page_title: Mike Hatch
section_title: 2000-2006
hierarchical_section_title: Mike Hatch / Attorney general of Minnesota (1999 to 2006) / 2000-2006
caption_attribution_description: Mike Hatch and Linda Berglin
context_page_description: Michael Alan Hatch is an American politician and lawyer. He was the attorney general of Minnesota from 1999 to 2007, commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Commerce from 1983 to 1989, and chair of the Minnesota DFL Party from 1980 to 1983.
context_section_description: Hatch took on other causes on behalf of the vulnerable. In 2000, he drafted and got enacted the Safe Place for Newborns Act, which allows mothers to take unwanted babies to any hospital for adoption. After 15 people were arrested in multi-million-dollar rings spanning 24 states that solicited young girls for prostitution, Hatch formed a task force to recommend legislative improvements. He secured $6 million in legislative funding for shelters for teenage runaways and prostitutes and drafted legislation that increased penalties for sex offenders.
  Hatch wielded the antitrust and regulatory powers of the office to promote market competition and regulate markets that were dominated by monopolies. In August 2000, he was an early opponent of the movement to deregulate electricity, issuing a several-hundred-page report claiming it would lead to higher prices for consumers. The year after Hatch issued this report, California experienced widespread power blackouts and 800 percent rate hikes after it deregulated electricity markets. In 2005, Allina Health System dropped its efforts to buy two cardiology practices after Hatch filed a lawsuit claiming that its proposal would give it a monopoly in local cardiac care.
  Hatch handled many constitutional cases as attorney general. In 2001, Minnesota state government nearly shut down when Governor Jesse Ventura and legislative leaders reached an impasse in budget negotiations. Hatch filed a petition to ask a court to order that essential state government services be funded in the event of a shutdown. The court granted Hatch's request, the first time that a Minnesota court had issued an order to authorize the government to continue to operate in the absence of a legislative appropriation. Hatch obtained a similar court order in 2005 requiring the state to continue to fund essential government services during a partial government shutdown that year.
  Hatch was an advocate for utility ratepayers. In 2001 he petitioned the Public Utilities Commission to put the brakes on a "no surprise bill" program by Reliant Energy Minnegasco that was marketed as a way for consumers to bring predictability to their home heating costs but resulted in customers paying as much as 20 percent more on natural gas. In 2005 he issued a scathing report faulting CenterPoint Energy for deliberately violating the law designed to protect low-income people from having their heat turned off in the winter. "They violated the law and every standard of human decency," Hatch said at the time. He got the company to reconnect power to 5,000 people. In 2006 he asked the Public Utilities Commission to roll back a rate hike proposed by Xcel Energy after discovering that it was asking for higher rates to collect taxes it would never pay and saddling residents with larger rate hikes than businesses.
  Hatch was active in protecting consumers in other sales transactions. In 2002 he won sweeping concessions from several automobile dealers that sold optional warranties and financial products, requiring them to tape-record all sales transactions in which they sold such products. In 2001 he obtained a settlement with US Bancorp requiring the bank to make refunds to customers (one-third of whom were over 80 years old) who were misled into buying long-term 10- and 20-year brokered certificates of deposit, thinking they were regular, short-term bank CDs. He sued the nation's largest maker of bulletproof vests for police officers, claiming the company continued to sell vests it knew would degrade in light. The company later filed bankruptcy.
  In October 2002, an airplane carrying Senator Paul Wellstone crashed in northern Minnesota, killing Wellstone 11 days before the state general election. Hatch, a Democrat, worked closely with the state's Republican secretary of state to ensure that people who already voted for Wellstone on absentee ballots would get another chance to vote. 
  Hatch was reelected to a second term as attorney general on November 5, 2002. Republicans won every other constitutional office that year. Hatch won more votes in that e
caption: Hatch with Linda Berglin at a parade in 2006
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