Can the A.B.A. declare independence?

DURING a heated debate at the American Bar Association's annual meeting in Chicago last August, a pro-choice attorney said something quite remarkable in her plea for a neutral stand on abortion. "The ABA should not become just another political lobby-God knows the American public has enough of them already," Nancy Iredale told the House of Delegates, the body that dictates official policy for the ABA's 360,000 members.

Over the past 25 years the ABA has taken liberal and left-wing stands on a host of issues, especially privacy rights, civil rights, and criminal procedures-all issues that have been the focus of Supreme Court deliberations. In addition, through its large Washington staff, the ABA has lobbied Congress and the Executive Branch on behalf of these positions. In short, the ABA has for quite some time been precisely just another political lobby." The real news is that the association's members are beginning to wake up to that reality and its consequences.

The last (for now, anyway) hurrah of the hard-line politicizers was at the ABA convention in Los Angeles in February 1990, where delegates voted overwhelmingly in favor of a pro-abortion resolution. However, following that vote, more than 1,500 members resigned from the ABA for religious reasons, prompting others to reconsider. The first tangible sign of their second thoughts was the outcome of the abortion vote at the Chicago meeting last August. After a lengthy debate, the neutrality forces won a surprise victory by a 200 to 188 margin from a House of Delegates whose personal views were overwhelmingly pro choice. Soon afterward, the ABA issued a rating of Well Qualified for Supreme Court nominee David Souter, presumed by many to be anti-abortion.

Some members seem determined to carry the neutrality campaign beyond the abortion issue: to re-establish the political independence of the ABA in general, and to reorient it toward its traditional trade-organization mission. Miss Iredale spelled that position out clearly last summer, declaring the ABA to be "an organization dedicated to the administration of justice, to providing legal services, to increasing public awareness about law, and most of all, to supporting us, the individual lawyers, as we carry out our daily practice."

The Left is furious that its control is slipping. Last summer Alexander Forger called the neutrality resolution an evisceration of the association, which will no longer be able to pursue the purpose of its being." Forger accused the neutrality forces of representing an outside force that was trying to take over the ABA. No doubt he was referring to the warning issued by Attorney General Richard Thomburgh that if the ABA did not abandon its pro-abortion stand, then the Justice Department would cease having the ABA review candidates for judicial appointments. Anthony Palermo, who headed up the Pro-Bar Committee for Abortion Neutrality, was outraged at Forger's charge of outside interference. "This is a grass-roots movement deeply offended by the process and outcome in Los Angeles," he said.

Events at the meeting in Seattle this February show the progress of this undeclared and unheralded war for political independence. The pro-abortion forces were counting on an easy victory for a proposal from the Vermont Bar that would have had the ABA oppose criminal penalties for women who have illegal abortions and for doctors who perform them. Before last year the ABA had passed dozens of boilerplate proposals which fell just short of declaring a constitutional right to abortion. This time, however, the House of Delegates voted to defer consideration until this summer at the annual convention in Atlanta-a setback for the pro-abortion forces, who wanted a minor victory to build on in Atlanta.

Playing for the Future

OR BOTH SIDES, the stakes are high. If the neutrality forces win a second major vote on abortion, it could begin a depoliticization process that will increasingly put left-wing advocacy groups on the defensive. On the other hand, if the neutrality forces lose, then the ABA will be doomed for years to remain tied to the yo-yo strings of the ACLU, the NAACP, and other such groups.

How did liberal advocacy groups gain such a stranglehold on the ABA? They built a power base from within, beginning with the creation of the Individual Rights and Responsibilities Section in 1966. Today the IR&R has only 2,700 members, or 1 per cent of the ABA membership, but it was, until last year, able to set virtually the entire political agenda for the ABA.

How does the IR&R get its way inside the ABA? One veteran observer describes the group's role as that of a "Trotskyite cell" infiltrating the ABA's committees and power structure. A close look at the top IR&R members will find the names of people who are indeed far to the left on the political spectrum: Father Robert F. Drinan, former president of the radical Americans for Democratic Action, who was a pacifist congressman from Massachusetts during the Vietnam War and a Sandinista sympathizer during the 1980s; D.C. Judge Abner J. Mikva, a very liberal former congressman from Illinois; and Jerome Shestack of Philadelphia, a lieutenant in Senator Joseph Biden's ill-fated 1988 presidential campaign. The names of IR&R leaders also show up in other powerful committee and section positions.

The permanent ABA staff in Chicago, which is decidedly liberal, wittingly and unwittingly plays into the hands of the liberal-left puppeteers. For example, when an analysis report is issued on a resolution, the staff calls on the activist groups to do the report. There is no independent ABA analysis. The report supporting the pro-abortion resolution in February 1990 was written in part by Estelle Rogers, a consultant to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. A 1990 resolution endorsing the Kennedy-Hawkins civil-rights bill was backed by an ABA report written by Kerry Scanlon, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Fifth Estate

THE political causes adopted by the ABA would not automatically be a public concern, were the ABA strictly a trade organization. But the ABA is a powerful player in the American political system. For nearly forty years it has played a quasi-official role in screening federal judicial nominees for their professional competence on behalf of the U.S. Attorney General. In 1987 the ABA found itself at the center of a public storm when a dissident minority of four on its Federal Judiciary Committee played a starring role in the dramatic defeat of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.

The ABA's role in the judiciary selection process also partially explains why a lawyerly version of the neoconservative movement has not dared unveil itself within the ABA. Dan Popeo, of the Washington Legal Foundation, says some conservative and moderate lawyers bite their tongues in ABA debates because speaking out might harm the possibility of their becoming judges. They are afraid of the liberal-left veto power within the Federal Judiciary Committee, he says. If the ABA were removed from the judicial screening process, Popeo believes, the curtain would fall on the Left's orchestration of the ABA.

Marching through Georgia

WITH ITS enemies in retreat, the forces of depoliticization within the ABA have been gathering steam and will soon go public. A new ad hoc depoliticization committee is already being formed, according to James Wootton, a Washington, D.C., attorney who is helping to organize it. It is dubbed for now the Keller Committee," after the Keller v. State Bar of California ruling by the Supreme Court last year. Since, in California, an attorney must belong to the bar to practice law, the Court ruled that compulsory dues to finance political and ideological activities violates the First Amendment rights of those who oppose such activities.

If the Keller Committee gets its way, the ABA will be able to support political activities only through voluntary donations, and ABA political statements will have disclaimers making it clear that only a limited number of members support them.

The Keller Committee will also seek to end ABA support for what Wootton calls a "politicized" Legal Services Corporation. For several years the ABA has been a staunch ally of those in the LSC who want to pursue law reform, lobbying, and class-action suits instead of providing legal services to individuals who are poor, the original mandate for the LSC.

Pro-choice forces have apparently decided to stage a tactical retreat at the Atlanta convention this August. According to the ABA, there are no abortion resolutions on the agenda, and there are no rumors of any surprise resolutions to be introduced from the floor. However, one insider confided that the pro-choice forces are planning to stage the mother of all resolution battles at the 1992 convention in San Francisco, where they will be able to pack the convention with sympathetic liberal and leftist attorneys from the Bay Area. The ABA's new president, Talbot (Sandy) D'Alemberte, who will chair that convention, has promised an epic struggle to pass a sweeping pro-abortion resolution. The battle is far from over.