After watching, hearing and reading all the opposition to Leslie Rutledge's re-election--mainly from her challenger in the Democratic Party--one would get the idea that Arkansas' attorney general has been doing . . . not much. That is, in her official capacity.
Which seems strange.
For Leslie Rutledge's office would tell you that, since 2015 at least, her office has had more Medicaid fraud convictions than during the last 16 years combined. And the year she was elected she put together a unit to combat fraud in disability insurance. And has driven all sorts of fraudsters out of the state with fraud and criminal convictions.
She's even been criticized for creating the Public Integrity Division in her office to track down the kind of office holders you've seen frog-marched in the news lately. The criticism has been mainly because she created the division in 2018, and not four years earlier. We're not sure anybody was clairvoyant enough to know four years ago that so many lawmakers would have been caught in various legal dragnets, but if anybody was, he, she or it should've let the rest of us know before election season 2016. If not before.
You'd be forgiven, Long-Suffering Voter, if you think that nothing that Leslie Rutledge did (or accomplished) in her first term in office would have been good enough for the usual partisans looking to put another scalp on the wall. Arkansas' first female attorney general has been criticized for fighting against federal overreach. To some of us that's a feature, not a bug, of her time in office. After all, she's the chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association. Fighting against federal overreach is sorta in the job description.
She's a fierce defender of the state's right to make abortion laws. She joined a lawsuit with other AGs to push back against Obamacare. And she told us one of her next targets will be the opioid crisis, which is taking too many Arkansans away from their families--never to return.
We're told to expect some sort of Blue Wave in the election next month. In many places, such a thing might even be deserved. But not in this state. And, more precisely, not in this state's attorney general's race.
Editorial on 10/24/2018