Meet the candidate: Liz Murrill to maintain federally-focused casework, if elected next La. AG

BATON ROUGE, La. (KALB) - In the last three years of Attorney General Jeff Landry’s eight years in office, numerous lawsuits have been brought against the federal government and federal programs.

Though the nationally-focused litigation has received some criticism, Solicitor General Liz Murrill, Landry’s second-in-command, said those efforts will not end if Louisiana voters elect her to the seat in October. After all, often times Murrill herself was on the floor of the courts arguing on behalf of the AG’s office in many of those cases.

Back in December 2021, Murrill was the lead on a lawsuit against President Joe Biden’s Administration’s vaccine mandate for federal contractors, which she argued before Judge Dee Drell in the Alexandria-based US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana. The mandate was embattled in the courts before coming to an end in May 2023.

As for more recent cases, Murrill has worked on cases against Big Tech companies accused of limiting protected speech and FEMA’s new flood insurance rating system, Risk Rating 2.0, amid an insurance crisis in Louisiana.

Murrill believes every nationally-focused lawsuit impacts the state and is part of the effort to combat federal overreach.

”I can always explain every lawsuit that we have filed and why we’ve filed it and how it threatens our civil liberties here at home or affects us dramatically here at home,” said Murrill. “For the FEMA lawsuit, we have 43 parishes that are part of that lawsuit that have joined with us. We have 12 levee boards and 10 states. It is a national program but it has a dramatic impact on us here, and that’s true of every issue that comes out of Washington.”

In addition to national litigation, Murrill believes the AG’s office should take support for district attorneys and sheriff’s offices “to the next level.”

”We’re not just centrally located in our capacity to support all of our sheriffs and DAs around the state, especially in our rural areas. But we have the ability to recruit and keep talent that they may not be able to do on a regular basis,” said Murrill. “So, we just need to bring that expertise to them when they need it. Because they may not need it all the time, but when they need it, they really need us.”

For instance, Murrill wants to bolster resources around cyber and financial crimes for sheriff’s offices.

Altogether, Murrill, the former top attorney for former Gov. Bobby Jindal, believes her 30 years of experience with a variety of litigation sets her apart in the race for AG.

“I just have a very, very deep and wide breadth of legal experience, experience representing and defending us against the assault of the federal government, defending the state constitution and the federal constitution and the laws that have been passed by our legislature to defend the policies that are adopted by our legislature,” said Murrill. “I have four sons that I have raised. My youngest is 19 and my oldest is 30. And my husband and I have been married for 30 years. So, I just think that I have more legal and life experience than anybody else in this race.”

State Rep. John Stefanski, a Crowley-based Republican, and prosecutor Marty Maley, a Republican who previously ran for AG in 2015, are also vying for the seat.

The primary election is on Oct. 14.

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