If a pro-life gazillionaire were giving funds to state attorneys general to go after Planned Parenthood, the left would quite rightly go bonkers. But ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg is doing much the same, except he’s paying AGs to pursue green-energy litigation. It’s still wrong.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner this week released a report uncovering this off-the-books appropriation of public power to serve one man’s priorities.
With grants to an NYU School of Law center, Bloomberg funds “special assistant attorneys general” in at least six states to work on clean-energy, climate-change and other environmental cases.
It would be one thing if the billionaire were paying a nonprofit legal foundation to litigate for his causes, or if AGs were using their own budgets to prioritize environmental law. But this is a private citizen setting the agenda for law-enforcement officials.
An AG who is ideologically in tune with Bloomberg, but wouldn’t otherwise devote scarce resources to these issues, gets to headline-hunt via lawsuits that wouldn’t normally pass the smell test.
Even a losing case can still have a chilling effect — and the targets must waste resources defending themselves.
The New York AG’s office took one of these grants while now-disgraced Eric Schneiderman was in charge. How many of the candidates to replace him think it’s a good idea to let billionaires direct the agenda of “the people’s attorney”?
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