AG Nessel On GOP Redistricting Lawsuit: “Just Another Effort to Circumvent What the People Wanted”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel‘s tenure so far has been aggressive, with hot-button issues from gerrymandering to juvenile lifers grabbing headlines.

Now, her office is asking a federal judge to drop Republicans’ lawsuit against Michigan’s new redistricting commission.

“We don’t believe that this lawsuit has any true merit,” she tells Stephen Henderson on Detroit Today. “It’s just another effort, in my opinion, by the GOP to circumvent what the people obviously very much wanted. And this is really our only avenue left at this point to ensure that we don’t have horrific gerrymandering.”

Topics discussed on today’s show: 

• Last week, the Detroit Free Press reported that only about half of all juvenile lifers in Michigan have been re-sentenced. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that those sentences are cruel and unusual, and decided in 2016 that the decision should be applied retroactively.

  “There have been a number of other cases that have been pending that I think have slowed down the process,” says Nessel. “There was no groundwork for how these decisions were going to be made. “Nessel says her office is currently handling a few of those cases directly. 

  “We’re prepared to indicate what our decisions are in those cases very soon, I think within the next week or so,” she says. 
   

• The criminal investigation into the Flint Water Crisis (Related: Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel Explains Dropping Charges in Flint Water Crisis Case)
• The controversy surrounding embattled Michigan Civil Rights Department Director Agustin Arbulu
• A lawsuit against her office’s handling of adoption agencies who refuse to work with same-sex couples.

Click on the player above to hear Michigan AG Dana Nessel discuss a variety of issues.