AG Stephen Cox wants his name on every right-wing lawsuit in America
Temporary Attorney General Stephen Cox, the transplanted Texan who has yet to celebrate his one-year birthday as a member of the Alaska Bar Association, faces confirmation hearings this week in two Senate committees.
One of the most striking aspects of his tenure is that Cox has stamped his name on right-wing court cases from elsewhere in America every couple of days, siding with the Fox News bubble on everything from cake decorations to firing members of the Federal Reserve.
By the end of March Cox had already signed 130 amicus briefs since becoming the state’s top lawyer, assuming that his opinions are shared by Alaskans.
If he has kept up this frantic pace in April, he will by now have inserted Alaskans into about 150 cases, most of which have little or nothing to do with Alaska or the needs of Alaskans.
Cox has made no effort to inform Alaskans about why he thinks his political opinions deserve to be spread like butter in courts across the land.
Cox, described by Sen. Ted Cruz in 2020 as a “principled Texan” when he became a U.S. attorney in East Texas, joined the Alaska Bar Association on May 7, 2025.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Cox exaggerated Cox’s ties to Alaska when he took the job. We’ve rarely, if ever, had an AG with as little Alaska legal experience as Cox.
He seems to be competing for his next job in the political realm, while concealing the arguments he is making from Alaskans in the avalanche of amicus briefs.
Is he allowing Jenna Lorence, the Outside lawyer for whom he created a new state job as solicitor general, to decide what’s best for Alaskans?
This is the 10-month rule that the solicitor general is operating under. Lorence completed law school in 2017 and has no Alaska experience.
If Cox protests at his confirmation hearings this week that he has studied these 150 cases or more and thought about them to make sure he is right, then he is clearly neglecting his work as attorney general.
These decisions are not supposed to be like those you have to make in the drive-in line at McDonald’s.
Perhaps he should be asked to list the culture war cases he has refused to endorse.
The first hearing is Thursday at 1:30 p.m. in the Senate State Affairs Committee.
The second hearing is Friday at 3:30 p.m. in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
At the same time that Cox has launched a filing spree with other right-wing generals across the land, he has made it much harder for Alaskans to understand just what he is claiming on their behalf.
The attorney general’s office decided recently that it would no longer provide links to the amicus briefs that Cox signs because of unidentified “resource constraints.” There are no such constraints on the resources deployed to track down cases throughout the land on which to score political points.
The department now lists only the names of the cases, forcing Alaskans to guess what opinions the “principled Texan” is espousing on our behalf.
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