A dozen Republican state attorneys general are fed up with what they view as the leftward drift and self-dealing of their nonpartisan national association and are asking the organization to change its ways and return roughly $280 million in assets to the states.

The National Association of Attorneys General was created in 1907 as a bipartisan forum for all state and territory attorneys general. Over the last year, several of the group’s Republican members have asserted that NAAG has become a partisan litigation machine that improperly benefits from the many tort settlements it helps to engineer. …

On Thursday, 12 attorneys general, led by Kentucky’s Daniel Cameron and Utah’s Sean Reyes, sent a letter to Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, a Democrat who serves as the current NAAG president. They are taking issue with an association – with an annual operating budget around $5 million – holding on to so much money.

“While NAAG should continue to maintain a reasonable operating budget to meet its mission, we do not understand how that mission requires that NAAG retain over $280 million in assets and the associated income from those assets,” they wrote. “As NAAG’s former executive director has acknowledged, this money belongs to the States. For these reasons, we write to ask NAAG to commit to discussions regarding mechanisms for returning those assets to the states.”