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Given that a majority of West Virginians oppose the state’s near-total ban on abortion, extending the designation “pro-life� to include opposition to euthanasia seems politically expedient.

(Ironically, the joint resolution — HJR 28 — was amended by the perpetually dislikable Sen. Eric Tarr, R-Putnam, to clarify that nothing in the proposed amendment precludes physicians from participating in executions — presumably through lethal injection — should capital punishment be legalized in West Virginia. In other words, Republicans are “pro-life,� except when it comes to guns and the death penalty.)

As noted before, the phrase “pro-life� has become so inextricably linked in the public’s mind with outright bans on abortion that the national Republican Party has been considering alternative phrases, at one point weighing the term “pro-child,� until even they realized they couldn’t make that claim with a straight face.

Currently, Donald Trump finds himself in a Catch-22 on abortion, catching flak from his MAGA base for opposing a national abortion ban, and from most everyone else for supporting the ability of states to ban abortion as a purported “state’s rights� issue.

Abortion will once again be the albatross around the GOP’s neck come Roe-vember, and the legislative supermajority’s attempt to make pro-life more palatable to voters by making it apply from (pre-)cradle to (pre-)grave, while encouraging the anti-abortion rights base to turn out and vote seems a rational strategy, even if the anti-euthanasia referendum is completely superfluous under current law.

Meanwhile, the second ballot referendum would constitutionally prohibit persons who are not U.S. citizens from voting in state elections (HJR 21). Again, that is already illegal under state law, but the referendum was intended to stoke the MAGA anti-immigrant frenzy with the false narrative that non-citizens are (or could be) voting in record numbers.

Alas, HJR 21 died at midnight on March 9 as Delegate Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, did a mini-filibuster to run out the clock on the regular session, preventing the House from taking a final passage vote on the resolution.

(That House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, recognized Pushkin, a vocal opponent of the measure, in the waning moments of the session suggests he wasn’t too keen on the resolution, either.)

Word is that, with the resolution’s demise, GOP operative Greg Thomas lost a big contract for an advertising campaign to promote passage of the referendum. (As it was, ads encouraging people to urge their legislators to support HJR 21 ran for more than a week after the session ended.)

That, folks, is what you call a win-win situation. There is a push to get Gov. Jim Justice to include the resolution on a May special session call, but given that the agenda is already becoming overstuffed, and given leadership’s propensity to eschew lengthy, extended special sessions, one can hope it won’t make the cut.

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On Wednesday, three weeks after Justice first claimed he knew nothing about state Tax Division liens against his Greenbrier resort for failing to remit $3.5 million of sales taxes to the state, MetroNews reporter Brad McElhinny finally asked a follow-up at Justice’s weekly virtual briefing, and, remarkably, Justice said he still hasn’t looked into the matter.

Which means he’s either lying or playing dumb.

Considering that The Greenbrier is Justice’s best known and most prestigious holding, the unremitted sales taxes, along with $2.5 million in delinquent property taxes could become a big thorn in Justice’s U.S. Senate campaign. Seemingly, the most reasonable course of action to avoid making it so would be to promptly pay those debts.

Considering that the liens are now more than two months old, and given Justice’s myriad other loan defaults and unpaid fines and judgments — including a new court order directing Justice to pay a total of $8.5 million in liens against eight other Justice companies — the logical conclusion is that he simply doesn’t have the money to make the payments.

We also have no reason to believe the liens for five months of unremitted sales taxes represent an isolated incident, or that The Greenbrier resumed remitting sales taxes to the state in December. Since liens are not filed in real time, there’s no reason to think that another batch of liens are not forthcoming.

If Plan A would have been to promptly pay the debts and resolve the matter, it appears Justice has opted for Plan B, playing dumb, and claiming he knows nothing, nothing about it.

(Justice has gone that route before as governor, claiming to have no knowledge of critical state issues such as inhumane conditions in state Correctional facilities.)

Justice cavalierly declared he wasn’t concerned about the unpaid taxes, claiming that, “At the end of the day, these things always get paid, don’t they?� as if he and his family are allowed to pay their taxes if and whenever they feel like it — a privilege not extended to other West Virginia taxpayers.

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Finally, as of my early Friday afternoon deadline for this column, I hadn’t received responses to my FOIA requests for information on Justice’s surprise announcement that he is having murals installed in the Capitol rotunda, with the eight murals to be installed and unveiled over a timeline that, strictly coincidentally, will coincide with the primary and general election campaigns.

However, I did some sleuthing around on the Auditor’s Office Vista search engine (I have to say in a state government that has become increasingly less and less transparent, Auditor JB McCuskey has been a shining beacon for open government), and I came up with some invoices for John Canning and Co., a historic preservation and restoration company located in Cheshire, Conn.

According to the invoices, the Department of Arts, Culture, and History has paid a total of $234,448 to date to Canning and Co. on what is a $485,000 contract to design, produce, and install the eight murals.

I couldn’t find anything showing that the contract, which was signed back in June 2022, had been put out to bid, but that could be a factor of my records-searching skills getting rusty now that I’m some 28 months removed from doing daily reporting.

For those concerned that the combination of secrecy surrounding the project and Justice’s general lack of couth could result in murals depicting Babydog at the State of the State, or Trump putting all the miners back to work, Canning and Co. looks to be the real deal, with a resume that includes projects at the White House, the U.S. Treasury Building, the National Building Museum, and state capitols in Connecticut, Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, among many others.

(The company also oversaw restoration of the Fulton County, Georgia, Common Pleas Courtroom, which I believe is where Larry David was put on trial for violating Georgia’s voter suppression law in the series finale of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.�)

The Scope of Service submitted by Canning and Co. noted that the process of designing the murals would begin by researching West Virginia history, reviewing architect Cass Gilbert’s directives for the never-installed murals, and studying similar murals in other Beaux-Arts buildings, and from there would proceed to providing preliminary sketches for state officials to review.

While there are many questions remaining to be answered, including the funding source for the $485,000 contract, whether the project was approved by the Capitol Building Commission, and who exactly had input on approving the mural designs, the invoices provide some comfort that Big Jim’s secret mural announcement won’t be a complete fiasco.