Op-Ed: Assault on Legal Aid Will Continue as Long as Funding remains tied to Econonmy, Politics
Legal Services E-lert
Bibliographic Info:
Author: Lonnie Powers
Source: Non Profit Quarterly, “Tied to the Railroad Track Once Again: The Perils of Legal Aid Funding”
Date: February 23, 2011
Lonnie Powers, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation, writes in a feature for the Non Profit Quarterly:
“Legal aid for low income people is under attack – again. The House of Representatives has proposed cutting $70 million from the current fiscal year’s funding for the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), an organization that funds local agencies that provide legal services for low-income individuals. This would be a 17 percent decrease in the current appropriation of $420 million and it would all come from local program grants. In a small bit of good news, the House, on a strong bipartisan vote, rejected an attempt to eliminate all funding for LSC . . .
Legal aid funding is suffering now in large part because its revenue is tied to the economic cycle. The amount of IOLTA income, for example, depends on the interest rates paid on and the amounts of money in the lawyer trust accounts. Since 2008 the benchmark interest rates on IOLTA accounts have fallen from 5.25 percent to just above 0 percent and the declining economy has greatly reduced the balances in IOLTA accounts. . . .
Even this understates the need. Numerous studies within individual states and nationally over the last 30 years have demonstrated that over half of the low income people who have a legal problem either do not recognize that it is a legal problem or do not know they can do anything about it. Many of those who do recognize that they have a legal problem do not know that they are eligible or how to get access to civil legal aid. The studies have consistently found that only about 15 percent of the legal needs of low-income people are met even in the best of times. . . .
So why then in the face of this ever-growing need for assistance would there be a concerted effort to cut funding? Primarily because legal aid works. Ronald Reagan hated legal aid because programs successfully represented the interests of low income people against major agricultural corporations in California and successfully opposed some of his welfare policies. One of his aides in the Governor’s office was quoted as saying, ‘Legal aid gives poor people the power of a major corporation and that’s wrong.’ As president, he attempted to end all funding. Newt Gingrich and the ‘Contract on America’ folks opposed legal aid in 1996 for similar reasons. Their opposition is grounded in a belief that low-income people do not deserve access to attorneys or in any event they do not deserve the same access as wealthy people. In part that belief reflects a distrust of the judicial system’s role in redressing imbalances of power. In part it is based on the myth that legal aid lawyers are only interested in using the law for ‘social engineering.’ This begs the question of why it is appropriate for lawyers who work for wealthy clients to do everything within their power to influence the nature of state and national legislation and regulations to benefit their clients when the same efforts by legal aid lawyers for poor people are seen as somehow illegitimate. Legal aid is confronting – as it has throughout its existence – the consequences of depending on funding tied to the economic cycle and ideological attacks on its very existence. The loss of funding, whatever the reason, has real consequences.”