While Donald Trump and his allies have showered plenty of love on West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice since he switched his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican two years ago, Justice is renewing a very public fight with a powerful state GOP leader.
Donald Trump Jr. will headline a fundraiser later this month Justice, and the invitation says that the attendees will include Sen. Shelley Moore and Reps. David McKinley, Alex Mooney, and Carol Miller—West Virginia’s entire GOP congressional delegation. Justice faces a primary next year against a few opponents including Woody Thrasher, who is his former state commerce secretary, and it would make sense for the governor to show that the party is unified behind him. However, that’s not exactly what’s happening.
State Senate President Mitch Carmichael will very much not be at the fundraiser, and Justice’s campaign manager said that he “wasn’t invited because he isn’t aligned with the Governor AND the President on some critical issues.” Indeed, Justice and Carmichael have been very publicly feuding over education. Justice, who is opposed to Carmichael’s push to introduce charter schools and education savings accounts, declared at a recent town hall, “I have pleaded with our Senate president saying, ‘Listen, you are imploding yourself. You are imploding the Senate.’” In a statement flecked with grammatical errors and strange Britishisms, Carmichael swung back on Friday with some text that pushes quite a few of Justice’s buttons.
Carmichael began, “In recent days, often truant Governor Jim Justice, has attacked me for leading the charge on comprehensive education reform in our state.” The “often truant” line is a reference to Justice’s well-established habit of spending most of his time at his Greenbrier resort, which is 120 miles from the state capital in Charleston. Justice doesn’t seem to be just working for home either, as the Associated Press reported in May that his schedule from the previous seven months showed that the governor “almost never meets with his Cabinet, is rarely at the capital and was largely missing at one of the most critical points of this year’s legislative session.” They went on to write that Justice spent his official time mostly at “photo ops or simply unaccounted for.”
Carmichael didn’t stop there. After a few paragraphs where he talked about the importance of his education positions, he continued, “Perhaps, the Governors inconsistent positions on education and other matters can be laid at the feet of his constant legal troubles with unpaid bills, worker safety violations, and delinquent taxes.” Carmichael concluded, “The worry and stress about these conflicts possibly contributes to his poor judgement and leads him to lash out at policies that represent traditional conservative values. His personal issues have certainly been an embarrassment to our state.”
Justice has indeed continued to attract plenty of headlines for the ongoing lawsuits from his companies’ habits of racking up huge fines. On Thursday, Justice agreed to pay $1.23 million in court-ordered sanctions against one of his companies, which federal prosecutors say is a shell that only exists to protect the governor and his family from paying their debts. However, his legal troubles are hardly over. On Thursday, MetroNews wrote that the sheriff of Logan County has “been authorized to sell shares of two Justice-owned companies to settle yet another debt in the court system.” The public auction will be held June 28.
Justice is no certainly stranger to messy fights with Carmichael. In April of 2017, when Justice was still a Democrat, he received a budget that was championed by Carmichael. The governor famously responded by dropping an actual pile of bull manure on a copy of the budget he vetoed it—because Republicans refused to raise taxes!
After Justice switched parties at a Donald Trump rally a few months later, it looked like he’d turned his relationship around with the legislature. A year later, Carmichael declared that Justice's switch had worked out "fantastically," and he went on to praise the governor’s vision for the state. It seems that those bright days of detente are long gone, though. Still, at least Carmichael will be relieved to know that, for the moment at least, there’s no actual bull manure coming from Justice.
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