Your Attorney General Doesn’t Work for You Anymore

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Your Attorney General Doesn’t Work for You Anymore

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This week, I was reading about Governor Patrick Morrisey’s record as Attorney General and got stuck on a question that wouldn’t leave me alone:When did I ever ask my Attorney General to file a multistate lawsuit?I couldn’t remember a single time. Not once. Not in conversation with neighbors, not on a ballot question, not in any candidate forum I’d ever watched. I’ve thought plenty about consumer scams, about the opioid crisis, about whether my AG was protecting West Virginians from price-gouging or fraud. I have never once thought, “What I really need is for my Attorney General to be the lead plaintiff in a 23-state coalition lawsuit against an EPA rule.”And yet that — the multistate lawsuit — has become the single most resource-intensive, nationally consequential, and politically rewarded activity of the modern Attorney General’s office. In West Virginia and across the country.This is an article about how that happened, why it should bother you regardless of which party you vote for, and a concrete reform you can ask your delegate and senator to support. A form letter is at the bottom — copy, paste, fill in your district, send.The Transformation Nobody Voted ForUntil about 1999, state Attorneys General were mostly what you’d expect them to be: the state’s lawyers. They handled criminal appeals, defended state agencies, prosecuted consumer fraud, and occasionally joined a multistate effort when something genuinely national — tobacco litigation, antitrust cases — required it. The job was unglamorous and largely local.Then Republicans founded the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) in 1999. Democrats responded with the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA)in 2002. Both are organized as 527 political committees. Both raise tens of millions of dollars per cycle from donor industries with direct financial stakes in litigation outcomes. Both function as case-selection committees, briefing-paper factories, and donor-access machines for their member AGs (Lipton, 2014).The Marquette political scientist Paul Nolette documents the transformation in his 2015 book Federalism on Trial: State Attorneys General and National Policymaking in Contemporary America* (Nolette, 2015). His finding, in short: the rise of RAGA and DAGA turned state AGs from low-profile law-enforcement officials into partisan policy entrepreneurs whose case selection is now driven by national party donors and ideological coalitions rather than by anything resembling state-specific harm.In his follow-up work, Nolette (2017) calls them “agents of polarization.” The phrase is precise. The AG office became one of the most efficient mechanisms in American politics for converting donor priorities into nationally consequential litigation — all conducted under the seal of a state government and at substantial public expense.How this Works in PracticeThe pattern is the same regardless of which party is in power in Washington (Nolette, 2014, 2017).When a Democrat is in the White House, Republican AGs file dozens of multistate lawsuits per year against federal rules on emissions, immigration, healthcare, education, finance, and ESG investing. The cases align — to a degree that is statistically very difficult to call coincidental — with the donor industries that fund RAGA: coal, oil, gas, pharmaceuticals, finance, for-profit education (Nolette, 2015).When a Republican is in the White House, Democratic AGs file the mirror-image waves of multistate lawsuits against federal rules on environmental rollbacks, immigration enforcement, ACA sabotage, abortion access, and federal preemption of state climate laws. Those cases align with DAGA’s donor base: trial lawyers, technology firms, and organized labor (Konisky & Nolette, 2021).A 2014 New York Times investigation by Eric Lipton — which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting — actually obtained the underlying communications: industry lobbyists drafting comment letters and lawsuit language that AGs filed under their own names with minimal modification (Lipton, 2014). The West Virginia AG’s office was named in connection with energy-industry communications in that investigation.This isn’t a fringe critique. It’s the documented operating reality of the modern AG office, in both parties (Lemos & Quinn, 2015; Smith, 2023).West Virginia’s Case Study: the Morrisey EraPatrick Morrisey is one of the cleanest examples of the archetype Nolette describes. From his 2012 election as Attorney General through his 2024 election as Governor, he:* Joined or led roughly 97 multistate lawsuits — the overwhelming majority against the Obama and Biden administrations* Won West Virginia v. EPA at the Supreme Court in 2022, restructuring federal administrative law and gutting EPA authority to regulate power-plant emissions — entirely through litigation, with no corresponding legislative action in West Virginia or Congress* Served as RAGA ...

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