Nurse Practitioner

National Nurse Licensure strips states of their authority to regulate nursing practice and places patients in potential danger. I'd like to refer you to three guiding principles of our state that bring up many questions regarding the National Nurse Licensure Compact.

Article III of the Minnesota Constitution states: "The powers of government shall be divided into three distinct departments: legislative, executive and judicial."

Nowhere in our constitution does it state that the powers can be divided or delegated to an entity outside these branches. The constitution allows the legislative branch to create the board of Nursing, but to join a national compact is a stretch and seems to violate our constitutional delegation of powers.

When contemplating joining the National Nurse Licensure Compact, other states turned to their constitutions to determine whether the compact was feasible.

In Kansas, the Attorney General supplied the Board of Nursing with a brief that declared the National Nurse Licensure Compact an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority.

According to the Attorney General:

"The compact does not <allow> compact administrators to set any minimum licensure standards for a state to be admitted to the compact. Enactment of the compact would essentially delegate to the legislatures of other states authority to set the minimum licensure requirements for licensees of those states who practice in Kansas."

The Louisiana and Nebraska Attorney Generals came to the same conclusion, with the Louisiana Attorney General stating:

"...because the compact would, through absolute reciprocity, allow other states' legislatures the unqualified right to determine the qualifications for the practice of nursing in this state by nonresidents, we believe the compact would be an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority."

In Pennsylvania, it was cautioned the National Nurse Licensure Compact violated constitutional due process grounds. Under the Compact, Pennsylvania nurses could be subject to multiple investigations and disciplinary proceedings and be held responsible for subsidizing the cost of these investigations. Additionally, they asserted that Compact nurses would not be able to protect their reputations because they would not be informed about what information had been submitted about them to the Coordinated Licensure Information System.

Although we recognize that the Minnesota State Constitution is not the same as other state constitutions, we believe that joining the National Nurse Licensure Compact would be a violation of the Minnesota Constitutions delegation of powers and due process clauses.

In addition to constitutional questions, it appears the National