Like many others in and out of Congress, Senator Warren “Gramm-Rudman” is loudly calling for budget cutting, but quietly calling for increasing the tax funds flowing to his favorite government projects. His pet spending program is the highly controversial Legal Services Corporation (LSC). LSC was started during the 1960s to provide free legal services to the poor who could not afford to hire a lawyer to protect themselves against the trials and tribulations of our modern society which seem to require some legal knowledge and assistance.
LSC, however, soon burgeoned into a refuge for young lawyers who seek social change through class-action litigation, legislative lobbying, and political activism. Anyone has a right to engage in those activities, but they should not have the privilege of taxpayer funding for their special-interest agenda.
At the heart of this tax-funded political activity are the LSC “support centers,” often called “left-wing think tanks,” where salaries can go as high as $74,000. These centers are more interested in changing the law than helping indigent persons who need legal aid.
The LSC-funded Western Center on Law and Poverty, for example, waged a campaign against Proposition 9, a California tax-cutting proposition. Why should the taxpayers finance the politics of those who pretend to represent the poor in resisting tax cuts, when others just as sincerely believe that tax cuts help the poor by spurring the economy and creating jobs?
Under the Reagan Administration, the Legal Services Corporation tried to develop a law school clinic program in which law students could volunteer their time to assist needy clients in exchange for credit and experience. This would be a cost-efficient program to encourage private-sector initiatives and volunteerism among lawyers. Actually, there wouldn’t be any need for the government to finance free legal services if all lawyers would volunteer an average of 20 hours per year in pro bono work. Such a program of volunteerism, however, would cut into the $300 million LSC tax-funded bureaucracy of 1,310 full-time offices staffed by 6,450 lawyers and paralegals.
LSC-funded lawyers have actively promoted abortion and abortion funding. LSC-funded lawyers have been involved in nearly all the abortion cases that have reached the U.S. Supreme Court since Roe v. Wade in 1973, including the cases that attempted to get the Court to declare unconstitutional the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits abortion funding. LSC-funded lawyers filed briefs in support of a Seattle abortion clinic that sought an injunction against picketing. LSC-funded lawyers represented Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California against an attorney general’s ruling that would have required physicians to report on the sexual activity of teenagers under age 14.
LSC-funded lawyers argued that teenage girls have a constitutional right to an abortion without the knowledge or consent of their parents. LSC-funded lawyers helped to overturn a California initiative that would have stopped state funding of abortions, and they succeeded with the help of State Supreme Court Judge Rose Bird.
LSC-funded lawyers brought the successful case that persuaded the Federal courts to overturn the U.S. Civil Service Commission’s policy of excluding active homosexuals from government employment. LSC-funded lawyers brought suits to try to get most of New York State turned over to the Indians, to get the government to pay for transsexual operations, to punish apple growers for not hiring every single person who claimed to have answered an ad for pickers, and to force unemployment compensation payments to strikers even though state law forbade it.
Don’t get the idea that these cases are all that LSC lawyers do. So many grants are given out for so many purposes that it is hard to categorize the subjects. In 1981, LSC awarded a $10,000 contract to the Many Races Cultural Foundation in New York to provide technical assistance. The only services provided were “congregational singing with tenants about their rights, health, interest and needs” and “Music and Cultural Seminars on how to use music to set and enforce Public Policy.”
The Legal Services Corporation financed a video training program with training manuals to train LSC lawyers in how to use litigation for harassment purposes. These training programs taught LSC lawyers how “to cause pressure on [a corporation’s] in-house counsel” by bringing “actions in out-of-the-way places.”
According to the General Accounting Office, a principal LSC priority has been building “a local base of support to insure continued federal funding” of the Legal Services Corporation and to oppose any restrictions on its operations. That’s how bureaucracies perpetuate themselves; those who believe there is a better way to provide legal services for the poor don’t enjoy the luxury of having the taxpayers foot their lobbying and litigation expenses.
