One of the greatest destabilizers of democracy that almost nobody knows about is a little tax-exempt group called RAGA, which stands for the Republican Attorneys General Association. It represents more than half the states’ chief legal officers, and its members are on the front lines of pretty much every single important legal movement in the country. Its moves and funding are directed, of course, by everyone’s favorite little Monopoly Man Money Guy, Leonard Leo. Yet the group receives almost no sustained public attention or accountability. Recently, Heidi Przybyla at Politico reported on how RAGA tried to run a D.C. official who had dared investigate Leo out of office. And once you actually train your focus on RAGA, they tend to pop up everywhere, over and over again. The group was behind amicus briefs in the outrageous social media case Murthy v. Missouri. They are driving the efforts to get around federal emergency treatment laws for abortion in the forthcoming EMTALA cases. They’re pushing for Texas-style S.B. 4 legislation in several states. And that doesn’t even get you to the whole raft of RAGA interventions when it came to trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Lisa Graves, founder and executive director of True North Research, to try to shine a light on an obscure group that works hand in glove with Leo and dark-money interests to stymie democracy and roll back environmental protections, civil rights, reproductive rights, and other freedoms for the very citizens they are elected to serve. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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AdvertisementDahlia Lithwick: Attorneys general were once kind of nonpartisan. They were apt to work across political lines, for the interests of the residents of the state.
Lisa Graves: All state attorneys general once belonged to the National Association of Attorneys General, NAAG, and it was a bipartisan group, a group of all the state attorneys general conferring about the practices in their state and cases that transcend jurisdiction.
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementThere was a significant set of lawsuits in the 1990s around tobacco because there had been a long-standing effort by the tobacco industry to deny the carcinogenic effects of smoking, despite the fact that the tobacco companies knew full well that their products did cause cancer. In fact, one of the things that had a fundamentally disruptive effect on U.S. law and policy in the past 50 years is that a then–tobacco lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote something called the Powell Memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, circa 1971. This was in response to a decade of environmental regulation to protect against rivers that were on fire, and smoke stacks, and pollution, in addition to efforts to try to regulate smoking. And so the tobacco lawyer, Lewis Powell, wrote a memo basically saying businesses need to get more involved in policy, and lobbying, and universities in order to change our laws to benefit corporations. He was rewarded shortly after with an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, and so that’s 1971.
AdvertisementFast forward to 1991. Finally, there is concerted effort by attorneys general across the country to hold the tobacco industry liable for the consequences to people’s lives, but also to our health care system. As that was ongoing, the Republican attorneys general decided to create their own attorney general association to pursue their own agenda and actually raise money from industries that they were supposed to regulate in order to........