Legal disservice
Silver, Isidore
The budget LEGAL DISSERVICE ANOTHER HOLE IN THE 'SAFETY NET'. THE Reagan budget axe, designed to chop off some social service limbs elsewhere, proposes to completely decapitate the Legal Services...
...Politics is, of course, filled with ironies...
...The stark simple fact is that there are twenty million or more poor people in this country and many more than that who are marginally above the poverty line...
...About thirty percent of the matters handled by the six thousand attorneys involved in these programs present mundane family dispute problems...
...it presupposes that one has climbed a ladder or used some other means to perch above a dangerous area...
...Of course, the president's desire to "get government off our backs" does not really mean "off all our backs," just the backs of those with expensive, well-tailored jackets...
...Reagan professes to be anti-government and believes that it over-regulates and is insensitive to the needs of those regulated...
...The abolition of federally funded legal services would not only be a hole in the safety net...
...it would simply take away a ladder-albeit not an income maintenance one-from even those groups allegedly "deserving" by the administration's rather arbitrary standards...
...Insofar as Legal Services pursues class actions against government to prevent arbitrary or discriminatory (and of course illegal or unconstitutional) treatment of the poor by the bureaucracies that govern their lives, it would seem to fulfill this apparent Reaganite goal...
...indeed, after his experience with one such agency, California Rural Legal Assistance, during his gubernatorial years, it is safe to say that he detests the idea that tax monies can be used to finance litigation against government agencies...
...Incidentally, the elderly-allegedly to be protected from the severities of the axe-will also suffer with the'' less deserving,'' since almost two hundred thousand of them used the Legal Services Corporation last year...
...The Legal Services Corporation cannot be accused of contributing to whatever crime problem the poor present, since it does not deal with criminal matters...
...By all accounts, the program is successful and low cost, factors which, in the eyes of the administration, may militate as much against it as in its favor...
...The reasons, provable and surmisable, for this Draconian proposal tell us much about the "non-political" nature of the administration's fiscal decisions and should serve to remind us of a few political truths as well...
...It does provide vital (and irreplaceable) funding for local agencies handling civil matters: one-third of the budget of New York City's Legal Aid Society's civil division comes from the Corporation ($ 1.4 million), and, in New York State, last year, the Corporation spent $22 million so that a hundred thousand civil matters could be handled...
...First, it is clear that Ronald Reagan simply does not like publicly financed legal services...
...York City...
...rather, ninety-five percent of its monies finance some three hundred programs with over one thousand offices throughout the country...
...Few of these matters, over a million in number, end up in litigation, and very few in litigation against government agencies...
...Reagan, like most politicians, has a long memory, and hatred is as much a political motivator as are other, disinterested motives...
...ISIDORE SILVER (Isidore Silver teaches constitutional law and history at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City...
...It is doubtful that significant monies to support a vital, necessary, and highly symbolic program of assuring justice to the poor (or to at least the five percent of the poor who even seek legal aid) will receive a high priority in any bloc grant distributions, at least in many states (many of the poor don't vote...
...almost twenty percent involve housing complaints, usually, of course, against landlords...
...other Reagan proposals will doubtlessly swell the figures...
...The ladder of legal representation is critical in our society, for the machinery surrounding the poor's simplest needs is cumbersome and awesome, especially to those unskilled, uneducated, and untrained in the arts of bureaucracy manipulation...
...Memory can be tricky...
...If anything cannot be, should not be, and need not be rationed, it is Justice...
...The Constitution promises to "insure justice...
...Contrary to Reagan's memory and the harsh rhetoric of some defenders of his proposal, Legal Services these days differs drastically from its late-1960s counterpart...
...THE Reagan budget axe, designed to chop off some social service limbs elsewhere, proposes to completely decapitate the Legal Services Corporation, a quasi-governmental body that spends approximately $320 million per year to fund legal services for the poor...
...but now even rudimentary legal justice for the poor, itself a foundation of whatever social stability we have, is at risk...
...Also, while it must be acknowledged that there are decent landlords, merchants, and bankers, the temptation to insure that "The Poor Pay More" (one of those sixties phrases that now seems forgotten) still lingers and can only be tamed by the threat (if rarely the reality) of litigation...
...The Corporation does not litigate...
...The image of the "safety net" is an intriguing one...
...Destroying Legal Services-actually an old Reagan sore point, shared by Richard M. Nixon-is clearly a political, not financial, decision, since there is no evidence that the "unworthy" or the "unneedy" are systematically cheating their way into the system...
...almost twenty percent of the matters consist of income maintenance claims, and.about fifteen percent consumer and finance problems...
...and the evisceration of Legal Services would be a good-though especially nasty-example...
Vol. 108 • May 1981 • No. 9
