. At USCIS, Cuccinelli instituted the “public charge” rule that restricted the use of public goods by immigrant legal residents. The new rule meant that immigrants seeking visas could be deemed inadmissible if it was determined they would need food stamps, Medicaid, or other public goods. Cuccinelli also acknowledged that the rule would make it harder to gain permanent legal status.
For those seeking to enter the country illegally, his cruelty was unvarnished. In response to the tragic death of a father and daughter in the Rio Grande, Cuccinelli commented, “The reason we have tragedies like that on the border is because those folks, that father didn’t want to wait to go through the asylum process in the legal fashion, so decided to cross the river.”
Elsewhere, Cuccinelli’s disdain for LGBTQ people (especially gay men) has also been key to his rise in conservative politics. Even years after gay marriage at least became overwhelmingly popular, Cuccinelli’s enmity persisted. In 2013, in a Hail Mary effort to stop marriage equality, he filed a 55-page brief with the Supreme Court arguing that same-sex marriage would lead to a polygamist revolution. That same year, Cuccinelli filed a brief with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals asking it to reconsider overturning Virginia’s anti-sodomy law, arguing that overturning the law imperiled minors. The federal court had struck down the law earlier that year, noting that the court cannot regulate consensual sex between consenting adults. Cuccinelli’s homophobic implication here is clear, and places him within a long, sordid lineage of “groomer” conspiracists.
Another infamous saga from Cuccinelli’s tenure as Virginia’s attorney general was his war against the Affordable Care Act. Moments after President Obama signed the landmark health care reform bill into law, Cuccinelli sent an attorney to stop its implementation—indeed, he was the first state attorney general to sue the Obama administration over the ACA, and later lauded the lawsuit as an accomplishment. Come 2013, when Cuccinelli ran for governor, he made his opposition to the health care law a cornerstone of his campaign, calling it a “national embarrassment.”
The Affordable Care Act has helped millions of Americans. If the ACA were to be repealed, a total of 29.8 million people would lose their health insurance and an estimated 1.2 million jobs would be lost. Interestingly, his own home state would be one of the most impacted, with a sum total of 685,000 people losing their health care access. For what? Ken Cuccinelli’s political ambitions. Conservative voters just can’t get enough of harming the worst-off people in society.
Despite his many losses, Cuccinelli has only stood to gain from his hateful ideology. He lost time and time again in the courts, he lost his gubernatorial bid, and yet he is still rewarded within the GOP. His callousness has only drawn him closer to the nerve center of the Republican Party, epitomizing conservatives’ embrace of a politics of cruelty.
Ken Cuccinelli is an angry man who hates seeing the world around him change. Rather than fashion himself as a public servant dedicated to bettering the lives of Americans, he has chosen a politics of exclusion, punching down on those he considers undeserving of the same rights as himself. While he may have endured loss after loss both in elections and in the courts, there is no doubt that he’s been rewarded by the conservative movement. He is now the person whom Republicans increasingly turn to: a cruel man who wants to ensure that all people are not treated equally. It is truly disturbing how Republicans have fully embraced this mentality. We should reject this mentality of rewarding cruelty; we as Americans should embrace the politics of empathy and understanding.
The phrase “personnel is policy” has become associated with Elizabeth Warren, but it owes its origins to the Reagan administration. And potential personnel like Ken Cuccinelli are set to be enormously consequential in the realm of policy. Indeed, he has a head start, as he helped author the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plot to purge the federal bureaucracy and turn it to Trump’s ends. Ominously, his contribution was a chapter on how the Department of Homeland Security should be run. When the media is deciding what to focus on in this presidential rematch, they might focus less on the candidates’ comparative stagecraft and more on the personnel they plan to empower to run the executive branch.
