Sunday, January 28, 2018

Maura Healey: wasting Bay State time and money

I've long had a beef with Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey.  The main output of her office is press releases announcing her opposition to some federal policy which has absolutely no basis in law.  This is true whether it's federal immigration policies or illegal Obamacare subsidies; the press release and the ink in the newspaper is the most important aspect.  Constitutional standing is an ancillary consideration.

In today's Sunday Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby writes about how the Berkshire Museum is trying to maintain its solvency by selling off some pieces including some Norman Rockwell paintings.  Maura Healey had no objection...until it was time to generate an issue for a press release:
Attorney General Maura Healey, whose office oversees nonprofits and charities, was notified of the museum’s deaccessioning plans in June, weeks before it was announced publicly. She rightly raised no objection. Not until four months later, after art-world purists had created a tumult, did Healey’s office go to court. It procured an injunction to halt the auction while it conducted an investigation of the Berkshire’s planning process.

Yet it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Healey’s investigation became a quest to find something, anything, to justify her belated opposition to the Berkshire’s plan. It isn’t only museum partisans who say so. Ruling on the initial request for an injunction in November, Superior Court Judge John Agostini pronounced it “bewildering” that Healey would try to stop the sale when her office “has uncovered no evidence of bad faith, no conflict of interest, [and] no breach of loyalty.”
That the law is a secondary consideration to every action of the AG's office is troubling.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

They must have found something, anything, because the appeals court overruled Judge Agostini 3 days later.

Roger Bournival said...

The people in her office are among the worst and rudest I've ever had to deal with. I was dropping off a Form PC at the AG's office at One Ashburton Place two or three years ago, and the broad I talked to basically brushed me off, half-grunting 'you have to drop that off at the McCormick Building' and then turned away, like I had just committed the worst offense in the world by asking her a question. The other broad at the McCormick Building was a bit better than that, but even she wasn't real helpful - she sent me to the mailroom (classic hack runaround).

The common thread here - zero professionalism.

Hopefully, this comment doesn't get erased again, like the most recent one I left on Thursday's post. It's getting real tiresome.

Anonymous said...

It was probably erased by a broad.