The Great Kentucky Office Grab

By BERRY CRAIG

AFT Local 1360

Kentucky’s proto-Trump is at it again.

Matt Bevin wants some of Andy Beshear’s Capitol office space, most likely because the outgoing attorney general wants all of the governor’s office space come Nov. 5.

“Finance and Administration Secretary William M. Landrum III informed Holly McCoy-Johnson, Beshear’s administrative services director, in a June 26 letter that the administration will move an unnamed tenant into two first-floor rooms on the front side of the Capitol now occupied by Beshear employees near his office and convert two rooms in the Capitol basement for use by the attorney general’s office,” the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.

The paper also said that administration lawyers need the space. Translation from the gov: Hey, Andy, this is you own fault. If you’d stop filing these nasty lawsuits against me, my legal eagles wouldn’t need these conveniently located rooms.

Bevin’s office caper is more proof—as it if were needed—that no behavior is too childish for him. Like Trump‘s, Bevin’s sophomoric spite knows no bounds.

The governor and the president are brothers in brattiness.

”These are the types of petty actions we have come to expect, but we are not going to let anything prevent us from fighting for Kentucky families,” Beshear spokeswoman Crystal Staley told the H-L.

AG Beshear has been a burr under Bevin’s blanket for going on four years. In other words, Beshear has been doing his job taking Bevin to court to rein in the gov’s unconstitutional excesses.

Bevin is “clearly running scared,” Beshear said in a recent fund-raising email for the faithful. That‘s a pretty stock charge politicians make against each other. 

But this Bevin silliness over AG office space hints that Beshear might be right.  

Bevin has made the GOP a house divided. He had a way tougher time in the primary than anybody expected. Who could blame him if he‘s  scared that Election Day could be a close encounter of the worst kind?

On the other hand, petulance and peevishness have marked the Bevin (and Trump) administrations from the get-go.

So nobody who’s paid even half attention to Bevin’s nonstop mendacity, meanness and ad hominem attacks on his opponents should be be surprised at this latest example of puerile pique from the governor.

But you can bet he of the Tang-hued hair would love the Great Kentucky Office Grab of ‘19.