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COLUMBIA — Thirty-seven minutes into an interview at a downtown Columbia law office owned by go-to Republican attorney Butch Bowers, Alan Wilson’s phone, like it often does, lights up with another call. Maybe it's a media request. Being a regular on the conservative talk show circuit in South Carolina means rarely a week goes by without someone wanting Wilson as a guest.
That's because listeners on the right like what he has to say. Some say the demand started when Wilson was elected attorney general in 2011. He'd go on to file some 63 amicus briefs and 24 lawsuits against President Barack Obama's administration.
A dozen years later, the legal filing pace has increased versus Democratic President Joe Biden's White House. Wilson has placed his name on some 88 opposing amicus briefs and 59 lawsuits in the name of the people of South Carolina against the administration's policies, making him a leader among an increasingly politicized crop of U.S.
state attorneys general. Which makes this particular phone call stand out. It’s Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, a Democrat who notably pledged as a candidate in 2018 to be a “firewall” to the policies of then-Republican President Donald Trump — a convicted felon Wilson has claimed to be a victim of a weaponized judiciary.
Wilson, flanked by his longtime political advisor Mark Knoop, picks up the phone. “William, I’m going to have to call you back,” he says, begging off. Alan Wilson took a taxpayer-funded trip to the Mexican border.
Why? The exchange, however brief, spoke volumes. To his rivals, Wilson is a political animal, the second-in-line of his father congressman Joe Wilson's burgeoning political dynasty who has used his position as South Carolina’s top prosecutor as an instrument to advance conservative policy positions and raise his own profile for a likely future run for higher office, be it governor, congressman or senator. But among his peers and close associates, Wilson is a prosecutor first, and relatively immune to the frivolous legal stunts that have defined other elected legal chiefs in Southern states like Louisiana and Texas.
"When it comes to the litigation, I wouldn't say he's unique in the sense that there are a number of other Republican AGs that are fairly characterized as ideologically motivated," said Paul Nolette, director of the Les Aspin Center for Government at Marquette University and an expert on the office nationally. "But I do think he stands out in a relatively small group of particularly prominent AGs," he added. At this present political moment, Wilson might be among the most influential figures in a political office that sees itself both as a defender of constituents’ way of life and a springboard to jobs above.
AG says South Carolina doesn't need mandatory waiting period between executions California’s former attorney general, Kamala Harris, is now the Democratic nominee for president. A number of former AGs — Missouri’s Josh Hawley and Eric Schmidt — are now U.S.
senators, while several — including former Louisiana AG Jeff Landry and Wilson’s former desk mate at the National Association of Attorneys General, former Pennsylvania AG Josh Shapiro — are now governors. Some have accused Wilson of using the office to set himself up for a similar run, though his friends are quick to dismiss such claims. “I don't think you'll find that unique just to Alan or any of these AGs, I will tell you that,” said Robert Bolchoz, a former prosecutor in the S.
C. AGs office and onetime attorney general candidate who has donated thousands of dollars to Wilson’s campaigns. Bolchoz continued, “From a strictly electoral politics standpoint, you get a lot more mileage out of bringing legal actions and being engaged in legal and policy matters that impact a broad group of people across the whole state than you would stepping in to take care of some solicitor's office that’s screwed up a bunch of ways.
” The office of the AG itself has immense power beyond South Carolina. It is tasked with prosecuting criminals and defending the integrity of state law. But it's also elected officials.
By nature, the essence of their work is inherently political, with authority that can serve as checks not only on state-level officials, but the federal government, as well. And under a 6-3 majority on the U.S.
Supreme Court, conservatives have been increasingly successful in moving the country to the right, making the ideological beliefs of those who hold the office of attorney general all the more crucial. It was Republican attorneys general who neutered most of Biden’s efforts to cancel student loan debt and an attorney general’s defense of a state law that ultimately led to the overturning of the national abortion rights protections previously enshrined under Roe v. Wade.
In several states, Republican attorneys general have taken legal actions to stall ballot measures on traditionally left-wing policies, like legalized marijuana and expanded ballot access. Altogether, it’s made the judiciary the latest political battleground. “I'm sure some are sincerely held policy disagreements that have legitimate legal questions, and some of it, I think, is just performative nonsense,” said Chris Kenney, a Columbia-based attorney who has previously sparred with Wilson on policy issues.
“But what’s really the problem is that we’ve got a United States Supreme Court that is basically begging for this kind of litigation.” S.C.
Attorney General Alan Wilson challenges new California tractor-trailer regulations Wilson has often been right there with them. In the opening weeks of the Biden administration, Wilson joined numerous Republican colleagues in lawsuits against the president’s LGBTQ policies , his moratorium on oil and natural gas leases and provisions in the American Rescue Plan barring states from using pandemic relief funds to finance tax cuts . It’s an extension of what Noelette calls the “nationalization” of state attorneys general, a trend that truly took root in state-level challenges to the Affordable Care Act under Obama in the mid-2010s.
In the current moment, though, it’s been defined by fealty to the figurehead of the entire conservative movement: Donald Trump, who Wilson endorsed early on in the 2024 race and is a member of his South Carolina Leadership Team. In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Wilson and the Republican Attorneys General Association, which he led at the time, filed multiple legal actions in battleground states around the country aimed at overturning the result in favor of Trump — a move he claims was to defend the status quo of state election laws. In 2024, Wilson also joined a cavalcade of Republican politicians who descended on New York City to accuse liberal prosecutors there of a “ sham trial ” intended to cripple a political rival during his so-called “hush money” trial.
Trump was found guilty. South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson speaks to reporters in a park across the street from former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York, Monday, May 20, 2024. “All prosecutors have a lot of power to deprive people of their liberty, of their property, and, in rare occasions, their lives and in their reputations,” Wilson told The Post and Courier during his phone call-interrupted interview.
“That's a power we have to be very meek with, we have to be very responsible. As the attorney general, my office has a lot of power in it. It's like a chainsaw.
You pick up a chainsaw, you respect it, because if you don't respect it, you can cut your leg off.” Wilson has been prone to the occasional political catch, including an infamous 2021 lunch at a Columbia barbecue joint with a teenaged Kyle Rittenhouse, who was found not guilty of charges associated with shooting three men during an August 2020 protest against police brutality in Wisconsin. But Wilson disagrees that his aims are strictly partisan.
He points to a pair of lawsuits he filed against the Trump administration around offshore drilling and plutonium waste, for example, and notes that he joined only on lawsuits challenging the election results he felt had legal merit — a distinction Noelette says sets Wilson apart from transparently partisan AGs like Texas’ Ken Paxton. “Sometimes, when you peel back the layers of what I'm doing, it's not as simple as a bumper sticker,” Wilson said. As an attorney general, what one believes is defined by what they defend and the arguments they make to mount that defense.
And in legal briefs and letters dating back more than a decade, Wilson’s worldview has been defined by the breathless defense of conservative voices and causes, even if there is a challenging logic underpinning those actions. Several beliefs are fundamental to how Wilson approaches the legal system. He believes in small government and opposes the concept of bureaucratic discretion, and he analogizes the growth of the federal government to that of the titular villain in the 1958 horror movie “The Blob,” growing larger and more aggressive with each lifeform it consumes.
SC Attorney General Alan Wilson joins Donald Trump entourage at hush money trial in NYC He does not believe the U.S. Constitution to be a “living” document, and that the letter of the law, rather than the righteousness of the outcome of those laws, is paramount.
In press interviews, Wilson has referenced a quote by late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, asserting Americans are governed by laws and not “by the intentions of legislators." “You don't read into it what you want based on the times," Wilson said. “It was written at a certain time, and then you read what it says.
I’m an originalist. I'm a textualist.” But in the actions he takes, there is a sense of political convenience in how he applies some of those beliefs.
He has been accused of purposefully ignoring the scientific consensus on climate change in defending fossil fuel companies but relied heavily on rapidly evolving scientific studies on the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines against specific variants of the virus during his fights against federal vaccine mandates during the pandemic. He has joined amicus briefs defending a Colorado cake baker who cited his religious beliefs in denying service to a same-sex couple, but several years later, led a multistate coalition challenging online events company Eventbrite for “deplatforming” an anti-transgender activist’s event in Spartanburg for violating its community guidelines. South Carolina attorney general Alan Wilson listens to a question from former S.
C. Chief Justice Jean Toal at a status conference to discuss an upcoming hearing on jury-tampering allegations against Colleton County Clerk of Court Rebecca “Becky” Hill at the Richland County Judicial Center on Monday, Jan. 16, 2024, in Columbia.
He’s also joined legal challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to draft new emissions standards while simultaneously relying on bureaucrat-crafted EPA standards to file lawsuits against companies like 3M and DuPont for allowing “forever chemicals” to seep into South Carolina water supplies. And while he points to several examples demonstrating how his personal views are not relevant to his interpretation of the law, some could make the case his personal beliefs have seeped into his litigation. During the Biden presidency, Wilson has mounted multiple challenges to changes to federal Title IX protections intended to protect transgender students from discrimination in public schools.
And like in his fights against federal protections against same-sex marriage, Wilson has argued that his qualms are not mired in policy or whether the LGBTQ community deserves equal rights, but how those aims were accomplished. At the time of the fight for same-sex marriage, Wilson argued it was a state’s right to decide whose marriage could and whose marriage could not be recognized by the state. In the current battle over transgender rights, Wilson’s disagreement is with the executive branch unilaterally redefining a long-standing definition of the word “sex” to include transgender persons.
In that sense, he said, it’s not a fight against transgender rights: it’s a fight against the federal government to legislate by administrative fiat. Editorial: Alan Wilson should stick to the law, stop trying to silence opinions he dislikes Polling of voters does show sexual identity is political. While American views on gender identity are complex, Republicans, according to polling by Pew , are largely skeptical of the validity of transgender people.
Wilson’s own personal beliefs on transgender people, and the LGBTQ community at large, are not hidden. He has called being transgender a mental disorder akin to bulimia or dysmorphia, and that he believes the recent mainstream medical recognition of the gender spectrum was based not in science, but in politics, and a campaign of indoctrination by a liberal society South Carolinians and red America don’t identify with. “There is an entitlement agenda on the left where they say everyone should be entitled to having their reality basically ratified by the rest of the world,” Wilson said in an August podcast appearance with members of the Palmetto Family Council, a conservative Christian advocacy group.
“They don’t want your acceptance, they want your endorsement.” It’s the point of why Wilson, now in his fourth term as South Carolina's AG, does what he does: He represents a conservative state and, at the end of the day, he’s beholden to fight for their interests even if protecting them means going to battle on a front hundreds of miles from South Carolina's boundary, like he did in early September with a self-publicized visit to the U.S.
border with Mexico. “It's impossible not to be political,” he said. “No matter what I do, I'm going to be criticized.
And I'm at peace with that. I just want to be able to sleep at night.” If he’s not doing his job, he said, the people of South Carolina can vote him out.
They haven’t..
