The Attorney General does much more than merely enforce the laws of the land. The Attorney General is able to influence legislation merely by the persuasive powers of the office. It is myopic to believe that the office possesses no discretion in interpreting the laws of this land, particularly on legal issues neither previously nor clearly decided by the Supreme Court. The Attorney General has the discretion to select which laws are to be given priority in enforcement, through control of the purse and the assignment of other resources. Based upon the nominee's consistent public statements and public actions over many years, I have no doubts that he would use the powers of the office to shape the judiciary and the law to his own personal agenda, at the great expense of women, minorities and our current body of constitutional and statutory law.
History is, indeed, a reliable precursor of the future.
While Missouri's Attorney General, the nominee issued a legal opinion seeking to undermine the state's nursing practice act. He opined that the taking of medical histories, the giving of information about and the dispensing of condoms, i.u.d.s and oral contraceptives, the performance of breast exams, pelvic exams and pap smears, the testing for sexually transmitted diseases and the providing of counseling and community education, by nurse practitioners, constituted the criminal act of the unauthorized practice of medicine. Each of these services were at the time routine health care practices provided by Missouri nurses for many years and, in fact, were being provided by nurses within the State's own county health departments. This Opinion by the nominee provided the impetus for the State's Board of Registration for the Healing Arts to threaten the plaintiff physicians and nurses with a show cause order as to why criminal charges should not be brought against them. Implementation of the nominee's Opinion would have eliminated the cost-effective and readily available delivery of these essential services to indigent women, who often utilize county health departments as their primary health care provider, and would have shut and bolted the door to poor women who relied upon these services as their only means to control their fertility.