MAYBE A WAY to unjam the going-in-circles debate about auditing the Legislature, the state’s highest justices pondered Wednesday, is simply to set a deadline.

Members of the Supreme Judicial Court tossed around that idea on Wednesday morning, while voicing frustration over the increasingly bitter feud between state Auditor Diana DiZoglio and Attorney General Andrea Campbell that has consumed lots of Beacon Hill oxygen and stymied any movement on DiZoglio’s voter-approved probeof the legislative branch.

“You’re both battling each other to exhaustion, and we’re going nowhere,” Justice Scott Kafker said to Assistant Attorney General Anne Sterman. “Don’t we have to push that forward, and isn’t that something we can do?”

The idea floated by justices was to order Campbell, by a certain date, to take a concrete stance on whether DiZoglio can conduct a narrow probe of the House and Senate, limited only to a handful of issues the Democratic firebrand originally identified as worth scrutiny.

DiZoglio has been agitating since she was first elected nearly four years ago to examine the House and Senate. Both chambers argue that such scrutiny from the auditor’s office would violate the constitutional separation of powers.

The auditor took her case directly to voters, championing a 2024 ballot question, which was overwhelmingly approved, granting her office the authority to probe the Legislature. But lawmakers have continued to balk, citing the same constitutional concerns.

DiZoglio sought to take legislative leaders to court to force their cooperation with an audit, and that’s when the showdown with Campbell took root. Campbell, who is charged with representing state officials in litigation, said she wouldn’t pursue DiZoglio’s case against House and Senate bosses without a clearer sense of its parameters and legal arguments — information DiZoglio contends she’s already provided — and the fed-up auditor decided in February to take a dramatic step: she filed her own case against Beacon Hill leaders, essentially attempting to circumvent the AG.

The court is focused primarily on the procedural morass: whether DiZoglio is allowed to sue legislative leaders directly, her request for special prosecutor to represent her, and Campbell’s attempt to have the lawsuit tossed, not the underlying questions about constitutional separation of powers. During Wednesday’s hearing, though, several justices suggested the intractable feud between the two was delaying resolution in the broader debate.

“At a certain point, this court decides whether something’s constitutional, not the AG,” Kafker said while questioning the attorney general’s team. “You can’t indefinitely prevent this court from deciding a constitutional question, can you?”

“That’s not our intent,” Sterman replied.

Then Justice Serge Georges Jr. cut in. “That’s the effect,” he said. “That’s the practical effect, because although you mention that this might, in your view, be a squabble between two different parties, you’re leaving us out. It effectively prevents any court from passing on the validity of the statute.”

Campbell and her deputies have at times contended that DiZoglio would not commit to a specific audit scope, and that the auditor has made comments suggesting she wants to examine more than the issues she initially identified — contracting and procurement procedures, non-disclosure agreements, and so-called balance forward line items — in a January 2025 letter to lawmakers.

Sterman said Wednesday there “may be legal merit to some of” what DiZoglio targeted, but that “it is also within the attorney general’s discretion to determine how those questions are teed up for this court so that we’re not having one case about those three requests, and then in six months, we’re before the court again on follow-up.”

After more than a year of back and forth and back again in private correspondence, public remarks, and incendiary social-media posts, the relationship between DiZoglio and Campbell is at a nadir. Justice Gabrielle Wolohojian raised the idea of a court order requiring the parties to craft an agreement on next steps within a certain period of time, given what she described as a “cycle of unproductive communications” between the AG and auditor.

“It seems to me, perhaps, that a deadline would have to be set by which the attorney general would fish or cut bait,” she said. “Is that the kind of thing that you see as being reasonable?”

Sterman said that seems possible, perhaps within as little as 30 days. Campbell’s goal, her deputy said, has been to “authorize something to go forward.”

Shannon Liss-Riordan, who is representing DiZoglio in the case, said the auditor would have “no objection” to a narrow review of her initial ask. But she, too, faced pushback from justices over her underlying argument that Campbell has been capriciously blocking legal action.

After Liss-Riordan – who lost to Campbell in the 2022 Democratic primary for attorney general — contended that the AG was “stonewalling” DiZoglio’s efforts, Wolohojian replied, “I don’t see that at all, to be frank.”

Kafker later said Liss-Riordan was “overstating [the attorney general’s] position.” And Wendlandt added, “It’s not true that the attorney general has stonewalled this case.”

Regardless of Campbell’s and DiZoglio’s procedural clashing, the high court signaled that the will-they-won’t-they is unacceptably impeding the normal process for hashing out disputes between constitutional offices.

“I think we’re at a point where, if you are willing to live with these [original] topics and that’s it in this lawsuit, we give the attorney general 30 days to determine the scope of the complaint she is willing to bring or not willing to bring,” Wendlandt said.