AG Watch

Mississippi, the birthplace of AG tobacco shenanigans, has started to reconsider the arrangement of its tobacco settlement funds. Or, to put it more bluntly, the Mississippi executive and legislative branches (with help from last week’s Jackson County Chancery Court ruling) have finally decided that the Attorney General is not a fourth branch of government, yanking Mississippi’s tobacco settlement revenue out of the AG’s Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi and placing it in the legislature’s piggy bank.

For eight years now, money from Mississippi’s settlement has been pouring into the Partnership’s coffers, providing former AG Mike Moore with beaucoup public relations points—and giving current and future AGs big incentive to continue a-pirating the seas of interstate commerce. Last week’s ruling does little to change that. Future Mississippi AGs may not behave like a perfectly autonomous government agency unto themselves, but the basic calculus of extraterritorial lawsuits will not change until the feds tell the states that they cannot keep ripping one another off.

Judge Bradley’s ruling restores a seemingly sane state fiscal-political system within the insane national economic arrangement of AGocracy; as long as that insane national arrangement operates—as long as Mississippi or any other state can steal from all other states—the states’ bookkeeping systems don’t really matter.