By John Brummett

Let me ask you something, purely hypothetically, of course.

Let us say you sued me for libel and won and got awarded damages. Do you think the lawyer who represented you in the suit ought to get to keep all the money and decide what to do with it?

I didn’t much think so.

In Arkansas government, the ever-more-imperious attorney general — now named Dustin McDaniel — gets to keep the lawsuit settlement money and distribute it unilaterally and arbitrarily. He does so for noble purposes that, coincidentally, serve to enhance his political standing.

That benefits his inevitable race for governor, an office that soon will amount to a demotion considering the way the attorney general keeps getting more presumptuously powerful.

Here’s the latest: Most states were joined in suing Eli Lilly for overstating what one of its brain drugs would do. McDaniel chose to eschew the national lawsuit and litigate for Arkansas separately. Eli Lilly anted up $18.5 million to Arkansas, which McDaniel, by our leave, took into his corner office and divvied up.

He gave most of it to Medicaid. But he took a little part of it to presume to make his office of attorney general, whose basic job is to be lawyer to state government agencies, a special investigator and locally deputized prosecutor of sex predators of children on the Internet. He also made his office the place for a new cyberspace forensics unit to track these Internet child-porn creeps.

You see what he’s done there. He’s snookered me into the risk of sounding like I’m defending sexual predators by saying he really doesn’t have any business spending on his own a sum of millions that all of us won as clients.

The State Police, the local police departments, the state Crime Lab — all could, and in some cases already do, engage in this same kind of computer reconnaissance of Internet sex predators of children. McDaniel’s carving out a duplicative role for his office in this vital and urgent work — well, heck, if it catches even one creep out there who otherwise would have gotten away …

McDaniel told me by phone Thursday that sometimes good policy and good politics fuse, and that, yes, this is an occasion in which his office can help do some important good in a way that might amount to good politics in his personal behalf.

But he said he was hardly the first attorney general to exercise such fiscal discretion and office embellishment. And he made sure I recalled that, in fact, he resisted a legislative raid on this discretion in the recent session, in part by promising greater accounting to the Legislature of his use of such settlement dollars.

He also referred me to a French/Latin phrase, cy pres (meaning as closely as possible to a donor’s intent), that he called a time-honored judicial doctrine that holds that settlement dollars ought to go toward addressing the failings made evident by the lawsuit. For example: His sending $15 million of the $18.5 million from Eli Lilly to the state’s Medicaid coffers to be matched three-to-one by the federal government.

Still, McDaniel’s worthy points notwithstanding, I must take note of the elephant in this room: This is one place where these tea party zanies infesting our state Legislature could do some worthwhile work.

We have entirely too many independent cash funds throughout state government, meaning money coming into agencies, perhaps through licensing, that the agencies are simply permitted to spend as they wish.

The Legislature could appoint a special study committee to identify and count up all this money and figure out if it might be more efficient and fiscally accountable to the people to bring all of it into the general appropriation process, which, after all, the state constitution designates as a legislative function.

I say that knowing full well that an Arkansas Legislature favored with $18 million in Eli Lilly manna might spend it all on local community centers and additional shrines at the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame.

McDaniel and I agree that, under the current arrangement, the voters of Arkansas ought to consider well the judgment of their future candidates for attorney general.

He, of course, would contend that his demonstrated judgment is so good as to warrant imminent demotion to the office of governor.

——-
John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.