Episodi

  • Happy Birthday, West Virginia. Sorry I’m a Little Late.

    Happy Birthday, West Virginia. Sorry I’m a Little Late.
    Jun 22 2026
    West Virginia turned 163 this week. I’m a couple days late to the party, so let me make it up to the old place with a present worth giving.Here’s some history worth sitting with on a birthday. On June 20, 1863, the western counties did something almost nobody in American history has done: they looked at a government run by people who didn’t represent them — power and policy tilted toward interests on the other side of the mountains, written for somebody else’s benefit, paid for with somebody else’s money — and they said no thanks, and they walked. They built their own state. For themselves. For their neighbors.That’s not a fun fact. That’s the whole reason this place exists. And it’s exactly why I’m launching what I’m launching today.For a while now, this newsletter has done one job: show you the machinery. How the money moves, how it hardens into policy, the pattern you can’t unsee once you’ve seen it. And a lot of you keep writing back with the same question — okay, so what do we actually do about it?This is the answer. Welcome to the West Virginia Model Legislation Library.If you already subscribe, you’re in — added automatically, nothing to click. The main feed stays what it’s always been: the investigation. This new one is the workshop. The main feed is where we expose what they’re doing. This is where we beat them at it.The American Legislative Exchange Council runs a model legislation library. I’m not telling you a secret — it’s their whole business model, and they’ll brag about it themselves. Corporations and politicians get in a room, often behind closed doors, and crank out template bills. Then those templates get carried home to states like ours and dropped in barely changed. Same words, state after state, written for the people who paid to be in the room.And it works — for one reason. Our Legislature is part-time. Sixty days. Almost no staff. A lawmaker who wants to do something needs bill text, a fiscal note, and talking points, fast, and usually can’t pull that together alone. So ALEC walks right into that empty space and hands them a finished bill. Tidy. Convenient. Written for somebody who doesn’t live here.So here’s the question I couldn’t let go of. If the whole con runs on the fact that they have a library and we don’t —then why don’t we just build our own? So we are going to. Not for billionaires. For our neighbors.Here’s the thing their money can’t buy: people who actually live here and know how this state works. Retired attorneys. Former county clerks. Folks who’ve spent careers reading the Code. We don’t need to fly in national staff or rent a think tank. We need to organize the people already sitting in our own communities — and aim that talent at laws written for us instead of at us.That’s what this library is. And the first entries start dropping here this week — all public, all free, all yours:* A blueprint for how an in-state policy shop really works — who you need, how a bill goes from idea to introduced, how you pay for it. The instruction manual for doing in the open what they do in the dark.* A straight-shooting brief on Amendment 1, the “Citizenship Requirement to Vote” measure on your November ballot. It won’t tell you how to vote. It’ll show you what that amendment actually changes — which is close to nothing — and what got shoved aside while it ate up floor time and ballot space.* Two real, drafted bills. Not ideas. Not wish lists. Actual legislation. One keeps West Virginia’s photo-ID requirement and fixes the gaps that quietly cost eligible people their vote. The other keeps the state’s voter-roll cleanup intact while making sure that being an occasional voter doesn’t become step one toward losing your registration. Both of them amend real sections of our Code, line by line.Read that list again, because this is the part that matters: neither bill weakens election security. Neither one keeps a single ineligible voter on the rolls. They keep the goal the Legislature said it wanted — and they stop eligible West Virginians from getting run over in the process. That’s what legislation built for your neighbors looks like. You’ll see every line of it this week.One straight word, because straight is the whole point. These are working drafts. Before anything like this gets introduced, it needs checking against the current Code and review by legislative counsel — and I say so right inside the documents. We don’t dress things up as more than they are. That right there is the difference between us and them.Here’s where you come in.ALEC works in the dark because the dark is the only place their game survives. Drag it into the daylight and it falls apart. We’ve got the opposite situation — which is to say, no problem at all. We’ve got nothing to hide, so we’re done acting like we do.* If you’re a lawyer, a retired clerk, a policy nerd, or just someone who knows ...
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    6 min
  • Why I’m Telling My 18‑Year‑Old To Wait Before Registering To Vote

    Why I’m Telling My 18‑Year‑Old To Wait Before Registering To Vote
    Jun 21 2026
    My daughter just turned 18. She’s smart, opinionated, and absolutely ready to vote. And I did something that feels almost sacrilegious for a parent who cares deeply about democracy: I told her to wait. Not forever. Not to disengage. Just to hold off on registering until we’re closer to the deadline this fall.Why? Because right now, our voter registration systems are a mess — a political battlefield where our personal data is being treated like a weapon, passed around between governments and third‑party vendors, and routinely left hanging out on the open internet like a forgotten file on someone’s desktop.I don’t want my kid’s full name, address, date of birth, and partial Social Security number sitting in some unsecured cloud bucket or in the hands of a contractor who treats “security” as an afterthought. And that is not a hypothetical fear. It’s exactly what has already happened, over and over again.This is not about discouraging her — or anyone — from voting. It’s about the adults in charge of this system behaving so irresponsibly with voter data that I don’t trust them with my freshly 18‑year‑old’s information right now.When Your Voter File Becomes a Political WeaponOver the last couple of years, the federal government has been on a crusade to get its hands on complete, unredacted statewide voter registration lists from almost every state and Washington, D.C. These aren’t just the public records versions that include name and address. They want the whole thing: full legal names, residential addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license or state ID numbers, and pieces of Social Security numbers.The Department of Justice has sent demands to at least 48 states and D.C., and has sued Washington, D.C. and 30 states that refused to turn over their full statewide voter registration lists with driver’s license and Social Security information. Some of these lawsuits target states the administration lost in 2020, and the stated justification is “we just want to check whether your rolls are accurate.”Let’s be clear: there is a world of difference between auditing election systems and hoovering up the most sensitive information on tens of millions of voters into federal hands, to be processed by contractors we know almost nothing about. Election officials from both parties have raised alarms because the federal government has never had full, unredacted voter lists at this scale before.Some states have said no. Illinois, for example, refused to hand over dates of birth, driver’s license or state ID numbers, and Social Security information, citing state law and privacy protections, and instead sent a more limited file like the one it shares with political committees. The DOJ wrote back and said, essentially, “Not good enough. We want the entire database, all fields, including full name, date of birth, residence, driver’s license, and last four of the Social Security number.”Other states have been sued and then vindicated in court. A federal judge in California dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit that sought to force the state to turn over its full, unredacted voter registration list, including addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. In total, at least eight of these cases — including ones against California, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Oregon, Maine, and Wisconsin — have already been dismissed, and the DOJ is appealing several of them.So from my vantage point as a parent, here’s how this looks: the federal government is in a legal knife fight with dozens of states trying to pry loose as much sensitive voter data as possible, while courts are saying, “Hold on, you may not be allowed to do that.” That is not a stable, trustworthy environment for me to casually toss my daughter’s data into.The Grown‑Ups Left the Door Wide OpenIf this were just a theoretical debate about who could access what, I’d still be uneasy. But this isn’t theoretical. We have a long, ugly history of voter data being leaked, misconfigured, and left exposed — not by some movie‑villain hacker, but by the very entities that collect and monetize this information.A few greatest hits:* A tech contractor in Illinois left at least 13 databases with about 4.6 million records on the open internet — no password protection — containing names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, voter registration history, absentee and early voting records, even death certificates from multiple counties.* Security researchers found a misconfigured database sitting online that contained information on about 191 million U.S. voters — including names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliations, phone numbers and emails — accessible to anyone who knew where to look.* A huge dataset compiled by Deep Root Analytics, a political data firm that worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign, ...
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    12 min
  • Hunger in West Virginia and the Morrisey–McCuskey–Scott Will Machine

    Hunger in West Virginia and the Morrisey–McCuskey–Scott Will Machine
    Jun 20 2026
    Hunger in West Virginia is not an accident. It is what happens when the same small circle of men controls the budgets, the lawsuits, and the money machine behind our elections—Governor Patrick Morrisey, Attorney General JB McCuskey, and consultant Scott Will.Have you ever been hungry?Not the kind of hungry that nudges you toward the fridge between meals. Not the kind of hungry that has you scrolling through a takeout app on a Tuesday night. I mean truly, stomach-aching, nothing in the cabinet, kids going to bed without dinner hungry.In 2026, the wealthiest country on earth is quietly letting millions of families go without food. At what point did hunger stop being a moral crisis and become just another policy argument? The distance between a full refrigerator and an empty one is the same distance between our leaders and the people they’re supposed to serve.I’ve been thinking about that question a lot lately. Because while lawmakers in Washington and right here in Charleston debate budgets, score political points, and protect tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, real people—your neighbors, your coworkers, the family down the street—are going without food. This isn’t a hypothetical. This isn’t a distant problem. This is happening right now, in 2026, in the wealthiest country on earth.And when you follow the decisions and then follow the money, you keep landing on the same three names.If you’ve been reading my work on this Substack, you know this isn’t a standalone story. In “Your Attorney General Doesn’t Work for You Anymore,” I laid out how RAGA and DAGA turned the AG’s office into a national partisan litigation machine. In “Your Help Really Makes a Difference,” I showed how Patrick Morrisey’s donor world operated at the Greenbrier. And in “Sugar Maple PAC may be buying the ads, but the real story is the small circle of operatives routing, reporting, and managing the machine behind West Virginia’s 2026 Republican primaries,” I traced the same pattern through Scott Will, SW2 Political, Matchstick, Bulldog, Red Curve, and the PAC infrastructure behind West Virginia’s Republican primaries. This piece sits on top of that groundwork. It is about what happens when that same machine meets something as basic as whether kids in West Virginia eat dinner.The Numbers Are Staggering — And They Should Shame UsA new Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis found that food insecurity in America has reached levels higher than during the COVID-19 pandemic. One in ten American households reported not having enough food to eat, or that their children missed meals—more than double the share who said the same in June 2020, at the height of the crisis. More than a third of households are now dipping into their savings just to buy groceries.Meanwhile, food prices in April 2026 were about 3.2 percent higher than a year ago, the fastest monthly spike in nearly four years. Overall inflation has climbed to roughly 3.8 percent, the highest in almost three years. People are not imagining this. It is real, and it is relentless.And yet, Congress passed the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” slashing around 186–187 billion dollars from SNAP—food stamps—over ten years. That’s about a 20 percent cut to the one program millions of families depend on to keep food on the table. Before the cuts, children made up roughly 39 percent of SNAP recipients, and older Americans around 20 percent. These are the people lawmakers decided could afford to go without.The Trump administration actually celebrated removing people from SNAP—as if hunger is a victory condition.Right Here in West Virginia: Patrick Morrisey’s Hunger BudgetWest Virginia already knows what hunger looks like. We live it. According to Feeding America, 1 in 5 children in our state faces hunger. In fiscal year 2025, about 272,800 West Virginians—15.4 percent of our entire population—relied on SNAP benefits just to eat. Our state consistently ranks among the most food-insecure in the nation.And now, on top of federal cuts to SNAP, WIC, and school nutrition programs, our state is facing its own budget crisis—one that threatens the programs quietly holding West Virginia families together.Governor Patrick Morrisey recently revealed a 40 million dollar structural gap in West Virginia’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funding. His early suggestions for closing that gap? Cutting childcare assistance. Cutting the clothing allowance that helps low-income families buy school clothes for their kids. Putting the futures of 58 Family Support Centers across our state in jeopardy.These aren’t just buildings. Family Support Centers are places where families get parent education, child-development support, after-school programs, GED classes, food and hygiene pantries, and a hand when they need it most. In a single recent year, just four of these centers served nearly 5,000 individuals statewide. They are ...
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    16 min
  • Honey, I Shrunk the Voter Rolls: An Introduction to Heather Honey

    Honey, I Shrunk the Voter Rolls: An Introduction to Heather Honey
    Jun 18 2026
    In my last piece, we met the Election Integrity Network — Cleta Mitchell’s meticulously branded operation for turning election anxiety into model legislation, one state capitol at a time. We walked through the handbook, the ten principles, the suspiciously timed poll, and the whole apparatus designed to make you feel like democracy is held together with duct tape and good vibes.Today, we need to talk about one of the humans inside that machine.Reader, meet Heather Honey — private investigator, voter‑roll auditor, Cyber Ninjas alumna, Pennsylvania election‑world celebrity, and, as of August 2025, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at the Department of Homeland Security.Yes, that’s a real title. No, it did not previously exist. No, you may not take the rest of the day off to process this.Part One: A Star Is Born (In a Voting Line in Lebanon County)Heather Honey’s personal mythology begins exactly where you’d expect it to: Election Day 2020, a polling place in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania.By her own account, she was standing in line when she watched an older woman get handed a provisional ballot. This, for Heather, was a Damascus moment. A call. A sign. Where most of us would think “huh, that’s a thing that happens sometimes,” Heather thought: I should spend the next several years of my life pursuing this.And she did.Before we go any further, understand that Honey is not a rogue Facebook warrior. She is a trained private investigator and supply‑chain auditor who ran a firm called Haystack Investigations. She knew how to find things. She knew how to build a case. The problem, as we will discuss at length and with increasing concern, is what she found — and what she did with it once she found it.Part Two: The Claim That Launched a Thousand HeadachesWithin weeks of her polling‑line awakening, Honey was knee‑deep in Pennsylvania voter data. She ran the numbers. She ran them again. And then she produced a figure: Pennsylvania had 205,000 more votes than voters.This claim made its way up the food chain with the speed you’d expect from a claim that tells powerful people exactly what they want to hear. It was briefed to Republican state Rep. Frank Ryan. It was cited in legislative hearings. And then, on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump stood on the Ellipse and screamed it into a microphone aimed at a crowd that was about to do something memorable.The Department of Justice later called the figure false. The Pennsylvania Department of State explained the methodology with the patient, tired energy of a teacher on the last day before summer break: voter rolls are updated continuously after elections. You cannot take a snapshot of the rolls weeks later and compare it to election‑night results and call the difference fraud. You will always get a discrepancy. That is how voter rolls work. That is, in fact, the whole point of voter rolls.But by then, the claim had done its job.Part Three: Honey Goes to ArizonaHere is something that is real and actually happened: Heather Honey was a paid subcontractor for Cyber Ninjas, the company hired by Arizona Senate Republicans to conduct a partisan “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 presidential ballots.For the uninitiated: Cyber Ninjas was a cybersecurity firm with no election experience, run by a man who had shared election conspiracy theories online, hired to audit an election they already believed was stolen. They searched ballots for traces of bamboo fiber, which they believed would prove ballots had been smuggled in from Asia. This is a true fact about the world we live in.Honey served as a “manager” on the project and billed tens of thousands of dollars for her work.The audit concluded in September 2021. It confirmed Biden’s win. In fact, it found Biden had won by slightly more than originally reported.Honey did not slow down.Part Four: Follow the Honey (CPI → FAIRE → Verity)The money trail starts with the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), the D.C. nonprofit that funds the Foundation for Accountability Integrity & Research in Elections Fund (FAIRE), Mitchell’s shiny new election “research” vehicle. FAIRE pulled in roughly 3.9 million dollars in contributions in its first reported year and spent about 2.0 million on grants and other expenses. That’s a lot of concern about voter rolls.Buried in FAIRE’s Form 990 is where it gets fun. FAIRE had to file Schedule L — the “Transactions with Interested Persons” schedule — because it paid Verity Vote LLC 121,284 dollars for “consulting,” and disclosed Verity as “an entity owned more than 35% by an officer.” Translation: one of FAIRE’s own officers owned the company FAIRE was paying.Verity Vote LLC is not some mysterious, free‑floating election‑integrity start‑up. It’s owned by Heather Honey, who lists her address as 1451 Quentin Road, Lebanon, PA, the same address that appears for FAIRE‑related entities and in Pennsylvania ...
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    17 min
  • Fill In the Blank

    Fill In the Blank
    Jun 17 2026
    They Played Themselves: A Note Before We BeginLet’s be honest about what we’re doing here. Someone handed a bunch of out-of-state dark-money lawyers a whiteboard and a dream, and asked them to write a Model Election Laws Handbook that would turn West Virginia — and every other state willing to listen — into a laboratory for voting restrictions. The result is a 116-page document that dresses up activist wishcasting in the language of legislative drafting and calls it policy research.After wading through their methodology and digging deep into the junk data — and I use the word “data” charitably, the way you’d call a gas station hot dog “cuisine”—here’s the thing that’s going to make you laugh: they played themselves.The crown jewel of the entire handbook, the empirical foundation on which the whole thing rests, is a single poll. One poll, commissioned by their own allied fund, conducted by a pollster who has been rated as favoring Republican-aligned results fielded in a very specific window: January 17–21, 2025.Let that sink in. They surveyed voters three days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration — at the precise peak of Republican voter enthusiasm, when Trump’s approval rating had climbed to 47%, its highest point of his second term before beginning a steady decline to 36% by late 2025. They captured Republicans at maximum victory-lap energy and Democrats at maximum “what just happened” shock, then used those results to claim that the American people overwhelmingly support citizenship purges of voter rolls.It’s like polling fans leaving a stadium after their team won the Super Bowl and concluding that the country loves football and nothing else matters.The poll they’re so proud of is a time-stamped artifact of a single partisan moment — and that moment has already passed. Trump’s approval among independents alone dropped 21 percentage points over the course of 2025. The handbook, meanwhile, is designed to be permanent law.So buckle up. What follows? The short version: there’s less real data here than in a fortune cookie, and the fortune cookie at least tells you something true about your future.But First: Who’s Holding the Whiteboard?The Election Integrity Network isn’t a group of concerned West Virginians who got angry about election security and decided to write a handbook. It’s one of eight organizations launched in 2021 by the Conservative Partnership Institute — a Washington D.C. nonprofit at 300 Independence Ave SE.In 2024, CPI paid Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, $871,853 in base compensation — plus $37,831 in additional benefits. Call it $909,000.Not millions. Just under a million. From a charity. That collects tax-deductible donations from donors whose names appear nowhere on the public filing.EIN is chaired by Cleta Mitchell, whose résumé includes a starring role on the January 2, 2021 phone call in which Donald Trump urged Georgia officials to “find 11,780 votes.” She resigned from her law firm when the call became public, testified before the January 6 Select Committee, and then did what any reasonable person would do next: built a 50-state election legislation network. The Model Election Laws Handbook is her flagship product.Her law firm, Compass Legal Group, billed CPI $608,984 for “legal services” in 2024, also from 300 Independence Ave SE. Compass Professional Inc. billed $986,048 for “administrative services.” Conservative Partnership Campus Inc. billed $1,202,229 for “facility services.” All from the same address.Four entities. One building. Nearly $3.2 million in related payments, routed through a 501(c)(3) charity that raised $32.3 million in anonymous contributions last year.Meanwhile, in Mannington, West Virginia, a man named Ed Fisher runs Citizens for West Virginia Election Integrity. He volunteers his time. He submits public comments to the West Virginia Legislature on Sunday nights at 9:58 PM.He is not paid. He is thanked in the dedication.The dedication calls volunteers like Ed Fisher “tireless warriors” who are “the backbone of saving America.” It says EIN owes them “an enormous debt of gratitude.”That is a beautiful thing to say to someone you’re not paying.Mark Meadows gets $909,000. Ed Fisher gets called a warrior. Keep that in mind as you read everything that follows.The Poll: Reading the Numbers They Don’t Want You to ReadHere is what EIN claims: that “Americans strongly support” the policies in the handbook, and that a poll confirms their reforms are “commonsense” and “desired by the voters.”Here is what the poll actually shows — if you read past the summary slide.The survey was commissioned by the FAIR Elections Fund, an organization in the same ideological orbit as CPI, and conducted by RMG Research Inc. — the firm founded by Scott Rasmussen, whose work has been repeatedly flagged for a pro‑Republican house effect.The fieldwork...
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    19 min
  • Mac Warner, Cleta Mitchell, and the War on West Virginia Voters

    Mac Warner, Cleta Mitchell, and the War on West Virginia Voters
    Jun 14 2026
    Quick Note: *I left you a metric ton of breadcrumbs at the bottom of this article…*Let’s stop pretending this is normal.For nearly a decade, West Virginia’s top election official, Mac Warner, used his office not to invite more of us into democracy, but to lock us out of it. He did it while parroting Donald Trump’s Big Lie. He did it while carrying water for one of the most notorious voter‑suppression strategists in America, Cleta Mitchell. And when he was done here, he carried that playbook straight to the U.S. Department of Justice.This is not “election integrity.” It is a coordinated attack on West Virginia voters — and it’s time we name it for what it is.“Cleaning” the rolls by erasing West VirginiansWhen Warner took office in 2017, he bragged that he was going to “clean up” our voter rolls. What he actually did was launch one of the most aggressive purge campaigns in our state’s history.Tens of thousands of registrations disappeared in a matter of months. Within a few years, well over a hundred thousand names were gone — roughly one in every twelve registered voters in this state. That is not housekeeping. That is a political scrub.And who gets wiped out when you swing a sledgehammer at the voter rolls?* Older voters who don’t move much but don’t vote in every single election.* Poor and working‑class people whose lives are chaotic enough without navigating red tape.* Students, renters, and folks who move for work and get lost in the paperwork.These are our people. Our neighbors. Warner turned them into rounding errors.Independent experts warned that his purge machine was moving faster and hitting harder than the data justified. County clerks quietly removed jaw‑dropping percentages of their voters, and instead of hitting the brakes, Warner’s office trotted out press releases crowing about “the cleanest voter rolls in state history.”Let’s be clear: in a state that already has no same‑day registration, no no‑excuse absentee voting, no drop boxes, and some of the lowest turnout in America, mass purges are not neutral. They are a deliberate choice to make voting a minefield.Enter Cleta Mitchell, Patron Saint of Voter SuppressionWhile Warner was busy deleting voters at home, the national voter‑suppression machine was taking notes.Cleta Mitchell’s name should be burned into our political memory. She was on the infamous call where Donald Trump begged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes. When that blew up, she didn’t slink away in shame. She built an empire.Her Election Integrity Network is a slick, well‑funded operation designed to do one thing: shrink the electorate. They train activists to mass‑challenge registrations, cook up bogus “fraud” stories, and pressure Republican officials to follow their script. They wrap it all in patriotic language, but the goal is simple — fewer voters, especially the ones they think will vote against them.And guess who she saw as a model state official? Mac Warner.Public records show Warner and his lieutenants speaking at Mitchell’s voter‑rolls working groups and webinars, sharing how they were “cleaning up” West Virginia’s rolls. Mitchell personally emailed Warner’s office asking for the very databases and tools they were using so she could feed them into her national machine.That’s not a casual connection. That is strategic coordination. West Virginia wasn’t just on her radar. We were a lab.ERIC: From Boring Success to Convenient ScapegoatHere’s the part that makes me angriest: we actually had a good system.ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center, was a bipartisan workhorse. It helped states flag people who moved, died, or were registered in multiple places, and it also helped identify eligible but unregistered citizens. In other words, it caught the rare cases of real fraud and helped more people vote.So why blow it up?Because the Big Lie machine needed a new villain. Mitchell and her allies started spreading lies about ERIC — calling it partisan, dangerous, corrupt. None of that held up to scrutiny. But it didn’t have to. It just had to scare enough Republican officials into pulling the plug.Mac Warner did not stand up for West Virginians. He saluted and fell in line.In March 2023, he yanked West Virginia out of ERIC, synchronizing the move with Florida and Missouri like they were coordinating a press conference, not gambling with our elections. Former Secretary of State Natalie Tennant called him out, warning that leaving ERIC would hurt election security and open the door to more sloppiness and more wrongful purges.Warner didn’t care. What mattered was not whether ERIC worked — it did — but whether staying in it annoyed the national election‑denial crowd. He chose them over us.EagleAI: Junk Science Aimed at Your RegistrationERIC was real infrastructure. Its replacements are junk.One of the crown jewels of Mitchell’s network is EagleAI — a ...
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    11 min
  • Your Attorney General Doesn’t Work for You Anymore

    Your Attorney General Doesn’t Work for You Anymore
    Jun 5 2026
    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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    17 min
  • “Your Help Really Makes a Difference”: Inside Patrick Morrisey’s 2015 Pitch to Utility Donors at the Greenbrier"

    “Your Help Really Makes a Difference”: Inside Patrick Morrisey’s 2015 Pitch to Utility Donors at the Greenbrier"
    Jun 4 2026
    In the August of 2015, Patrick Morrisey — then West Virginia’s Attorney General, today the state’s 37th Governor— stood in a room at the Greenbrier resort and made a frank request of the energy, financial-services, and healthcare executives in front of him: keep writing the checks.UtilitySecrets.org obtained audio of that fundraiser, hosted by the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). Morrisey was joined by his counterparts from Utah and Montana, Sean Reyes and Tim Fox. In remarks that run only a few minutes apiece, the three Republican AGs explained — in unusually plain language — what donors get in return for their generosity, and how they coordinate with one another and with the national organization that helps re-elect them.The audio recording would be striking on its own. What gives it weight is that it lands inside a structural story that political scientists have been documenting in the peer-reviewed literature for years. In a 2017 study published through Marquette University, political scientist Paul Nolette argued that state attorneys general have become “a more entrenched part of the national policy landscape,” with “coalitions of mostly Republican AGs aggressively challeng[ing] Obama Administration initiatives such as the Clean Power Plan” and successfully “limited, delayed, or curtailed Obama’s regulatory agenda, particularly during his second term” (Nolette 2017).The Greenbrier audio is, in effect, the campaign-finance correlate of the legal strategy Nolette describes. This post walks through both.What Morrisey Told the RoomSpeaking to a crowd that, by his own description, included representatives “in the financial services industries, healthcare, energy, across the board,” Morrisey framed his office as a turnaround story for industry:“I think people used to look at West Virginia and maybe want to run in the opposite direction in terms of the business climate there, but through our office and some of the changes in the legislature, we’ve really been able to … start turn things around.”He then ticked through his EPA-litigation résumé, anchored on the Clean Power Plan stay his coalition had won at the Supreme Court earlier that year:“We helped lead the charge against the president’s Power Plan, obtaining the stay. In West Virginia, that’s as good as you can do. When you’re fighting for coal miners and their families … if you can get a stay of the President’s top initiative that matters. If you can get a stay of the Waters of the United States rule, that matters.”And then came the ask. Not the kind of generic ask that surfaces in stump speeches, but a specific, transactional appeal aimed at the executives in the room:“The only way I get to stay is through your incredible generosity, so thank you all for coming today. Thanks for your support and if you haven’t written a check, I’d be grateful if you could; if you have already maxed out, if you would consider talking to some of the executives and people that you know, I would be appreciative of it. … I do have a very rich opponent and while we match up very well on the issues, you know it helps to have a little bit more in the way of resources in order to counteract some of those TV buys. So your help really makes a difference.”He closed by name-checking the rest of the RAGA roster on hand — “General Fox, General Reyes, and obviously you know about the great leadership of Chairman Schuette” — and thanked the room “for coming to the Greenbrier.”The Pitch from Reyes and Fox: “You Won’t Go Broke”Tim Fox, Montana’s then-AG, made the coordination explicit. The product on offer was not a single state’s legal docket. It was a 27-, 28-, 29-state coalition acting as one:“When we collaborate and get together … with Patrick Morrisey and push back against the federal government, or get together and write a letter to the federal government or whatever it is, we make a difference when there is 27, 28, 29, 30 or more attorneys general; people listen, people watch, and it makes a difference. So thank you for supporting each of our attorneys general in RAGA, and thank you for supporting me. You won’t go broke, and it’ll be one of the best investments you’ll ever make.”Sean Reyes, who later went on to become the subject of the CMD records lawsuit over his RAGA and Rule of Law Defense Fund correspondence, was more colorful — and more direct about who was holding the checks:“If you have checks for us, I’m taking Missy to the Supreme Court but Alan will be here and Erica can help us out as well. … Just remember that when you are writing those big corporate checks, you’re standing there with me in the ring of a bunch of gangbangers from fifth grade, that’s how I feel with you.”Three AGs. One coalition. One ask.The Scholarly Backbone: Why “27, 28, 29” Wasn’t BlusterTim Fox’s coalition arithmetic is exactly the dynamic Nolette documents in...
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    16 min