# Auditing the Office of the Governor

*A petition filed in the middle of an election cycle, not a retrospective. Psalm 82 has God standing in the congregation of the mighty and asking the rulers directly how long they intend to judge unjustly — and the record shows He has answered that question inside a single night. This exhibit submits the evidence: seven countable axes with public sources, from the stock of regulatory restriction to the outside-counsel ledger where clean hands are manufactured, and three sitting governors from the attorney general track run across the scale. The verdicts split by conduct rather than party. The fig tree in Luke 13 got one more year and a deadline. The officeholder who finds this article is invited to work out which hill is worth his office.*

By Ody, The Wellkeeper

> *God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods. How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the wicked? — Psalm 82:1–2

Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground? — Luke 13:7*

This is not a retrospective. It is a petition, and it is filed now.

An election cycle is running. Candidates are being fielded, sponsors are writing checks, and sitting officers are making decisions this month that will bind counties for a decade. The customary posture is to wait — let the cycle finish, let the histories be written, assess in ten years when nothing can be done about it. That posture is a courtesy the record does not require and the moment does not permit.

So the ask is direct and present tense: let the fruit be inspected now. Let the ledgers be opened now. Let the men holding these offices be weighed while there is still something on the scale that can move.

What follows is the evidence submitted with that petition — seven countable axes, public sources named, three sitting governors run across the scale. A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight. The instrument discloses what it values so it can be argued with. Then it counts.

## The Court Is Already in Session

Psalm 82 is not a poem about God's opinion of government. It is a courtroom transcript.

God stands in the assembly of the mighty and addresses the rulers directly. The indictment is two counts: judging unjustly, and accepting the persons of the wicked — favoring the connected party. The specification is neglect of duty: defend the poor and fatherless; do justice to the afflicted and needy; deliver the poor and needy; rid them out of the hand of the wicked. The finding is that they will not understand and walk on in darkness, and that consequently all the foundations of the earth are out of course.

Then the sentence, and it turns on their own dignity: I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.

The office is a real delegation. That is exactly why forfeiting it is a real fall.

The psalm closes as a petition and not as commentary: Arise, O God, judge the earth. Someone wrote that down and sang it in public while the unjust judges were still sitting. It was not a prophecy about the distant future. It was a request for a hearing, now.

And the record shows the request being granted inside a news cycle.

Nebuchadnezzar, walking his palace admiring his own construction: while the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven. Mid-sentence.

Belshazzar, reading the writing at his own feast: in that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain.

Herod, seated in royal apparel and receiving the acclamation of the crowd: immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory.

Three rulers, three same-day dispositions. Whatever else is true, the objection that these matters take generations is not supported by the text.

One clarification keeps this honest. Removal from office is not damnation. Belshazzar lost Babylon that night; the books of Revelation 20 are still closed, and every man in that chapter is waiting on the same throne as every man reading this. Paul delivers a man up for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus, and says of those under judgment at Corinth that they are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world. Chastened rather than condemned. Two different courts, and the nearer one is a mercy.

So the petition is not for anyone's destruction. It is for the audit to be conducted while the outcome can still change — remove or chastise, but let the status quo be upended, because the foundations are out of course and the poor are still in the hand of the wicked.

## By Their Fruits — The Evidence

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Not by their promises, their party, their press conferences, or the causes they announce. By what came off the tree.

One question has to be set aside first, because it cannot be answered honestly: whether governors from the attorney general track delivered better lives. The sample is roughly a dozen sitting governors, with no counterfactual state to compare against and every confounder in the economy sitting on the scale. Anyone who publishes that ranking is selling something.

Conduct is different. Conduct is dated, public, and countable — and it is the fruit the text actually asks about.

An attorney general spends years mastering litigation, administrative rulemaking, and adversarial posture toward a co-equal branch. He never spends those years building legislative coalitions, because the job does not ask him to. He arrives in the governor's office holding a toolkit, and the toolkit is morally symmetrical. Deep knowledge of law is exactly as useful for repealing statutes as enacting them, for devolving authority as consolidating it, for opening records as sealing them. The audit does not ask what he knew. It asks which way he cut.

Seven axes. Each scores minus 2 to plus 2. Positive means authority moved outward, downward, or was time-limited. Negative means it consolidated toward offices the executive appoints. Range: minus 14 to plus 14. The embedded value is stated rather than laundered as neutrality — dispersed, reversible, accountable authority is treated here as good stewardship, and concentrated, permanent, unaccountable authority as its opposite.

1. STOCK OF RESTRICTION. Net change in the state's regulatory restriction count across the term. Source: Mercatus State RegData, counting instances of shall, must, may not, prohibited, and required across state administrative codes — 46 states plus DC, agency-level attribution, multiple collection years. Missouri has cited it in claiming a 20 percent reduction; Idaho's Board of Pharmacy used it to track its own reforms. Weight lightly and never alone: some law empowers, and some deregulation enslaves.

2. RULE BY DECREE. Executive orders per year, emergency declarations issued, and the diagnostic sub-measure — declarations renewed past their statutory window, or authority sought by regulation after voters or courts capped it. The most revealing of the seven, because it records what a man does when he has just been told no.

3. ELECTED OFFICES CONVERTED TO APPOINTED. Each conversion of a directly accountable office into an appointed one, as a discrete dated act. The cleanest indicator of consolidation available.

4. DOWNWARD PREEMPTION. Bills signed stripping counties and municipalities of ordinance-making power. Local governments hold no inherent sovereignty, only what the state delegates. States resist preemption from above while wielding it downward. Count the downward strokes.

5. SUNSET AND REVERSIBILITY. Did new authority arrive with an expiration date and mandatory review, or in perpetuity? A man who believes he is a steward writes an end date into his own grant. A man building a position does not.

6. SETTLEMENT DISPOSITION. Were litigation proceeds earmarked to the harm they were collected for, or swept into the general fund and securitized? Oklahoma walled its tobacco money into a constitutional trust in 2000 and cut adult smoking by half. Most states did not. Binary, dated, public.

7. THE PROXY LEDGER. Sovereign litigation outsourced to private counsel paid a percentage of the recovery is the engine under the whole tobacco-to-opioids-to-food sequence. The official announces the suit; a private firm's economics drive which suits get brought and what remedy is demanded. This is where clean hands are manufactured.

The standard already exists in statute. North Carolina's Transparency in Private Attorney Contracts Act requires the executed contingency contract and the attorney general's written determination to be posted, and any contingency payment posted to the attorney general's website within 15 days and kept there at least 365 days. At least 14 states adopted variants of the older Private Attorney Retention Sunshine Act, requiring open competitive bidding, public hearings above $1 million, and documentation of hours, expenses, and rates. In the lead paint litigation the California Supreme Court held that government retention of contingency counsel is permissible only where full-time government attorneys retain complete control of the case and veto power over outside counsel's decisions.

Published, bid, capped, and control-certified — or the state does not say.

## The Ledger as It Stands

Partial. Axes not yet pulled are marked, not guessed. A scale reporting a total it has not earned is a false balance.

BOB FERGUSON — Washington. King County Council 2004-2013, attorney general 2013-2025, governor from 2025.

Axis 2: no notable expansion on the record. Neutral.

Axis 3: the King County sheriff converted from elected to appointed by voter-approved Charter Amendment 5 in November 2020, seven years after Ferguson left county office. The post was also appointed under the 1969 charter and made elective by voter amendment in 1996 — a pendulum moved twice by the electorate, not a ratchet. Not attributable.

Axis 6 and fiscal conduct: he signed the millionaires' tax in March 2026, a new perpetual revenue instrument. Negative. Against it stands a documented act of restraint scoring strongly positive — he rejected the wealth tax his own caucus wanted to balance their budget, warning it was untested and might not survive court, and scolded his party through the session for returning too little of the new revenue as offsetting relief.

Axes 1, 4, 5, 7: not yet pulled.

Standing: incomplete, with one clear positive marker of a man who told his own coalition no in public.

JOSH SHAPIRO — Pennsylvania. Attorney general 2017-2023, governor from 2023.

Axis 2: the strongest negative marker available on the most diagnostic axis. Pennsylvania voters amended their constitution in May 2021 to cap gubernatorial emergency powers at three weeks, following pandemic orders Shapiro had defended as attorney general. In December 2021 the state supreme court struck the health department's school mask mandate as beyond its regulatory authority, while noting the department could grant itself that power by regulation. In August 2026 the administration proposed a 500-page rewrite of the health code citing that case as the impetus, expanding departmental authority from surveillance to prevention, containment, and mitigation of any disease, infection, or condition.

The structure is admitted in the filing. Voters closed a door by constitutional amendment. A court identified the window. The administration is going through the window.

Axes 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7: not yet pulled.

GREG ABBOTT — Texas. Attorney general 2002-2015, governor from 2015.

Axis 1: Texas sits well below the most heavily regulated states in the RegData counts and has pursued licensing and permitting reduction. Positive.

Axis 4: the maximum negative available, and likely the largest single entry on this axis in the country. Abbott signed House Bill 2127, the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act, in June 2023 — preempting cities and counties from regulating in fields occupied by broad swaths of state law, including the Labor, Occupations, Property, Finance, Insurance, Agriculture, Business and Commerce, and Natural Resources Codes. His framing: one regulatory regime across the entire state. Struck down at district court, upheld on appeal, now in effect. A think tank has since sued Dallas to void 83 city ordinances under it, and the legislature has already attempted a follow-on bill handing the attorney general power to sue cities directly for noncompliance.

Note where enforcement routes. Back through the attorney general's office. The pipeline runs both directions.

Standing: split. Deregulatory on volume, maximally consolidating on authority. Any framework that cannot tell those apart is not measuring stewardship. It is measuring party.

Which is the finding that matters. The variance inside the attorney general cohort is larger than any variance between that cohort and any other. One man refused the revenue instrument his own party demanded. One is routing around an amendment his own voters passed. One deregulated with a hand while stripping every city and county in his state with the other. Same training, same toolkit, same pipeline, opposite conduct.

The office is not destiny. These were choices, made by named men, on dated records, while men in identical positions chose otherwise.

## A Wink at the Balance

Noticed, not argued. TEKEL is a weight — the shekel, the standard unit on the scale. MENE is a count. PERES is a division. Numbered, weighed, divided: the three operations of any audit, in order, in Aramaic, delivered to a king drinking from vessels taken out of a treasury that was not his. Consistent-with is never proven-by. But an auditor may notice when the oldest recorded audit uses his own three verbs.

## The Hill

The fig tree in Luke 13 had produced nothing for three years and the owner ordered it cut down — why cumbereth it the ground. The dresser of the vineyard asked for a stay: let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it: and if it bear fruit, well: and if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down.

One more year. Digging and dung, which is to say discomfort and humiliating work. And a firm date.

That is the disposition being asked for here, and it is worth being precise about what it is not. It is not a request for anyone's ruin, and it is not a call for any man to lift a hand against another. It is a request that the owner of the vineyard inspect His own trees on His own schedule, which He has never needed permission to do, and that He do it now rather than after the harvest is lost.

Every axis in this exhibit is redirectable from inside the office today. A proposed rulemaking can be withdrawn during the comment period. Emergency authority can be sunset by the same pen that claimed it. A preemption statute can be narrowed. Settlement proceeds can be earmarked by appropriation. Contingency contracts can be posted by close of business — North Carolina's statute does it in 15 days. Not one of these requires a ballot, a supermajority, or an opponent's defeat.

So to the officeholder who found this page, and to the staffer who sent it to him: the question is not whether the policy is defensible. Most of them are defensible. Competent counsel will defend every one, and that is exactly the difficulty, because a thing can be lawful, winnable, popular with the donor class, and still be the wrong hill.

The question is narrower and it is yours alone. Is the 500-page workaround around your own voters' amendment the hill? Is the eighty-third ordinance stripped from a city that wanted it the hill? Is the general-fund sweep of money collected off dying people the hill? Is the sealed contingency contract the hill?

Because a hill worth dying on is by definition a hill you would still choose knowing the cost, and the cost is now legible. Somebody is keeping the ledger. Several of us are. And the One who convened the assembly in Psalm 82 was keeping it before any of us learned to count.

Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.

Not eventually. Now, while the fruit can still be borne, while the tree is still standing, and while the man holding the office can still be the one who turns it around.

And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened. Consider the implications of what is to be found there.