Aaron Ford was sworn in as the state’s attorney general on Tuesday, having never prosecuted so much as a parking ticket. To be sure, there is more to being the state’s top lawyer than just criminal prosecution, but suffice it to say there is a lot of work for someone with Ford’s lack of relevant experience in that position to get knowledgeable about before he can effectively manage his office.

Whenever any new boss comes on to the scene, how he chooses to spend his first few days on the job can tell us a lot about how he will perform during his entire tenure. If Ford’s first major public act as AG is any indication, things aren’t looking too great.

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President Trump’s administration recently promulgated new rules that exempted employers with religious objections from covering certain contraceptives under their company health insurance policies, which are heavily regulated thanks to Obamacare. (I like “Obamacare” better than “Affordable Care Act,” because the former has the virtue of being accurate, and it reminds us just how new all of these rules really are.)

When President Obama inked his signature legislation into law, those of us who could see more than one or two election cycles into the future warned that whatever power you give a politician or bureaucrat you like, someday a politician you don’t like will have the same power. And now that “someday” is here.

The rational response now that said politician-people-don’t-like (Trump) has power over health insurance decisions would be to say, “Gosh – maybe it wasn’t such a great plan to give the federal government such sweeping control over our day-to-day lives,” but political tribalism laughs in the face of logic or reason. And so the response by various lefty attorneys general was to sue the feds — and hope they could find a judge who would order the President to force private citizens to forsake their sincerely held religious principles. (Speaking of unwise precedents to set…) The amicus briefs are political documents, not legal ones.

Mr. Ford was a little late to the game, owing to not yet being elected, but he lost no time in very publicly signing on to two legal briefs in support of this anti-individual liberty endeavor, with the full support of Gov. Steve Sisolak.

Legally, the effort is doomed to fail. The Supreme Court has already ruled in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby that regulations which force employers to provide contraceptives contrary to their religious beliefs violates the First Amendment. Neither of the two amicus briefs Ford signed on to bothered to argue how Hobby Lobby doesn’t apply in this situation – instead, both of them went for the incredibly lame (but all too common) strategy of “ignoring the law we don’t like” by not mentioning the Hobby Lobby case (or even the First Amendment) at all.

Given that the rules of professional conduct for attorneys in Nevada prohibit attorneys from ignoring adverse legal authority, we can only hope Ford insists on higher standards of legal professionalism from his deputy AGs.  

The problem with “ignoring the law” as a legal strategy is that it gives away a lawyer’s most precious commodity – credibility – for absolutely nothing in return. There will be times when I hope and expect Mr. Ford will fight for the interests of the state of Nevada against the federal government, and when he will fight to secure the individual liberties of all Nevadans, even the ones he doesn’t agree with politically. This lawsuit will make it harder for him to do that, to the extent it even signals his willingness to do so.

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But even if there was no First Amendment issue here, the effort is still lame. This isn’t just about inexpensive and widely available birth control (which I’m all in favor of, and which will exist with or without Mr. Trump’s new regulations) or Donald Trump (who I’m much less enamored with). It speaks more broadly to a troublingly subservient attitude our new state officials seem to have towards Washington.

Not for the first time am I rendered amazed at the faith my friends on the left must have in President Trump, given their vehement desire to give him ever more power over our daily lives.

If states want to ensure their citizens don’t have to pay out of pocket for birth control, they are free to do so (and indeed, Nevada already does — in the form of state statutory insurance mandates, making participation in this lawsuit even more inane). We don’t need to go begging the federal government to fund Nevada’s budget priorities. Instead, our state officials should be spending their time and political capital trying to extricate Nevada from federal mandates, not demand more of them. We should seek to keep more of our own power, and not incidentally, we should seek to keep more of the tax dollars that flow from the paychecks of Nevada’s workers into the gaping maw of the federal treasury.

Moreover, Ford’s eager lawsuit-joining in this matter is a general failure of the state’s attorney general to prioritize what’s most important as he figures out his job. I didn’t particularly care for the previous AG’s partisan approach to his job, either — because when state-level politicians focus overmuch on federal political debates, you can take to the bank that the critical day-to-day grunt work their offices should be doing is being ignored.

As a state senator, Ford could get away with pointless grandstanding. Legislators are almost never held accountable for the success or failures of their votes in the long run. But as an executive officer overseeing some of the most important (and often most unappreciated) functions of our state government, he does not have the same luxury.

If Ford has higher political ambitions (and who doubts he does?), he would do well to take a page from Gov. Brian Sandoval’s book, and focus himself on the core responsibilities of his state level office that Nevadans count on every day. It’s the difference between being someone and accomplishing something. So far, he is off to an inauspicious start.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007. He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016. By day, he is an attorney in Reno. Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].