If you count Florida’s Bill McCollum (and we always do), three of the 12 Republican attorneys general who say they’re suing over the Democratic health care reform bill are also running for governor of their respective state next year (Michigan’s Mike Cox and South Carolina’s Henry McMaster are the others).

Of the remaining nine, five are seeking re-election in 2010 and four don’t have to run again for two more years.

McCollum, whose gubernatorial platform to lower health care costs is to limit lawsuits, said his lawsuit is not political. Perhaps he should remind his campaign, which has sent seven press releases about health care reform in the past seven days.

Story here.

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, and some other Democrats who voted against a measure to deny federal money to scandal-tainted ACORN said they did so because they regarded the action as an unconstitutional “bill of attainder.”

Wexler was on the losing end of a 345-75 House vote in which local U.S. Reps. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, and Tom Rooney, R-Tequesta, voted with the majority and U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar, answered “present.”

A bill of attainder, forbidden in Article I, Section IX of the constitution, is a legislative act that imposes punishment on a specific person or group without a trial or hearing. But there’s legal precendent allowing a law that singles out an entity if “the law under challenge, viewed in terms of the type and severity of burdens imposed, reasonably can be said to further nonpunitive legislative purposes.”

UCLA law professor and blogger Eugene Volokh offers this discussion of the matter and concludes: “My rereading of the precedents leads me to confidently and unambiguously say, ‘I don’t know.’ “