The funding freeze

And the Sackler family pays up

I’ve had some people ask me what it’s like to become Attorney General.

I’m still new, but here’s the best way I can describe it:

Imagine someone sets up 50 chess boards in front of you.

Each board represents a major case your office is involved in - water polluters, scammers, criminals, public corruption, antitrust, fentanyl, price gouging. Every board is a chess match against an opponent like that.

Some of these matches have been going on for years. Your first job is to study each board, understand how we got here, and then - most importantly - figure out how to prevail.

Fortunately, you’re not alone. You have access to teams of experts who are highly experienced and will give you as much information as you want.

So your first few weeks? They’re spent learning. Consulting with your teams, understanding the history, listening to strategic advice.

And then, one by one, you start making moves. Every move matters because every board represents real lives and real stakes.

I know that’s pretty abstract, so I asked A.I. to create a visual aid. Here you go:

Not sure those chess boards look quite right, but otherwise not half bad...

Now substitute lower ceilings, fluorescent lights, more coffee cups and computer monitors, and you’ve got the idea.

The Sackler Family

When I was in high school, the Sackler family’s pharmaceutical company - Purdue Pharma - invented a new opioid pill.

They lied to doctors and said it wasn’t addictive.

That was the start of the opioid crisis. Back then, we called it the prescription pill crisis.

It took us about ten years, but eventually, we cracked down.

But by then, loads of people were addicted, so they hit the streets looking for their fix - and found heroin.

So then we had a heroin crisis.

That lasted for a few years until synthetic heroin arrived - and that’s fentanyl.

The fentanyl crisis is really just the third wave of the opioid crisis the Sackler family helped create in the mid-1990s with their deceptive marketing of OxyContin.

Our state was one of the leaders of the mega-lawsuit against the Sacklers, and a few years ago, a big settlement was reached.

Then the Supreme Court blocked the settlement. They told the states to renegotiate the terms.

So we did. And last week, we got it resolved in a way I’m pretty sure will be upheld by the court.

The bottom line? A lot more money for North Carolina. And, by the terms of the agreement, that money will go almost entirely to anti-addiction programs run by individual cities and counties. It’s being channeled directly into the communities that have been hit hardest, with strict rules that it be used to treat addiction or prevent the next generation from falling into this epidemic.

That news was a huge deal for our office, and when the additional funding starts to flow later this year, it will be a huge deal for the state as well.

Federal Funding Freeze

One time, many years ago, President Nixon announced that he wasn’t going to spend the money Congress had appropriated for some clean water programs.

And the Supreme Court unanimously said he couldn’t do that. If Congress passes a law that says, “Spend $100 on this,” the president can’t decide, “I’d rather spend $50.” The Constitution gives spending power to Congress - there’s no getting around that simply by declining to spend what they’ve appropriated.

Clinton tried something similar, though on a smaller scale, and the Supreme Court blocked him, too. He used a line-item veto - which Congress had explicitly given him! - to strike certain spending provisions from the budget. The Court ruled that violated the Constitution. Why? Because not even Congress can delegate its power to the president without amending the Constitution. Congress has certain power reserved to it, whether it likes it or not.

So when a president says, “Hey, freeze hundreds of billions that Congress appropriated,” it’s not a close constitutional call. It goes much further than Nixon and Clinton went, and it’s obviously not going to hold up in court.

And it didn’t.

On Sunday night, just as I was sitting down to dinner with my family, I got a text about the president’s order to freeze a massive chunk of federal funding. I read the order - just a page and a half long - and it was immediately clear that it was unlawful.

First thing the next morning, I spoke with my team and we all agreed: Based on clear precedent, this violated the Constitution. So we joined the lawsuit to challenge it, and the court quickly put the freeze on hold, pending a full hearing.

Now the order has been withdrawn entirely. The administration said it “didn’t go through the proper approval process.”

Now we’re waiting to see if funding freeze version 2.0 appears. If it does, I assume they’ll take a more tailored approach in the hope of surviving a court challenge.

Here’s what I take from all of this: The rule of law still holds. When power is overstepped, there are mechanisms to pull it back. And it’s important to hold the line, not for politics, but to defend the constitutional order on which civil society depends.

I’ll keep you posted.

Best,

Jeff Jackson

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