A showdown brewing since 72% of Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly approved an audit of the Legislature 18 months ago will take center stage in the state’s highest court this week.
The state Supreme Judicial Court is set to hear arguments in Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s legislative audit case against House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka on Wednesday.
After hearing from both sides, justices will decide whether to approve Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which DiZoglio filed in February, and whether the auditor should be allowed to have a special outside lawyer in the case.
Mariano and Spilka have stifled DiZoglio’s efforts to audit the Legislature since over 2.3 million Bay Staters signed off on the auditor’s ballot question in November 2024. The top Beacon Hill Democrats, in partnership with Campbell, argue that the financial review would violate the state constitution.
“Regrettably, nearly a year-and-a-half after the ballot initiative was approved,” DiZoglio wrote in a brief filed with the SJC on April 22, “the People have still not received any answers as to the future of the legislative audit.”
“The reason for this significant delay is the Attorney General,” the auditor added.
A sticking point in the case is how Campbell is representing Mariano and Spilka, a representation that the state auditor has described as “insanity” and goes against the will of the people.
DiZoglio is requesting that the SJC allow her to appoint outside counsel selected by her office to represent it as a “special assistant attorney general.” Shannon Liss-Riordan, who lost against Campbell in a 2022 Democratic primary for AG, would receive the nod if so.
Liss-Riordan is set to deliver the auditor’s arguments in the SJC hearing.
In March, Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlant denied DiZoglio’s motion for a special assistant attorney general, ruling that the auditor failed to cite a “statute, constitutional provision, or other authority” that would grant the outside counsel.
Wendlandt transferred the lawsuit to the full SJC bench, overruling the single justice’s decision on what she described as “threshold issues.”
In her brief filed with the SJC ahead of the hearing, DiZoglio pointed to a 1975 case that provided state officials with “judicial recourse where the Attorney General has abused her gatekeeping authority.”
In a reply brief filed with the SJC on Thursday, Campbell argued that she has the “responsibility to ‘establish and sustain a uniform and consistent legal policy’ for the whole of state government.”
Fulfilling that responsibility, the AG argued, has proven “impossible” because of DiZoglio’s fight.
“Meeting this responsibility is a challenge,” Campbell stated, “when there are legal disputes among branches of state government, particularly where, as here, those disputes involve novel constitutional issues infused with politics.”
Campbell added that the SJC should grant her motion to dismiss the case on the claim that DiZoglio’s lawsuit was filed “illegally.”
“The State Auditor cannot challenge the AGO’s decision-making by filing an unauthorized action against other state officials,” the AG stated, “and, even if she could, pressing the State Auditor for substantive answers about a case she now concedes involves constitutional issues of first impression is not arbitrary or capricious.”
DiZoglio has said that her office has answered the AG’s questions about the audit’s scope and her position on its constitutionality “extensively through formal memoranda and letters … on no fewer than six occasions throughout the past year.”
In a feisty exchange with a Framingham city councilor in late March, Spilka opened up on her resistance to the audit, arguing that DiZoglio is trying to act like a monarch.
Spilka highlighted that the Senate is audited “every single year” and that Beacon Hill leadership selects from a “certified list of independent recognized auditors.”
“That word ‘independent’ is a very key word here,” the Senate president said. “… the auditor’s claims are, I believe, a political audit wanting to prove something.”
Spilka said that both the Senate and the House provide the auditor with financial information every year, and that the public can find procurements, contracts, expenditures and salaries on the state Comptroller’s website.
“You will be able to go down to almost paperclips that we buy,” Spilka said, “and again, I don’t know what else is necessary to go through. There’s nothing to hide.”
After the Reading Select Board voted in March to send a letter to Spilka and Mariano demanding that they open their books and comply with the audit, some municipalities have followed suit, including Wilmington, Yarmouth, Norton and Somerset. Others have denied making their own requests.
The Pioneer New England Legal Foundation, a legal research and litigation nonprofit, filed a brief with the SJC in support of DiZoglio’s fight, saying the case “implicates broader questions of economic fairness and public trust in elected officials.”
“Unless the Auditor can conduct audit activities in furtherance of the mandate of the voters,” the foundation stated, “that office is essentially nullified, and we can expect other government entities to ignore or sidestep her legitimate inquiries.”
