When Congressman Tom Davis (R-Va.) was asked by the Weekly Standard about the scandal detailed on page one, he defended LSC corruption by asserting, “Lawyers always misrepresent their caseload to clients.”
Davis went on to joke about a lawyer who dies and and meets St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. The lawyer asks,”I am 38, what am I doing here?” St. Peter responds, “We bring lawyers here based on the number of hours they’ve billed.”
Joke On Taxpayers
Very funny, except this time the joke is on the taxpayer. On
August 4, Davis voted to increase LSC funding, the only member of the GOP
leadership to do so. Believe it or not, Davis is the man responsible for
keeping Republican control of Congress. He is Chairman of the National
Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC),
The August 3 Washington Post contained an article entitled, “GOP’s Ax No Match for Pork Barrel.” It detailed how Republicans have fallen short of their rhetoric about cutting government spending. The article cited a Cato Institute study which showed that the $75.3 billion in programs targeted for extinction in the 1995 “Contract With America” are now funded to the tune of $77 billion.
If there are any successes for the GOP majority, LSC would have to be considered one of them. Its budget has been reduced about a third since the Republicans took control, but the obvious question remains why such a worthless agency is still funded at all. Perhaps the answer can be found in the cynicism of Tom Davis.
Corruption Under Davis’ Nose
Davis would seem to have every reason not only to vote against LSC,
but to lead the charge to get rid of it. He represents Northern Virginia,
home of Northern Virginia Legal Services (NVLS), one of the six LSC grantees
audited in 1998. The audit revealed a host of irregularities and
showed that NVLS padded its caseload by a factor of two or three.
NVLS is no stranger to bad publicity. In 1997, a liberal Democrat state judge named Ian O’Flaherty called for NVLS to lose its county funding. He wrote, “I would expect to see the poor’s champion here fighting for the poor’s rights continuously, and with gusto. Yet, I almost never see legal aid. I am hard-pressed to remember more than a handful of times...”
Last month, NLPC filed a formal complaint against NVLS, alleging that it is representing a client who is not only a Maryland resident, but who owns a hundred-acre horse farm and separate investment properties.
Divided Leadership
For the August 4 House vote, Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.) and
his staff put on an energetic campaign to switch Republican votes in the
wake of the scandal. Some progress was made compared to 1998. The effort
also resulted in LSC supporters scaling back their amendment which passed.
Instead of going for $300 million, the current level of LSC funding, they
went for $250 million.
Unfortunately, Davis undercut the anti-LSC efforts and voted with the Democrats. Armey’s struggle was certainly uphill, but with only a four-vote majority, Republican initiatives face certain death if the leadership is divided.
The biggest concern that NLPC supporters who call and write me seem to have is the lack of real leadership in Washington. They can’t understand why GOP leaders are unwilling to confront a corrupt and ideologically exhausted liberal machine.
Of course, NLPC is not a partisan organization. We hit hypocrites in both parties. But it doesn’t take a partisan to recognize that there is a relationship between the level of corruption and lack of competition between the parties. When leaders of both parties go to bat for a scandal-ridden program, the result is no accountability.
Knock-knock
As the Post pointed out, “The age-old dilemma for budget-cutters is
that special interests always go to the mat for the programs that affect
them; there are few votes or campaign contributions to be won by attacking
any particular program.” On this issue, the special interests are legal
services grantees themselves, who often illegally lobby, and the powerhouse
American Bar Association (ABA).
The reason the ABA likes LSC so much is that it frees lawyers from their traditional obligation to provide legal aid to the poor on a volunteer basis. In a sense, LSC functions as welfare for affluent lawyers.
Tom Davis currently is making the rounds to potential GOP donors with a slickly-produced slide show on how the GOP will hold its majority in 2000. It stresses how the GOP seeks to stop needless lawsuits by lawyers. I wonder if he has a different slide show when the ABA lobbyists come knocking.
EW