Legal Aid To Poor Is Under Fire -- Critics Complain Taxpayers Subsidize Advocates' Radical Political Agenda

Jul 9, 1995

Marilyn Milloy

Newsday

At least once a week, April Newbauer, a Legal Aid Society attorney, maneuvers through the congested corridors of a housing complex in New York City. She darts in and out of tiny rooms, feverishly tending the cases of clients about to be booted from the places they call home.

It's fast, intense, crazy work, she says, but not so bad compared with what's going on around her: Dozens of poor tenants, huddled in corners with their landlords' attorneys, trying as best they can to negotiate over impending evictions.

"So many people are just muddling through this process - no lawyers, no advice," an exasperated Newbauer says. "Then they look up and they've signed off on an agreement to pay $3,000 in two weeks, and they have no clue as to what they've done. No clue."

Advocates for the poor have long maintained there are not enough lawyers to sort through the maze of routine legal problems that can easily upend troubled lives.

But among conservatives in Congress and elsewhere, there's little sympathy for attorneys such as Newbauer who work in one of the hundreds of organizations across the country that are subsidized by the taxpayer-supported Legal Services Corp.

Critics like Rep. George Gekas, R-Pa., complain that these lawyers habitually file lawsuits over "the smallest, most meaningless" things: suing a farmer for failing to post regulations so migrant workers can see them, for instance. The poverty lawyers zealously take on government agencies, the critics say. They even try to impede welfare-overhaul efforts by challenging restrictions on benefits, Gekas says, echoing one of the agency's most vociferous opponents, Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas.

Radical political agenda seen

In essence, these critics say, Legal Services lawyers aren't simply plying their trade with the routine matters that beset the poor, like landlord disputes or fraud. Rather, they say, trotting out a charge that makes supporters boil, the attorneys are shameless activists promoting radical political agendas anathema to the original intent of the 21-year-old agency: to provide equal access to justice to people who simply can't afford it.

And so, along with scores of other federal programs deemed to be an unwarranted drain on the public coffers, Legal Services - which disburses grants to more than 300 local legal-aid organizations each year - is facing a deathwatch: It has been targeted by House budget leaders for elimination, to be phased out over the next three years.

Though not even its most ardent critics are convinced that it will come to that, Legal Services supporters say there's no way the agency will survive in its current form.

Congress proposes restrictions

Already a House appropriations subcommittee has recommended a plethora of far-reaching restrictions - including prohibitions against the filing of class-action suits - and a budget cut of more than a third, from Legal Services' current $415 million to $278 million.

Other lawmakers, meanwhile, are pushing measures that would prohibit the use of private donations - which account for 40 percent of the agency's budget - for purposes the agency's government funds are not allowed to subsidize, like assistance to undocumented immigrants.

"The threat to the corporation has never been as formidable as it is today," says Alexander Forger, Legal Services president. Yet the rap his organization is taking, he insists, maliciously distorts this reality: that the overwhelming number of 1.7 million cases handled nationally involve bread-and-butter matters like domestic violence, child support, evictions, consumer fraud and issues around AIDS. Rarely do these even go to trial, he says, and those that do more often than not end in victories for the poor. Even the much-ballyhooed class-action suits, he says, account for only one-tenth of a percent of the cases legal-aid attorneys pursue.

But Forger and others say these facts are minimized by people for whom the poor have never been a priority - and who abhor the fact that the federal government actually helps them take on big interests. "The only thing more unpopular than a poor person is a poor person with a lawyer," says Judith Goldiner, a Legal Aid Society attorney.

Indeed, says Clint Lyons of the Washington-based National Legal Aid and Defender Association, "When a poor person . . . can say to a housing authority or an agency of government, `You're not abiding by the law and I'm going to sue you,' well, that (angers) some very powerful interests. After all, you're talking about a poor person who's lazy and should be working anyway . . . Unfortunately, that's the stereotype."

Critics furiously deny contempt for the indigent, but their anger over what the agency is allowed to do has fueled the assault against Legal Services. Created by Congress in 1974 out of concern that too few law firms were willing to work free on behalf of poor clients, the agency has had a hand in court decisions dealing with issues as far-reaching as the use of dangerous pesticides by farmers and housing discrimination by government agencies.

But critics like Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus say the reach goes too far - and for people who, he hints, may not even deserve the benefits. He recently suggested to a congressional committee that he was galled by efforts of Legal Services attorneys to "transfer wealth from productive, law-abiding citizens to . . . persons who reject work as their duty and regard welfare as their right."

Farmers, meanwhile, assert that they've lost tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend against nitpicky suits brought on behalf of migrant workers. Housing authority officials say Legal Services lawyers routinely impede efforts to rid projects of drug dealers.

Some want to terminate program

Some key Republicans argue that all this makes trying to fix the agency hopeless. Just last week, Rep. Robert Dornan, R-Calif., and 26 other Republicans fumed in a letter to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., that they were fed up with the "reckless and irresponsible" agency and were not about to sign off on an overhaul. "We intend to see that it is eliminated," they declared.

Yet Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., who is advocating an array of restrictions for the agency, says many of the complaints could be satisfied if the attorneys would just stick to "garden variety" types of cases, like landlord disputes. "There's nothing nefarious about any of this," he insists.

But supporters say this kind of selective access to justice is unfair, vague and, most likely, unworkable.

"They keep saying we're too controversial . . . But the `routine' cases are really hard to define," says Forger. "If somebody is not executing the minimum wage, if they are wrongfully withholding food stamps, if migrant laborers are being housed in improper dwellings . . . all this necessarily creates some element of controversy" when challenged.

"They may say we're radical," says the Legal Aid Society's Scott Rosenberg. "But the reality is that we are among the most conservative people in America because we simply say, `Follow the law.' "

--------------------------------- FACTS ON THE LEGAL SERVICES CORP. ---------------------------------

Congress has passed a $1.6 trillion budget blueprint for 1996, the first step in Republican plans to balance spending by the year 2002. To help do that, Republicans in the House and the Senate propose cutting as many as 400 federal agencies and programs; the Legal Services Corp. is one of them.

Program: Legal Services Corp.

Age/History: Created by Congress in 1974.

Budget: $415 million in 1994.

Impact: Provides 4,000 lawyers nationwide and is said to benefit 5 million poor people.

Mission: To give indigent people access to the legal system.

Supporters: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Emergency Management Agency, White House.

Groups Against: American Conservative Union, American Farm Bureau Federation, Christian Coalition.

Prospects: Fairly good prospects for survival, but the terms of its existence likely will be dramatically different; lots of restrictions on what attorneys can do are expected, and far less money.