Troy King and Private Attorneys: UPDATED

For those of you who have followed this blog for some time, you have likely noticed that we have criticized Troy King for hiring liberal trial lawyers like Jere Beasley to do work for the state. This process has been a major problem in many states including Georgia and West Virginia, where Attorneys General have used this power to reward political supporters.

In Alabama, this has certainly created strange bedfellows. Troy King calls himself a conservative, yet he has endeared himself to trial lawyer Jere Beasley. On October 20, 2009, the conservative Washington Times praised an 8-1 Supreme Court decision rebuking King's practice by throwing out many of the lawsuits. They also noted King's close connection with Beasley, citing numerous PAC contributions in over $150,000 linked to Beasley, his wife, and Montgomery lobbyists with close connections to Beasley (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/20/alabama-clips-trial-lawyers/).

There are a lot of interesting things to come out of this case. One, the Times reported that the court found that mispricing was the result of the STATE, and not the pharmaceutical companies. Second, Supreme Court Justice Thomas Woodall said this was "an attempt to use tort law to re-define [Alabama's] Medicaid reimbursement obligations." This directly refutes King's testimony that as AG he is simply seeking to uphold the rule of law. In fact this demonstrates that he has acted quite to the contrary during his time as AG by creatively using the law to further his own ends.

In return, as I said previously, Troy King has received the support of liberal trial lawyers. Jere Beasley runs the "Jere Beasley Report," a website devoted to supporting lawsuits (many which true conservatives believe are abusive) as well as other liberal projects like national healthcare. It was interesting to see back in October that Jere Beasley ran a story explicitly supporting Troy King's re-election campaign in 2010 and attacking his political opponent. As I said, politics makes strange bedfellows.

Well, the story made the news again in January. This month, the Washington Legal Foundation released a report supporting the Supreme Court's decision against King. "When attorneys general work with private attorneys - individuals with interests that may be different from the state - the overall benefit to the public becomes suspect at best," wrote Behrens and Silverman, who work for Shook, Hardy & Bacon's Public Policy Group in Washington (http://www.legalnewsline.com/news/225269-wlf-paper-praises-ala.-sc-decision). This echoes the concerns of Bill Pryor and the conservative Federalist Society who argue that hiring private attorneys creates a conflict of interest whereby the states then abuse the court system.

Unfortunately, what this ultimately means is that an essential point of what Troy King considers his success as Attorney General is a lawsuit practice which conservatives deem abusive and which the Alabama Supreme Court seems to think is unlawful. This is yet another reason the nation's highest-paid AG should be removed in June.