The state’s highest court helped clear a few of the logs that were jamming the way forward for Diana DiZoglio’s audit of the Legislature, but the toxic political fight that has consumed Beacon Hill is far from over.
Roughly a year and a half after DiZoglio first moved to follow through on new power voters granted her, the state auditoris inching closer to getting an answer on whether she can in fact examine certain aspects of the House and Senate without breaching constitutional firewalls.
Those bigger legal questions had been idling while justices sorted through a related but separate dispute between DiZoglio and Attorney General Andrea Campbell over how litigation could unfold. A day after hearing arguments in that matter, the Supreme Judicial Court gave Campbell a hard deadline to decide whether to represent the auditor in her lawsuit seeking to force the Legislature’s cooperation with her review. Campbell had been hesitant to take up DiZoglio’s case, arguing that the auditor was failing to answer key prerequisite questions about the scope of her planned audit.
Campbell responded by permitting DiZoglio to go forward with litigation against legislative leaders, represented not by the AG but instead by outside counsel — Shannon Liss-Riordan, a high-profile lawyer who lost to Campbell in the 2022 Democratic primary for attorney general.
DiZoglio told CommonWealth Beacon that Liss-Riordan will take on the case pro bono. Despite the forward movement, she continued to jab at Campbell over the AG’s prior resistance.
“It was very important to [Liss-Riordan] that we be able to have representation,” DiZoglio said. “She very much saw the games the attorney general is playing, and Shannon Liss-Riordan is no stranger to standing up to the attorney general and standing up to Beacon Hill.”
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Published by MassINC