Attorney General Darrell McGraw

For years now, West Virginia Attorney General Darrell McGraw has coveted a “satellite office” in the Eastern Panhandle – a blatantly political expenditure aimed at shoring up one of McGraw’s weakest areas of support.

However, McGraw’s previous requests for hundreds of thousands of dollars in state funding were rejected by then-Governor Joe Manchin and the West Virginia Legislature.

But we all know that Darrell McGraw is not one to take “no” for an answer. Attorney General McGraw triumphantly opened his Eastern Panhandle office this week – funded with undisclosed amounts of money from state lawsuit settlement funds.

The West Virginia Record writes on the opening of McGraw’s office that:

The grand opening comes six months before McGraw might have to endure another close re-election effort. This time, he’s facing an Eastern Panhandle resident in Republican Patrick Morrisey, an attorney who works in D.C. and lives in Harpers Ferry.

 

“No one objects to the opening of an office in the Eastern Panhandle, but McGraw has done it by co-opting the power of the Legislature to appropriate funds,” Morrisey said Tuesday.

 

“The last time I checked the West Virginia Constitution, the Legislature possesses the power of the purse. McGraw seems oblivious to that fact.”

 

McGraw also attempted to open an office in the Eastern Panhandle office in 2007, but the Legislature would not give him the funds he requested.

 

“We’ve wanted to do this, really, for a long time,” McGraw said. “Like any issue in government, there’s going to be some controversy, some resistance. But we expect that. It’s part of our business.”

 

West Virginia Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, a legal reform group often critical of McGraw, says the move is questionable from many perspectives.

 

“Even though the Legislature is supposed to have the ‘power of the purse’ to control state spending, McGraw has unilaterally decided, in an election year nonetheless, to use state lawsuit settlement funds to open a satellite office without legislative approval,” said Richie Heath, CALA’s executive director.

 

“These funds generally are intended to be for the benefit of West Virginia consumers and not, as it appears in this instance, to build McGraw’s name-recognition in an election year.”

 

It’s a shame that Darrell McGraw continues to play politics with state settlement funds as if they were his own personal slush fund.

The money his office is spending on self-promotion and office staffing is part of a larger national settlement that was supposed to help “foreclosed-upon homeowners.” But national news reports show that the settlement funds are often being diverted to anything but struggling homeowners. While McGraw’s spending has been done under the guise of the “Save our homes” program, it’s unclear how much of the state settlement funds is actually going to affected homeowners.

West Virginians deserve to know how much is being spent on this “satellite office,” and whether or not those resources could be better spend on consumers elsewhere.

Secretary of State Natalie Tennant has been the target of a lot of criticism for allowing convicted felon, and current federal inmate, Keith Judd to get on the West Virginia ballot for President.  

In a clear protest vote against President Obama, Judd made national news after he received approximately 41% of the vote in our May 8th Democratic Primary.

Attorney General candidate Patrick Morrisey says today that Tennant isn’t the only state official to blame for Judd’s appearance on the ballot. In an op-ed commentary appearing in The Charleston Daily Mail, Morrisey writes that:

The fundamental problem with Keith Judd’s ability to easily access the ballot lies both in the lack of specificity of the West Virginia election code and the inability of Attorney General Darrell McGraw to provide the secretary of state and the Legislature with legal strategies to make it very difficult or practically impossible for a felon to run.

 

The attorney general is the chief law enforcement officer in the state and should have proactively identified and sought to fix this and other basic election law problems a long time ago…

Patrick Morrisey

 

…An attorney general must be competent in election law and identify the ambiguities in the state code that place our state’s reputation at risk. A competent attorney general would not allow crisis after crisis to occur in our electoral process.

It’s no shock that Attorney General McGraw has been hands off in this area. The only time that McGraw has ever take a real interest in the state’s election laws is when it has possible implications for his re-election.

But the Keith Judd situation is just another example of how Darrell McGraw fails to truly represent the interests of West Virginia.

The race for state Supreme Court is officially set as incumbent Justice Robin Davis and personal injury lawyer Tish Chafin have advanced from the Democratic Primary to face Circuit Judge John Yoder and Supreme Court law clerk Allen Loughry. Justice Davis led the Democratic Primary ticket with approximately 28% of the vote, with Chafin finishing less than 3,000 votes behind.

Greenbrier County Circuit Judge Jim Rowe – who is highly regarded for his fairness – finished in a distant third place.  Judge Rowe was significantly outspent by both Davis and Chafin, both of whom relied upon considerable amounts of their personal wealth during the race. 

The Charleston Daily Mail writes that challengers Yoder and Loughry were critical of the spending so far:

Yoder said he wanted to see Greenbrier Circuit Court Judge Jim Rowe win one of the two Democratic Party nominations. Rowe came in third with 19 percent of the vote.

 

“It tells me on the Democratic side, the amount of money you spend is far more important than the qualifications,” Yoder said.

 

Yoder also appeared to challenge Davis’ qualifications, even though she is now a seasoned veteran of the court.

 

Yoder said Rowe “was, by far, the most qualified” candidate in the Democratic field.

 

Loughry, who is the sole Supreme Court candidate to take advantage of state public financing for his run, lamented the “tremendous amount of money” spent in the Democratic primary, particularly the $1 million Chafin put into her own campaign.

 

“And when one candidate put $1 million into her campaign, that candidate sent the message to every kid growing up in every rural part of this state that they don’t count, that they can’t participate in West Virginia politics and you should not be able to buy a seat on the West Virginia Supreme Court,” Loughry said.

The race for Supreme Court should be a high-profile affair during the General Election, as many will be watching to see if the Court continues down a path of moderation or makes a return to its days of “jackpot justice.”

West Virginia Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse’s latest research of publicly available campaign finance reports shows that campaign contributions from the personal injury bar are flowing to the two frontrunners in the Democratic Primary Election for state Supreme Court.  

Justice Robin Davis and personal injury lawyer/candidate Tish Chafin have received approximately 95% of all large personal injury lawyer contributions during the primary reporting cycle.  Overall, personal injury lawyer interests account for nearly one-third of the large campaign contributions given to state Supreme Court candidates so far this year (donations greater than $250 which require disclosure of donor occupation and employer).

As of the latest filing period, Justice Davis has accepted more than $100,000 in contributions from personal injury lawyers, their staff, spouses, and family members.  These contributions account for nearly half of Justice Davis’s total large contributions.

Similarly, candidate Tish Chafin has raised 40% of her large campaign contributions from personal injury lawyer interests – a total of more than $60,000 in contributions.  The other six Court candidates have combined to raise only $7,500 in large contributions from personal injury lawyer interests.

While lawmakers previously passed a public financing pilot program for this year’s Court race in an attempt to reduce the influence of special interest money, it’s clearly having little impact. Only one candidate opted into the program.

As a result, most candidates are free to accept significant amounts of campaign contributions from many of the lawyers that could ultimately appear before them on the Supreme Court.

With only a week remaining until the Primary Election, newspapers are in the process of cranking out their endorsements.

Circuit Judge Jim Rowe

In the much watched Democratic Primary for West Virginia Supreme Court, Justice Robin Davis and Judge Jim Rowe appear to have received a majority of support from the state’s major newspapers, including endorsements from The Charleston Daily Mail, The Huntington Herald-Dispatch, The Wheeling Intelligencer, The Martinsburg Journal, The Times West Virginian in Fairmont, & Parkersburg News & Sentinel to name a few.

Justice Robin Davis

One interesting opinion piece from this morning’s Parkersburg News & Sentinel raises questions about whether candidate Tish Chafin would be a step in the wrong direction.

In discussing the WV Supreme Court’s improvement in recent years, Mike Myers writes:

With the Primary Election being two weeks away, action is picking up in the race for state Supreme Court. While incumbent Justice Robin Davis and candidate Tish Chafin have been running television advertisements for the last few weeks, Greenbrier County Circuit Judge Jim Rowe’s television ad is up now as well.  

With the top-two vote-getters in the Democratic Primary advancing to face Republican Circuit Judge John Yoder and Supreme Court law clerk Allen Loughry, this could be a three-horse race in the final two-weeks between Davis, Chafin and Rowe.

Attorney General Darrell McGraw’s latest campaign finance report is another unfortunate example of “pay-to-play” politics in West Virginia state government, as research by West Virginia Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse shows that McGraw’s political campaign is once again being financed, in large part, by the law firms that he has previously appointed to lucrative no-bid state legal contracts.

LegalNewsline.com reports that:

Attorneys previously given state contracts by West Virginia Attorney General Darrell McGraw have so far contributed $36,000 to his re-election campaign….

 

…McGraw has won his last two re-election campaigns by less than one percentage point of the vote. Critics routinely point to his relationship with the plaintiffs bar.

 

Those firms that saw employees and their spouses contribute to McGraw’s 2012 campaign [include]:

 

Attorney General Darrell McGraw

• 

Bailey & Glasser, a Charleston firm that gave $7,000 and was previously hired for a case against prescription drug retailers like Wal-Mart over the price of generic drugs;
• Bucci, Bailey & Javins, a Charleston firm that gave $5,000 and was hired for a case against Visa and MasterCard;
• DiTrapano, Barrett & DiPiero, a Charleston firm that gave $2,500 and was hired for a case against OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma and a case against Bank of America;
• Frankovitch, Anetakis, Colantonio and Simon, a Weirton firm that gave $3,000 and was hired for a case against Cooper Wiring Devices and Leviton Manufacturing (the appointment was dropped when the companies sued McGraw over the hires) and a case against Comcast;

 and,
• Cook, Hall & Lampros, an Atlanta firm that gave $8,000 and was hired for the case against Bank of America.

More than 43¢ of every $1 raised by the Attorney General’s campaign comes from his network of “special assistant attorneys general,” who in turn have reaped millions of dollars in legal fees over the years.

This certainly gives off an unseemly appearance of “pay-to-play” and raises questions as to whether state legal work is going to the biggest campaign contributors.

Sadly, McGraw’s questionable conduct has been going on for nearly two decades now. And many state lawmakers have shown little interest in holding the Attorney General accountable anytime soon.

All of this leaves us to wonder – what’s so bad about requiring the Attorney General to hire outside counsel in an open and transparent process?

Attorney General Darrell McGraw’s frequent use – or misuse to be exact – of state funds for his own political gain has reached epic heights over the years.  And with another election year upon us, it appears that McGraw’s office is once again gearing up its state-funded political machine.

The West Virginia Record reported this past week that Attorney General McGraw is using state settlement funds to open a satellite office in the Eastern Panhandle:

[Chief Deputy] Hughes said the efforts on this project right now are focusing on Kanawha, Putnam and other large counties as well as the eastern Panhandle.

 

“That’s where most of the mortgage problems are,” she said, adding that the AGs office soon will set up a satellite office in the eastern Panhandle.

Attorney General Darrell McGraw

 

“We’ll have a lawyer from legal services in the office,” she said. “We’re using some of the mortgage settlement money for that because there are so many mortgage issues over there, and they need a satellite office.

 

“We’re hoping by April 1 to have the office up and running. Mortgage money is paying for this. We haven’t configured the whole office yet, but we plan on rotating staff there. We’ll have paralegals, a secretary, a lawyer or two. One person working with us from Legal Aid will be operating out of that office. We’ll have different lawyers there from our Consumer Protection Division. We’re not going to hire one person and leave him or her there.”

Attorney General McGraw has wanted an office in the Eastern Panhandle for quite some time, but state lawmakers have routinely rejected additional funding for such an office.

Former employees in the Attorney General’s office have testified under oath that Darrell McGraw’s consumer protection spending is directly influenced by political considerations. And the Eastern Panhandle will likely play a deciding role in this year’s race for Attorney General. Consequently, it’s difficult to look at the Attorney General’s newest “consumer protection” office as little more than a campaign headquarters in the Eastern Panhandle.

Sadly, this isn’t the only example of questionable spending by the Attorney General in an election year.

In 2004, Darrell McGraw’s office spent nearly $1 million in state funds on television advertisements that appeared to be designed to build public recognition of the McGraw name. Given that the Attorney General’s office hadn’t spent more than $50,000 on television advertisements in the previous four years, The Charleston Daily Mail called the spending “an insult to the taxpayers’ intelligence.” That same year, the Attorney General’s office was also criticized for its questionable purchase of $141,000 worth of trinkets (pens, pencils and pillboxes to name a few) bearing Darrell McGraw’s name.

McGraw has also been accused of misusing state settlement funds for political gain.  The Attorney General has likely cost the state millions in precious Medicaid funding for the state’s neediest citizens – a by-product of an intentional scheme by the Attorney General’s office to avoid paying money owed to the federal government. Instead of giving the state settlement funds to the plaintiff state agencies he was supposed to represent, Darrell McGraw spent millions of dollars on handouts for his personal pet projects.

For far too long, Attorney General McGraw has treated taxpayer money as his own personal slush fund. State lawmakers need to ask serious questions about McGraw’s newest “consumer protection” office, before even more money goes to waste.

With the primary election a little more than one month away, things are starting to heat up in the race for two seats on the West Virginia Supreme Court.  Seven of the eight Court candidates met with The Charleston Daily Mail to discuss the issues, and judicial recusals was one of the dominant topics.

Last week, candidate Tish Chafin announced her so-called “Balanced Court Initiative” – a proposal to change the way the state Supreme Court handles motions from attorneys to remove Justices from cases for potential bias or conflict of interest.

Criticism of the proposal was fast and furious, with Chief Justice Menis Ketchum calling Chafin’s plan “silly” and “crazy,” while noting that the Court was already working on rules to improve the Court’s current recusal process. In a separate interview, the Chief Justice cited Tish Chafin’s husband – state Senator Truman Chafin – as an example of attorneys abusing the recusal process for personal gain.

Chafin’s proposal didn’t fair much better amongst the current court candidates.  As The Charleston Daily Mail reports:

Several candidates also took aim at the plan.

 

[Justice Robin] Davis also wondered if it’s a good idea to put justices in the position of being able to remove each other from cases.

 

“I think that would be very troublesome,” she said.

 

Davis said Michigan uses a method similar to the one Chafin is proposing and the court there is “dysfunctional.”

Other topics of interest included the possible creation of an intermediate appeals court in West Virginia.

While some candidates said the need for an intermediate appeals court was eliminated with the Supreme Court’s Revised Rules of Appellate Procedure, others weren’t so sure.  Greenbrier County Circuit Judge Jim Rowe said “I think the jury is still out, so to speak.”

No doubt it should be an interesting month as the candidates begin to debate the issues in greater depth, and inform West Virginia voters of where they stand on important judicial issues.

It’s safe to say that West Virginia has had trouble over the years competing with our neighboring states for good-paying jobs. The average wages for West Virginia workers are some of the lowest in the nation. And West Virginia has one of the lowest workforce participation rates in the nation.

Many people accurately cite our state’s out-of-step legal climate and overly burdensome regulatory and tax environment as the source of many of our problems, as job providers ignore our state for those with better jobs climates.

In an editorial this morning, The Martinsburg Journal agrees with the notion that West Virginia must do more to compete for jobs:

Our tax structure, regulatory framework and,in some respects, our courts need to be improved to make us competitive against other states. As matters stand, without tax incentives…we sometimes are not appealing.

 

[Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill] Maloney has a point: Instead of relying on high-stakes economic games we may lose, West Virginia needs to provide a more appealing playing field for all businesses.

Meanwhile, a new report from MoneyRates.com illustrates the problem our state has competing with our neighbors, as West Virginia ranks among the 10 worst states to make a living:

For the second year in a row, MoneyRates.com has crunched data on income, cost of living, taxes and unemployment to make its lists of the Best and Worst States to Make a Living.

 

These rankings are determined by an adjusted average income figure for each state, a number that factors together the four variables above to determine each state’s relative standing for career-related conditions.

The full rankings show that West Virginia compares poorly to each of its neighboring states.

Virginia ranks as the best state in the nation to make a living, while Ohio (13) and Pennsylvania (15) both make the top twenty states. Maryland (23) still ranks in the top half of all fifty states, with Kentucky (30) trailing not too far behind.

It’s quite disturbing that West Virginia falls twelve spots behind our closest neighboring state – we’re actually closer to the bottom of the rankings than we are to Kentucky.

Clearly, state lawmakers need to get busy tackling the problems that are really hurting state workers.  Otherwise, West Virginia will just continue to fall behind.