Environmental Collusion
Wattsm Up With That? cited CEI’s Senior Fellow Chris Horner’s Law Enforcement for Rent report.
Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released a report (Law Enforcement for Rent) in August of 2018 detailing an unprecedented level of cooperation between the state governments of Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Washington and the District of Columbia. In these states, environmental groups and major liberal donors directly fund attorney general staff, research, public relations and other services. These non-governmental funds are specifically earmarked to advance progressive legal positions.
………………………………..
Dr. Horner and CEI spent two and a half years filing freedom-of-information requests to get the documentation they needed to write this report. All the most critical documents are in the Appendix. In addition, on a separate site you can download all the documents. Many of these documents have never been made public before and many could only be obtained by court order in the face of determined opposition from the attorneys general. Horner concludes his executive summary as follows:
“The public–private partnership of law enforcement for hire revealed in this report, in which the partnership uses public office to expend resources not appropriated or approved by their legislatures, raises significant constitutional and other legal issues—as well as ethics concerns—and should be the subject of prompt and serious legislative oversight.”
I think we can all agree with this. It is heartening that CEI has sued the state of Virginia to block its attempt to bring a Bloomberg-funded “special assistant attorney general” into their staff.