The headlines write themselves. The Speaker of the West Virginia House of Delegates steers landmark data center deregulation through the legislature, votes with the majority to defeat amendments that would have returned local control to communities, and then within days of the gavel falling, signs on to represent data center developers fighting citizen groups in court. Two cases. Two counties. One Speaker.
If you are waiting for the WV WASP to join the pile-on, keep waiting.
Not because the optics are fine. They are not fine. Not because Roger Hanshaw’s critics are wrong to be uncomfortable. Some of their discomfort is legitimate. But the coverage of this story has been so focused on one man that it has completely missed the underlying problem.
Let’s start with the argument being made against Hanshaw, because it deserves a fair hearing before it gets dismantled.
The claim, essentially, is this: Hanshaw built the legal architecture protecting the data center industry, and he is now cashing in by representing that same industry in court. He used his position to benefit his future clients. He has a conflict of interest.
Here is the problem with that argument. It proves too much.
West Virginia has a citizen legislature. That means we ask doctors, teachers, lawyers, coal miners, farmers, and businesspeople to leave their professions for 60 days a year, go to Charleston, vote on laws that govern the state, and then go home. They do not stop being doctors, teachers, lawyers, miners, farmers, or businesspeople when they walk out of the Capitol. They go back to their lives. They go back to their clients.
So when we say that a lawyer-legislator should not be able to represent clients in an industry affected by legislation he voted on, we are saying something with consequences we are not prepared to apply consistently. Should the physician-delegate who voted on the hospital licensing bill be barred from practicing at a hospital regulated by that bill? Should the teacher-delegate who championed the education funding formula be prohibited from working in the school system that benefits from it? Should the coal operator who sits in the House and votes on mining regulations face an ethics complaint every time he runs a mining operation?
Nobody is making those arguments. The outrage being directed at Hanshaw rests on a standard that applies to him alone because he is visible, powerful, and easy to dislike. That is not a principle. It is merely a grievance.
Now, there is a harder version of the Hanshaw criticism that deserves more serious treatment. The Mason County case stands apart from Tucker County in one important way. Hanshaw filed his notice of appearance in the Mason County appeal on February 12 of this year. One week later, with that representation already active, the House passed the data center rules bundle. He voted on legislation directly relevant to data center development while already on retainer for a data center developer. He did not request a Rule 49 ruling, which is the House’s own process for a member to disclose a potential conflict before voting.
That is the sharper edge of this story and it deserves some scrutiny. But even there, Rule 49 would have almost certainly allowed him to vote anyway. Under the House’s own rules, a member is directed to vote if the presiding officer determines the member is affected only as part of a class of five or more similarly situated entities. Under the rules the legislature wrote for itself, Hanshaw was in the clear. The Speaker, it bears noting, is the presiding officer who rules on Rule 49 requests from other members. He is, in effect, his own referee.
Which brings us to what this story is actually about.
The real problem hiding inside the Hanshaw coverage is not his client list. It is the set of rules West Virginia has written to make these situations not just possible but legal, comfortable, and essentially unreviewable.
Start with financial disclosure. Under West Virginia law, W. Va. Code 6B-2-7, public officials including legislators must disclose their employer and identify income sources by category. But the statute explicitly carves attorneys out from disclosing their individual clients. Hanshaw listed Bowles Rice on his disclosure form. He was legally required to list nothing more. The public, the press, and fellow legislators had no way of knowing from any official document that he was representing Fundamental Data or any other data center interest. That information came out through court filings, not through any disclosure system designed to surface it.
That is a loophole in the disclosure law large enough to steer a data center through.
Then there is the 60-day election blackout. W. Va. Code 6B-2-3a(c)(1) prohibits the Ethics Commission from accepting complaints against a candidate during the 60 days before an election. West Virginia’s primary is May 13. The blackout started March 13. The Tucker County filing was March 16. By the time Country Roads News broke the story, the window for a formal complaint on the Tucker County case had already closed. Anyone wanting accountability through the Ethics Commission is now waiting until after the primary, at minimum, and the five-year statute of limitations means this will not age off the books. But the immediate electoral accountability the system is supposed to provide has been neutralized by the calendar.
Here is what the WV WASP believes should change, and we believe it should apply to every legislator regardless of party, industry, or visibility.
Lawyers serving in the legislature should be required to disclose, by category, the industries in which their active clients operate, without naming the clients themselves. The attorney-client privilege protects individual client identities. It does not and should not protect the public from knowing that their Speaker is generating income from the data center sector while crafting data center law. A simple industry-category disclosure resolves both concerns.
The class-of-five loophole in Rule 49 needs examination. When a legislator has an active, paid client relationship in an industry, voting on legislation that directly benefits that industry is a different thing than a doctor voting on general healthcare funding. One is professional adjacency. The other is active financial entanglement. The House should consider a rule requiring disclosure and abstention when an active client relationship exists in the specific industry under consideration, regardless of the number of entities affected.
And the 60-day election blackout, while designed to protect candidates from politically motivated complaints, functions as a shield against legitimate accountability during the one period when voters could actually act on information. The legislature should examine whether that window needs narrowing, or whether an expedited review process for complaints filed in the 90-day period before the blackout could serve both interests.
Roger Hanshaw played by the rules. But the rules are the problem. This story belongs to every lawmaker in West Virginia, not just the ones who are currently convenient to attack.
The WV WASP is a political news, humor, and commentary outlet. Visit is at Wvwasp.com and follow us on X @wvwasp 🐝