By Jack Fowler
Tuesday, July 26, 2022
‘All organizations that are not
actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
Those interested in watching O’Sullivan’s
First Law play out in real time should pay
attention to the ways and means of the allegedly bipartisan National Association of Attorneys General, a.k.a. “NAAG,” whose ideological-trending ways have forced a growing
number of Republican members to head for the exits.
How wise this craze is for America is a
matter for consideration.
NAAG’s membership — attorneys general from
the 50 states, plus AGs from Guam, Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia,
American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands — has
been depleted by five members since early 2021. All departures are by
Republicans. All cited serious concerns with the institution’s ideological
trajectory, its practices, and its thrall over money as their reasons for
leaving.
Alabama AG Steven Marshall jump-started
the walk-out in April 2021. “I can’t justify spending taxpayer dollars to
fund an organization that seems to be going further and further left,” he explained. “With the money we will save, I can add a young lawyer to my consumer
protection division and yield a far better return on the taxpayer’s
investment.”
It took a while, but the following May, a
trio of Republicans — Ken Paxton (Texas), Eric Schmitt (Missouri), and Austin Knudsen
(Montana) — wrote to NAAG’s Democrat chairman, Tom Miller, Iowa’s long-serving
attorney general, to announce that they were following Marshall out the door.
The
Association’s leftward drift over the past half decade has become intolerable.
Indeed, this liberal bent has fundamentally undermined NAAG’s role as a
“nonpartisan national forum” that “provides a community to collaboratively
address” important issues. . . .
We
previously met with NAAG’s senior leadership to make them aware of our
concerns. Those conversations were friendly, but nothing has been done. And we
see no signs that anything will change in the future.
Within days of that exit,
Arizona’s Republican AG, Mark Brnovich, followed suit. “We are hereby notifying
you that the Arizona Attorney General’s Office had decided to withdraw its
membership from NAAG,” he wrote. He additionally charged that “the Association
is supposed to function as a nonpartisan forum, but the speakers and topics
presented at recent NAAG meetings indicate otherwise.”
Where’s the leftward drift? As reported in the Washington Free Beacon, “Republican NAAG
members are growing frustrated at what they say is the heavy progressive
current running through organization programming — such as an institutional
‘special organization initiative’ dubbed The People v. Hate,” and crafting
programs such as a “Zoom panel on social media disinformation that canvassed
progressive pet causes like reforming amplification algorithms in social media
to isolate the far-right.” Another bone to pick, of many: NAAG event speakers
have also included leftist billionaire Tom Steyer’s brother and representatives of
the conservative-hating Southern Poverty Law Center.
All this happens even though 28 of the 50
state attorneys general are Republicans. Yet somehow, NAAG’s leadership is
disproportionately Democratic.
NAAG’s practices have also sparked a
series of fiduciary concerns and questions with troubled Republican (now)
ex-members: As Knudsen explained to his constituents:
Montanans
rightly expect their elected officials to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars
and transparency from funds that are supposed to be managed in our best
interests. Continued membership in the National Association of Attorneys
General does not meet those expectations, so today I am officially ending it.
Will others do the same? There is a hint
of that possibility. On the heels of Brnovich’s departure, eight other
Republican AGs — led by Kentucky’s Daniel Cameron — sent NAAG’s leadership a
pointed, four-page, answers-demanding letter to Chris Toth, then NAAG’s leader.
The letter explained the core of the GOP’s fiscal concerns with the
institution, and especially with its sidekick, cash-besotted nonprofit,
the NAAG Mission Foundation, described in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial as “The Attorneys General Racket.”
(Which is quite an accusation for a
profession fabled — once upon a time at least — for its prosecution of
racketeering.)
The letter to Toth has yet to receive a
formal response from NAAG leadership. But that is not because it lacks
substance. It reinforces critiques about the organization’s “increasingly
partisan programming and the seeming exclusion of conservative members in favor
of more liberal ones.” And it spotlights the practice and existence of
“multi-state settlement agreements” (such as that made with the tobacco
industry in the late 1990s) that formally designate NAAG and its foundation as
direct recipients of lavish settlement payouts, often of many millions of
dollars.
Case in point: In early 2021, consulting
behemoth McKinsey & Company agreed to a $573 million
settlement on a multi-state opioid-crisis case.
Orchestrated by state attorneys general, the agreement explicitly cut in NAAG
for a whopping $15 million. Wasn’t this case, though, about the human
victims of the national opioid epidemic, more so than being a vehicle
for a guaranteed payday for a cabal of elected lawyers? Per Toth’s letter:
NAAG’s $15
million McKinsey settlement is nearly double the amounts received by some
states and nearly 40% more than Kentucky received. These states have lost
thousands of their citizens to the opioid epidemic and represent thousands more
who still struggle. Yet NAAG, an entity with no such constituency, collected
$15 million.
There’s plenty more in the till than that
amount. NAAG’s 2021 Annual
Report declares over $280 million in
combined assets of both NAAG ($165 million) and the Mission Foundation ($115
million). Which raises a serious question: Why do groups representing attorneys
general need over a quarter of a billion dollars at their disposal?
If you suspect this money is to be used as
de facto ideological, jurisprudential investment capital, you’d agree with the
GOP letter writers. They charge that the NAAG cash is controlled by
Democrat-populated “fund committees” that reek of trial-lawyer activism. From
their letter:
As you
know, there are reports of fund committees constructively barring Republicans
from the application processes, while these same committees appropriate
settlement dollars to fund left-wing programming. Furthermore, fund committees
are now issuing grants that are more like loans than grants. Of course, loans must
be repaid, which incentivizes states to pursue litigation for a financial
return, regardless of whether such litigation is justified. The result is
NAAG’s promotion of “entrepreneurial litigation” and “suing businesses for
profit,” all of which is “more in line with the plaintiffs’ bar” than making
whole those who have been harmed.
The GOP AGs demanded a reply to their
broadside by June 6 — a date that has come and long gone with silence. So what
to do? Will more peeved Republicans abandon NAAG, even with GOP hopes of
netting two or three additional generalships in November — thereby hardening
the control NAAG’s Democrat-heavy leadership has over its bulging
settlement-funds endowments?
Or: Could the potential of a 30–20
Republican-majority balance stem the run on membership, and inspire members to
plot a strategy for institutional control, with a goal of putting an end to
what the Journal calls “unsavory practices that deserve more
public exposure” — all of it bankrolled by settlements that sent big hunks of
cash to a special-interest group rather than to actual victims?
There is a heck of a lot of damage can be
done with $280 million in the hands of progressive Democrats. Maybe —
hopefully — this will be something that members of the Republican Attorneys General Association dwell upon when they meet next month in Colorado.
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