Attorney General Pam Bondi wowed local Republicans on Monday afternoon with a visit to GOP headquarters at Lake Sumter Landing.
“I had a Democratic friend ask me, ‘If she’s young, cute and blonde, how competent can she be?'” Roberta Ulrich of the Village of Bridgeport at Miona Shores asked the attorney general during the visit.
Bondi quickly told the audience she’s 48 years old.
“And I’m just getting started,” Bondi said, drawing both vigorous applause and laughter.
Bondi, who is on the campaign trail, energetically ticked off a list of accomplishments from her first term in office. She’s cracked down on pill mills, synthetic drugs and human trafficking.
And Bondi isn’t backing down from the difficult issues of the day.
She made no bones about how she feels about Amendment 2 which would make medical marijuana legal in Florida.
She pointed out that she had watched her own father die of leukemia. And she said she has no interest in seeing the ill suffer.
But Amendment 2 is broad and vague, she warned.
And it could allow for medical marijuana to be prescribed for “any other condition,” opening the door for doctors to write prescriptions for things as trivial as “kids who have anxiety and cannot study for their tests,” she warned.
She also didn’t shy away from the issue of same-sex marriage.
“There are good people on both sides of this issue,” she said.
But Bondi also said that when she put her hand on the Bible and took the oath of office she had sworn to uphold the constitution of the state of Florida.
In a surprising move Monday night after she left The Villages, Bondi said she wants the Florida Supreme Court to decide once-and-for-all whether same-sex couples can marry in the Sunshine State.
“That is unquestionably an important issue, and the Plaintiffs, the State, and all citizens deserve a definitive answer,” Bondi’s office wrote in a 6 p.m. filing to the state’s Third District Court of Appeal. “Until recently, the issue was squarely before the United States Supreme Court, and it appeared that a definitive answer was coming. … Unfortunately, the United States Supreme Court decided not to answer the question.”
Barbara Qualls of the Republican Federated Women of The Villages also got a little work out of Bondi during the visit.
Bondi dutifully manned a phone and helped chase down an absentee ballot, something GOP volunteers are doing a lot of out of the Lake Sumter Landing office.
“She’s great,” Qualls said.
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