Less than two years ago, I met a young lawyer for breakfast in Eastern Market. She was energetic, tough, irreverent and extremely hard-working. She had gotten a fair amount of attention when she had been the lead attorney on a case that established the right of same-sex adoption — and same-sex marriage – in Michigan.
She was cynical about the establishment, but idealistic about what a committed attorney general could do for justice in this state. She had read The People’s Lawyer, the book I had written with Frank Kelley about his 37 years as Michigan’s attorney general, years in which he crusaded on behalf of the environment, consumer protection and civil rights.
“That’s what I want to do,” she asked me. “I want to be another Frank Kelley. Do you think I should run? Do you think I could win the Democratic nomination for attorney general?”
Immediately, I thought of all sorts of reasons why it would never work. She hadn’t been especially active in the Democratic Party, usually a prerequisite for any kind of statewide office. She didn’t have close ties to organized labor.
Democratic orthodoxy dictates that one member of every statewide ticket has to be black – and I was already hearing rumblings that Patrick Miles, the former U.S. District Attorney for the western half of Michigan would be the designated candidate for attorney general.
Thanks to a quirk in Michigan’s Constitution, nominees for that job, like that of secretary of state, are not picked by voters in a primary, but by party activists in statewide conventions.
Plus … the woman across from me was openly gay and married to another woman. Even today, there are still voters for whom that would be a deal-breaker.
But I also knew that Dana Nessel would give the job 100 percent, and that Shirley Chisholm’s old slogan, “unbought and unbossed” totally applied to her.
I also knew that every attorney general since Kelley left in 1999 – Jennifer Granholm, Mike Cox and Bill Schuette — spent much of their time in office running for governor.
Nessel, I was sure, had no interest in that. “Go for it,” I told her.
I have no illusion that my advice was a deciding factor or even meant very much, but she did. Somehow, she beat the UAW and AFL-CIO and won the nomination. She made some mistakes and ruffled some feathers, but on election night won by exactly 115,000 votes.
Since then, she pretty much hasn’t stopped – nor trimmed her sails. On Thursday, Feb. 21, she announced that she was investigating former trustee George Perles’ sudden resignation from the MSU board late last year — after rumors that he resigned as part of a deal whereby he got out of paying $200,000 in money he’d pledged to the university.
While announcing that, she also sternly chastised Michigan State for continuing to withhold thousands of documents that may be relevant to the Larry Nassar investigation.
If that wasn’t enough for a single day’s work, she also told Michigan’s Roman Catholic dioceses to “stop self-policing” in an attempt to deal with cases of sexual abuse by clergy, and said that both MSU and the church “care more about their brand than seeing justice done.”
The next day, she became the first attorney general since Frank Kelley to meet with the Institute of Public Utilities and served notice she wouldn’t be turning a blind eye to rate releases she found excessive. This all followed a first seven dizzying weeks in which the 49-year-old Nessel indicated her office would be involved in everything from Flint to the legality of putting the pipeline in a tunnel, to the legislature’s rollback of sick leave and minimum wage laws.
“One thing I can tell you,” she said during that breakfast long ago. “I may not get reelected, but if I am elected I’m going to be an activist attorney general on the side of the people.”
Like her or not, nobody can say she hasn’t hit the ground running.
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