AG Hilgers urges unity in GOP

Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers urged fellow Republicans to be strategic in their efforts to support conservative candidates and principals Saturday in Aurora, saying it is critically important now to be unified in the fight against out-of-state influence.
As the keynote speaker for the Hamilton County GOP convention, Hilgers explained his first-term strategy as attorney general, saying he is excited to continue fighting for Nebraska if reelected in November, where he will face Democratic challenger Jocelyn Brasher.
“I think there’s more uncertainty and more peril going on in our country than in any other time, at least since I’ve been alive,” Hilgers said as he began a 30-minute speech at the Plainsman Museum. “We have a breakdown in institutions unlike I’ve seen in my entire life, we have more challenges for our kids whether it’s TikTok or these online media sites and the types of drugs that they have access to and all these other things. We have a skyrocketing mental health crisis among young people and adults and we’re seeing a dramatic ignoring of the US Constitution or the state Constitution. We also see an enormous amount of very powerful individuals and companies on the left who are trying to make massive decisions for us as a people that are having a really significant impact.”
Hilgers told a group of 40 gathered for the GOP convention that he didn’t file any lawsuits as attorney general early in his tenure, focusing instead on building a team he felt was necessary to fight, and win, legal challenges on behalf of Nebraskans all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“When I took office, I could see where the left was going, where the left wanted to go,” he recalled, citing examples of efforts to get rid of coal as a primary energy source, forcing transgender issues on states and making state-sponsored racial quotes mandatory. “What I did when I first became AG was not file lawsuits … but plot out, just like a good game of chess, where we needed to go. We built a team to get there and after my first six months to today we were filing more lawsuits than almost anyone else in the country.”
One case he cited was Nebraska versus Biden, with the state challenging former President Joe Biden’s attempt to eliminate student loan debt.
“The Biden administration tried to spend a half a trillion dollars on student loans, without a vote of Congress,” he said. “You can’t do that. We took the Biden administration all the way to the United States Supreme Court and I sat right in front of the nine justices as we argued in Nebraska v Biden, one of the most important separation of powers cases of modern times. And we won.”
Hilgers said he is proud of the fact that he assembled what he considers to be an elite legal team that is often outnumbered, but never outgunned on challenging cases of the day.
“They get up and they chew glass and they just fight,” he said. “They care about fighting and winning, and they care about sniffing out the ways that the left is kind of dictating our lives. We bring unstoppable energy every day to win these battles and be able to help just do what we think is most important as conservatives, which is let you and your families decide how you should run your life.”
Hilgers said conservatives should not fight one another, but instead be unified in the fight to advance principles they agree on.
“The problem is, there are a whole lot of people who want to dictate your lives, and they absolutely, even though they don’t live here, they don’t ever come here and they really don’t care about here, they want to dictate our collective way of life,” he said, citing as an example a foreign billionaire who spent $10 million on Nebraska elections in 2024. “For this billionaire to spend his money, which for him is like a day’s worth of interest, trying to change our way of life is really, really dangerous, and it’s against the law. So we’ve sued him in Madison County to put a stop to him and all of his shell nonprofits that funded the money. 
“There’s an initiative petition that is coming that, if it passes, will prohibit the Legislature from changing ballot initiatives unless there’s 40 senators who vote yes,” he added. “That would be impossible. What that means, if it passes, is that billionaires or others from out of state can spend millions and millions and millions of dollars to change our elections or change our laws. If that happens, I don’t think it will be a matter of much time for the rapid progressification of our laws in Nebraska and there won’t be very much we can do about it from an electoral perspective. These are huge, existential battles, and we’re on the front lines fighting.”
After Hilger’s presentation, the Hamilton County GOP elected officers for the coming year, with Greg Epp as chairman, Chris Slocum as vice chairman, Tanya McKay as secretary and Andy Forsberg as treasurer.
Delegates elected for the GOP State Convention June 6 in LaVista included Justin Elge, Shauna Moody and Sara Erlenbusch, with alternates Greg Epp, Caroline Epp and Chris Slocum.
The group also voted to endorse several Republican candidates for state office, including Dist. 34 Sen. Loren Lippincott, 3rd District Congressional challenger David Huebner, Secretary of State candidate Scott Petersen and State Board of Education Dist. 5 candidate Angie Eberspacher.