AG Caldwell is spending your money to contract politically-connected trial lawyers to take care of the state’s legal business. In one case, he spent more than $15 million to hire outside law firms that often were political supporters of his. One of those outside lawyers he contracted even fell asleep in court.
Our group has recently called him “the Plaintiff Attorney-In-Chief… [he] focuses his efforts on civil ligation in the belief that serving as a consumer advocate best fulfills the role of that position” in The Louisiana Record.
The Hayride also has strong words condemning Caldwell’s actions.
Ideally, you’d want your attorney general to focus more of his time on rooting out government corruption and – particularly in this day and age – trying to preserve some semblance of federalism amid Washington’s constant encroachment on our freedoms. But if you’re going to have an AG who’d rather spend his time as a consumer advocate and suing big companies for whatever reason – which is not to say that an attorney general who sues BP, for example, is per se wrong for doing so – it would be comforting to know that the result of his actions isn’t just to generate big-time fees for his campaign contributors and other pals.