Attorney General Bill Sorrell says it’s the clear duty and responsibility of the attorney general to aggressively 
defend all laws passed by the Legislature including those that might be breaking new legal ground.
In this race, Chittenden County State’s Attorney T.J. Donovan is challenging seven-term incumbent Bill Sorrell.
This week, Donovan suggested that he would be more involved than Sorrell has been in legislative decisions to pass controversial laws.
Donovan was referring to two Vermont laws that were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. One dealt with campaign finance and the other the availability of drug marketing information.
Sorrell says he made sure that lawmakers understood the risks of passing these laws.
"The attorney general doesn’t have a vote on what the laws should be," said Sorrell. "We can advise the Legislature and we do very aggressively advise the Legislature but when they finally make the decisions to do what they want to do and the governor signs the bill and the law gets attacked then it’s our job to zealously, aggressively defend that’s what we’ve done and that’s what we’re doing."
And Sorrell points out that both of these laws were found to be constitutional by federal courts.
"These laws weren’t out of the blocks outright unconstitutional we won at the trial level on campaign finance we won at the trial level on the pharmaceutical pricing," said Sorrell. "And then we ran into the U.S. Supreme Court that has handed down the Citizens United case, the most conservative Supreme Court we’ve had in this country in at least 100 years."
Donovan also said that the state has lost millions of dollars in legal fees in some of these cases. Sorrell admits that this is true but he argues that his office has brought in far greater sums of money during his tenure as attorney general.
"So $3 to $8 million over 15 years of having to pay out and hundreds of millions of dollars coming in – we’re a revenue generator for the state."
Both candidates are working hard to line up endorsements and establish local campaign committees to prepare for the August 28th primary.