When AGs run for higher office

Stateline.org has an article about a number of state Attorneys General who are running for higher office and the delicate line they must walk in doing their current job without appearing to be using that position to help their run for another office by boosting their visibility.

The first part of the article focuses on Michigan’s Mike Cox, a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor, who has been accused of filing lawsuits over Asian carp and the health care reform bill in order to boost his visibility and credibility and help his campaign.

Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox filed a legal brief in federal court last week, defending Arizona’s new immigration law from an Obama administration lawsuit. Arizona and other states, Cox wrote, have the right to secure their borders if the federal government won’t.

Cox filed the brief in his official capacity as Michigan’s top lawyer. But it also came in handy for his run to win Michigan’s Republican gubernatorial primary on August 3.

The brief is likely to play well with conservative Michigan voters who favor the Arizona law. It landed Cox national TV appearances on Fox and MSNBC, and he has referred to it at least four times from his campaign Twitter account. “Just filed in AZ federal ct to defend the citizens of Arizona — and MI— from Obama,” Cox wrote in one dispatch. In another, he criticized Obama for “suing the citizens of AZ 4 defending fed immigration law he refuses to enforce.”

Like the nine other attorneys general who are running for higher office this year (seven for governor and two for U.S. Senate), Cox must walk a fine line between the official duties of his current job and the political demands of campaigning for a new one. Sometimes — as the legal brief over the Arizona immigration law shows — the two roles intersect. When they do, it can help candidates politically even as it leaves them open to criticism that they are improperly leveraging their state offices for a boost in the polls.

“It’s a patently political ploy in his quest for the Republican nomination for governor,” a spokeswoman for Democratic Jennifer Granholm, the current Michigan governor, grumbled about Cox.

Cox, of course, is not alone in having the dual responsibilities of doing one job while campaigning for another. Among his opponents are a sitting U.S. Congressman, Pete Hoekstra, who has been criticized for missing many key votes while campaigning; a sitting state Senator, Tom George; the current Oakland County Sheriff, Mike Bouchard; the Speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives, Andy Dillon, who has also been called on by many even in his own caucus to resign his leadership position while running for governor; and sitting Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero. Each of these brings both potential conflicts of interest and opportunities to use one’s position to boost one’s visibility for the campaign.