If Dave Stockman is looking for more places to cut the federal budget, one of the best places to start would be the Legal Services Corporation. Most Americans have never even heard of it, but they are paying dearly for it.
The Legal Services Corporation was sold to the American people as a welfare program essential to help the poor pay for legal services they desperately need but cannot afford. It has turned into a monster which is fomenting radical and revolutionary programs at the taxpayers’ expense.
Last year, it funnelled more than $300,000,000 in taxes to pay the bills for an elite corps of several thousand government-funded lawyers and several thousand more of their full-time assistants. Since they are not federal employees, they are not covered by civil service restrictions or Hatch Act prohibitions on political activity.
These liberal activist lawyers are employed by more than 315 private corporations, which include on their boards of directors many leaders in liberal organizations such as Common Cause, the AFL-CIO, the National Organization for Women, Welfare Rights, “Gay” Rights, and the National Lawyers Guild. Many activists financed by the Legal Services Corporation are committed to the goal of implementing a radical social and political agenda.
Here are some of the items on the economic action agenda of the “legal services” lawyers funded directly or indirectly by your tax dollars: the defeat of ballot initia- tives to reduce taxes and spending, such as Proposition 9 in California; expansion of the food stamp program to college students from affluent families and to those who re- fuse to take jobs; and action to block businesses from moving to other areas where they can operate more profitably.
Here are some of the items on the “let’s help foreigners soak Americans” agenda of the “legal services” lawyers funded by your tax dollars: class-action suits demanding damages because foreign refugees arriving in the United States had to wait one month before being added to our welfare rolls (even though they received food stamps and emergency aid immediately); and representation of radical Iranian student protesters.
Here are some of the items on the social agenda of the “legal services” lawyers spending your tax dollars: lawsuits by children to challenge the authority of their parents on matters such as access to personal mail and choice of schools; lawsuits pro- moting racial quotas in education and employment; challenges to the authority of local police officials; and opposition to capital punishment for premeditated murder.
And there is much, much more on an imaginative variety of radical programs: imposition of land use controls in order to prevent development of our natural resources; lawsuits to force the U.S. government to surrender American territory to radical Indian activists; and organization of unions of prison convicts who want social Security benefits, political rights, and color television.
The Legal Services Corporation funds a nationwide network of liberal activists who know how to use your money to promote their agenda through all three branches of the federal government. They lobby for new laws and administrative rulings to further their goals. When they cannot get the legislature to pass their proposals, the “legal services” lawyers litigate to get liberal judges to impose new court-made laws.
The “Tegal services” activists are specialists in “grantsmanship,” the science of applying for and receiving federal grants and contracts. They always operate on our tax dollars.
The Legal Services Corporation is clearly not a legitimate welfare program of “lawyers for the poor.” LSC is a racket whereby leftwing and radical activists promote their radical goals through the devious use of tax funds.
President Reagan’s mandate from the November election is not merely to cut down federal spending. He has a mandate to cut out the programs in which the federal government shouldn’t be involved at all. The Legal Services Corporation is an excellent target for his scalpel.
