War on the poor.

WHEN Marvin Gempler, manager of the Washington Growers League in Washington State, wrote to the Legal Services Corporation in Washington, D.C., to complain about the onslaught of cases against farmers by Evergreen Legal Services, he received with his reply a copy of an article: "The Quest for Justice: Why Does It Have Enemies?"

For too long, the LSC has been identified with the quest for justice for the poor in civil cases. In fact, the programs funded by the LSC -- which was established by Congress to provide federal funds to and loosely "monitor" more than three hundred programs across the country -- are designed to implement the philosophy of an elite corps of Sixties-style radicals (Green Berets of the Left, as one critic termed them) who use the poor as tools, and then leave them behind as victims.

This may sound like an unduly harsh description of a program that has become moral apple pie. But if we look at the Legal Services system not in the abstract terms in which it is sold to the public -- as "equal access to justice for poor people" -- but as it works in the real world, its chief victims are indeed the poor, whether it be rural farmworkers, urban tenants of public housing, or low-income people in general.

Consider, for example, the impact of Legal Services programs on the small-scale American farmer and the farmworkers he employs. The pattern is the same from New England to Washington State, from Florida and Texas to Ohio and Pennsylvania. A farmer who employs seasonal labor receives a "demand letter" from his local Legal Services program. Typically the letter tells the farmer that the program has been retained by a number of farmworkers who work, or worked, for him (often unnamed); that he is in violation of a number of provisions of the Migrant and Seasonal Farm Workers Protection Act (MISPA) of 1983, for which he can be assessed $500 per worker per violation; and that if he does not want the expense of federal litigation, he had better settle the claim quickly. There is a name for a threat that if you do not pay up it will be the worse for you -- extortion.

Some may have visions from old movies of oppressed farmworkers living in subhuman conditions and badly in need of lawyers to establish their rights. However, labor camps are now generally inspected by the Department of Labor, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, building inspectors, fire inspectors, the Department of Public Health, and more. As a result, Legal Services complaints focus primarily on technical violations, bread-and- butter wage claims, and what Robert Haas -- who represents farmers hit by Legal Services suits in the mid-Atlantic states -- calls "throw it on the wall stuff, hoping some of it will stick."

Take the failure to post a sign, a favorite item in Legal Services demand letters. Under MISPA, farmers must post a certificate that the farmworkers' housing has been approved by the relevant authorities prior to occupancy. Judy Mauch, who runs Mauch Farms in Ohio, is currently fighting a Legal Services lawsuit that, among other things, charges that there were people living in the labor camp before it was licensed. "We were approved," says Mrs. Mauch. "We had a letter of approval, but the certificate was still being processed in Columbus so it was not yet posted. They're suing us for that. It's enough to drive the farmers crazy."

A Fight to the Death

WHAT is most striking about these cases is their disproportionality: the disproportion between the claimed injury and the restitution demanded, and the disproportion between the resources of the farmer and the resources of the Legal Services attorneys. Ryan Edgley, an attorney in Yakima, Washington, describes a case brought by Evergreen Legal Services on behalf of 11 farmworkers who claimed the foreman had failed to record properly the number of hours they had worked pruning trees. The total wage claim amounted to $2,500 over a five-month period. Yet Evergreen sent a demand letter to the grower saying he owed $143,000. How did they get from $2,500 to $143,000? For starters, they claimed that the failure to record the hours properly constituted four violations of MISPA, for each of which each of their clients was entitled to $500. While Edgley feels the case may well be settled for a small amount, Legal Services attorneys will have forced the grower to spend tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

The playing field here is sharply uneven, for, as Marge Jacques, an apple grower in western Maryland, puts it, "They're spending money that doesn't belong to them. You're spending your own." In January 1995, Ohio growers sent a letter to their legislators, appealing to them to do something about ABLE (Advocates for Basic Legal Equality). The farmers wrote: "ABLE routinely shows up at depositions with three and four attorneys and always has four attorneys at pre-trial conferences. What would you do if your personal attorney showed up with four of his partners plus paralegals and charged you for all these lawyers doing the same thing?" (Legal Services suits are typically brought under statutes that permit fee shifting, and so farmers wind up paying not only their own attorneys but also the Legal Services attorneys, although the latters' salaries and expenses are wholly paid by the government.) Because of the costs, the farmer is ill-advised to fight, no matter how strongly he feels he is in the right. Libby Whitley, who for many years worked on labor issues for the American Farm Bureau, says, "You fight to the death and it is the death. You might win on principle but you've lost the farm."

Legalized Terrorism

WHILE labor-intensive agriculture is everywhere under assault, Legal Services has specially targeted farmers who participate in the H2A program (known as H2 until 1988), which brings in temporary foreign workers to harvest crops when sufficient domestic workers are not available. Although the program is so heavily regulated that it has been called the "clean jeans of the farming business," Legal Services attorneys have long been hostile to it on ideological grounds, stating frankly in newspaper interviews, speeches, articles, and congressional hearings that their goal is to put the program out of existence.

Legal Services attorneys set out to achieve their aim through a blizzard of lawsuits. In western Maryland six orchard owners found themselves the target of 175 administrative complaints and 15 federal lawsuits in 1983 - 85. Through this "legalized terrorism," as one grower described it, Legal Services eliminated the H2 program and in the process closed down all the orchards of commercial size in western Maryland.

Legal Services has now targeted growers in West Virginia who used the H2A program. A Legal Services attorney dug up a forgotten statute, the West Virginia Wage Payment and Collection Act of 1884, passed to protect coal miners from having all their wages deducted in the company store. (When grower Doug Dirting went to the Department of Labor in Charleston to obtain copies to post on his property, no one there had heard of it; with an employee, he rummaged through old boxes of papers in the basement to find it.) The Act specified that an employer could not deduct more than 25 per cent from a worker's pay. What made the Act a lethal weapon for Legal Services was that in addition to the small deductions the growers made for insurance and food ($5 to $7 for three meals a day) they also, because of agreements between the Jamaican worker and his government, deducted 23 per cent of a worker's salary and paid it into the National Bank of Jamaica, where it was held for him until his return. Attorney Tom Wilson explains: "The Jamaican government wants a certain amount of wages to be sent back to be sure the guy doesn't go AWOL, which is of benefit to the U.S. Government, which doesn't need INS people chasing them. So what you have is Legal Services frustrating something that is in the interest of the Jamaican worker, the Jamaican government, and the U.S. Government -- and being paid by the U.S. Government to do it."

Nor was this the only trump card uncovered by Legal Services attorneys. They found a discrepancy between the job order the growers signed with the Department of Labor -- specifying workers would be guaranteed employment for three-quarters of the period on the order -- and the master contract between the growers' association and the West Indies Central Labor Association, which required that workers be given 10 days' notice. Growers had followed that contract for decades without objection from the Department of Labor.

Legal Services has brought a number of suits against the growers for violations of both the Wage Payment and Collection Act and the so-called "three-quarter rule." It has piled up every possible penalty, including 30 days' "liquidated damages" (basically 30 days' wages) per worker per year at compound interest on each count. Vicki Dirting has calculated that for 1987 alone she and her husband, Doug, would be liable for $83,000. Robert Haas says these suits "could wipe out the whole apple industry of West Virginia." After ten years of litigation, neither issue has been tried on the merits, but the costs of these essentially frivolous suits have already driven some growers into bankruptcy and threaten to eliminate all of them, before the legal issues are even resolved.

Even when there are substantive problems -- and no one disputes that farmworkers often have real grievances -- most could be easily solved, given good will, without litigation. A decade ago, a woman who had served as a paralegal and then administrator of the Belle Haven, Virginia, office of Migrant Legal Services signed an affidavit describing how she had been discouraged from trying to resolve problems: "My method of operation had been to give the growers notice of the nature of worker complaints against them in order to provide them an opportunity to correct the problems."

The objective of the attorney in charge of the office, however, "was to file as many complaints against the growers as possible. He discouraged me from attempting to work out compromises with the growers, going so far as to tell me that if the growers and crewleaders trusted me so much, I couldn't be doing my job right." She reports one instance in which she discussed housing deficiencies with a Virginia grower and on her follow-up visit saw carpenters repairing the problems. But when she reported the progress to her employer "he instructed me to file a complaint against the grower immediately -- before the repairs were finished."

For Legal Services attorneys, the elaborate lawsuits are a game. One can only imagine the triumphant cry of "Gotcha!" from the attorney who came upon the Wage and Collection Act and realized its litigation potential. Tom Wilson, who represented many of the Maryland growers before they were forced out of business, observed at the time: "You have a bunch of political ideologues that are having fun bashing the system. This is sport for them. Indoor sport. Fun."

Conflict of Interests?

FARMWORKERS are as much the victims of this cruel game as are farmers. In Florida, the sugar-cane growers' cooperative employed 1,700 cane cutters under the H2A program in 1988. Within a few years, thanks to a barrage of Legal Services suits, the number had dropped by half. When a journalist with the Miami Herald asked an attorney with Florida Rural Legal Services about the role of his program in putting sugar-cane cutters out of work, his response was that he did not know "whether there's any point in having people employed in a situation where they're not paid right." In fact, the Jamaican workers were being paid $40 a day in Florida compared to the $3.10 they would have earned in Jamaica. By 1993 the number of H2A workers in Florida had dropped from a peak of 10,000 to 1,000. Libby Whitley says: "It boggles my mind. If a group of employers had decided to get together and conspire to put 9,000 minority workers out of jobs, everybody would have gone bananas. But Legal Services does it and they're hailed as heroes."

They are not heroes in Jamaica, where farmworkers have woken up -- too late. The Jamaican Weekly Gleaner belatedly warned its readers that "workers mistakenly believe that they are being supported by the critics of the program [H2A] who they think wish to see them get a better deal. Nothing could be further from the truth. The critics all wish to destroy the program for political reasons." Indeed, the representation of Jamaican workers by Legal Services attorneys raises serious ethical questions. If the attorney's goal is to eliminate the program, his interest is antithetical to that of his client, and he should not be representing him.

Nor is it only temporary foreign workers who lose jobs. Texas Rural Legal Aid all but wiped out vegetable farming in the high plains of Texas. At the height of its campaign, 3,000 of the 16,000 residents of Hereford, Texas, known as the "salad bowl" of the Texas panhandle, signed a petition to the Legal Services Corporation calling for "an end to the political activism, racism, fear, violence, and economic destruction being promoted in our midst with our own tax dollars."

So intent are Legal Services programs on suing farmers that they ignore the interests of their traditional allies, the farmworker unions, on whose behalf they often launch litigation campaigns. For example, the lawsuits brought by Ohio's ABLE persuaded growers to sign on with the Farm Workers Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), whose leaders had promised that FLOC's grievance procedures would protect the growers from Legal Services suits. But the suits go on, and an angry FLOC has joined with Mauch Farms against ABLE, for, if its grievance procedures are ignored, the union has nothing to offer the growers.

Because farmers often shift to mechanized harvesting when Legal Services moves into high gear in their neighborhood, farmworkers are often the greater victims. In Florida, sugar-cane growers have turned to mechanical cutters, even in soil not well suited for them. South of Dade City, Florida, 80 per cent of snapbeans used to be harvested by hand; thanks to Legal Services, now only 10 per cent are hand-harvested, even though machine harvesting means growing an inferior bean, with a lower market price.

Bizarrely, even as Legal Services programs were forcing small farmers into mechanized agriculture, Legal Services was bringing suit against research into agricultural mechanization on the grounds that mechanization favored corporate agriculture over the small family farm. In 1978, California Rural Legal Assistance brought suit against the University of California at Davis to prevent research on new varieties of fruits and vegetables and on new agricultural machinery. The suit dragged on for 11 years; by 1989 Legal Services had lost on every single count, and millions of taxpayer dollars had been frittered away. "A very poor use of their resources and a terrible waste of university resources" is how George Marchand, one of the university's attorneys, sums up the "ag-mech" case.

Even putting aside the nightmarish consequences of giving "public interest" groups the power to control university research, who would have benefited had Legal Services prevailed? The "small farmers"? The Grange, which represented them, entered the suit on the side of the university. The farmworkers? But Legal Services was everywhere busy putting them out of work. Poor people in general? But mechanization reduces the cost of food, which especially benefits the poor. The suit was typical of Legal Services. In no one's interest, it was a multi-million-dollar plaything to harass and frustrate the "establishment."

Next Victims

THE URBAN poor have suffered equally at the hands of Legal Services. Wallace Johnson, head of the Public Housing Authorities Directors Association (PHADA), has said: "Drugs are the No. 1 issue facing managers of public housing in America today." Nonetheless, Legal Services programs have launched a war to preserve drug dealing in public housing. It must be stressed that representation of drug dealers is not an occasional misstep on the part of an aberrant Legal Services program, but a systemic, pervasive activity. The problem first became apparent in 1989. After a policeman was shot to death in a drug raid in a public- housing project in Alexandria, Virginia, Jack Kemp, then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, wrote to all 3,300 public-housing authorities asking them what was the extent of the drug problem in their projects and what in their judgment could be done. In a flood of letters, PHA directors cited Legal Services as the chief impediment to eliminating drug dealers from public housing.

To quote one typical response, from S. R. McDaniell Jr. of Orlando, Florida: "Tenant evictions are required when the sale and use of drugs are uncovered, but this is always hampered by the Legal Services Corporation's lawyers. . . . [W]e are immediately informed by the tenant's 'free' lawyer that we cannot evict them."

Because some in Legal Services dismissed as "anecdotal" the evidence given by McDaniell and the many other PHA directors who echoed him, David Wilkinson, then the LSC inspector general, initiated two surveys, one of public-housing authorities, the other of Legal Services programs. Perhaps the most damning single finding was that the housing authorities had elected to bring eviction proceedings on other grounds in over nine hundred drug cases. Wilkinson quoted one survey respondent: "Our recent experience supports avoiding any action against any tenant on a drug-related charge wherever it is possible to proceed with other lease violations as a viable alternative." In other words, the tenant who failed to pay rent, or was guilty of other non-drug-related lease violations, was left to his fate. But the drug dealer, or the tenant who harbored one, had an instant champion in Legal Services.

Little has changed since 1991, when Wilkinson completed his surveys. In 1992 a young attorney named Philip Stinson submitted an article to Clearinghouse Review, the Legal Services journal, in which he outlined how nuisance-abatement acts, some of them specifically designed to deal with drug-related activity, could be used to cleanse public housing of drug dealers. Clearinghouse Review did not publish it. PHADA's Wallace Johnson says flatly, "To the best of my knowledge we have never received any support from any Legal Services lawyer anywhere in the country assisting us in efforts to help us get rid of these thugs."

The improvements that have occurred are despite Legal Services efforts to undo them. Overcoming vigorous opposition from Legal Services, Jack Kemp altered HUD rules to provide that in drug- related cases, housing authorities could go directly to court to seek eviction, without having to go through prior administrative hearings. According to John Waddy Jr., the attorney for the Housing Authority in Columbus, Ohio, the change has cut the process from six months or more to 45 days. The benefit goes beyond the saving in time. Bud Albright, who was Kemp's assistant at HUD, points out that formerly the housing authority had to prove its case twice. By the time the case reached the courts, the drug dealer had found out who the witnesses were, and, says Albright, "He would pay a visit and say, 'Gee, you think I bother your children now, I wonder what they'd look like in a wooden box?' Of course that would keep them from testifying, and you'd get to court and be unable to evict them."

Where housing authorities find Legal Services a less serious problem than five years ago, it is because they have fought hard and won in the courts. John Hiscox, head of the Housing Authority in Macon, Georgia, who at the height of the crack epidemic was dealing with close to three hundred drug evictions a year, says: "Legal Services would pull out all the stops. You would think it was a murder trial. We would have jury trials; teams of Legal Services attorneys would prepare for these things. Sometimes we would have up to $8,000 worth of legal fees in one case. What eventually helped was that we won them. We won the overwhelming majority."

Keeping public-housing projects free of drugs requires more than the ability to evict drug dealers; screening to keep known criminals from moving in is also essential. Here, too, Legal Services throws up roadblocks to the most modest efforts to ensure the safety of residents. In 1994, the Atlanta Legal Aid Society brought a class-action suit against the Atlanta Housing Authority on behalf of those who had been denied admission on the grounds of their criminal history. Although the AHA denied housing only to those with criminal histories in the last three years, Legal Services argued it was unfair to exclude people who had been "successfully rehabilitated" as evidenced by their completing their sentence, probation, or parole! The Americans with Disabilities Act is providing Legal Services yet another handle. "All of a sudden," says John Hiscox, "screening out someone who is a substance abuser is screening out someone with disabilities, which is a protected class."

Legal Services attorneys offer a variety of defenses for their involvement. In the case of the drug dealer, an individual is innocent until proved guilty. In the case of a tenant whose son uses the premises for drug dealing, the innocent should not be punished for the sins of the guilty. But those who work and live in public housing point out the suffering that Legal Services attorneys inflict upon the vast majority of residents who, as Violet Chandler, an attorney with the New York City Housing Authority, says, "want to be able to go to the door, put the key in the tumbler, without worrying about a bullet smashing into the back of their head." As for punishing "innocent" family members, Violet Chandler points out: "This family is living large because they're benefiting from that one person who is selling drugs. You walk in, and they've got a 54-inch TV, a Nordic Track, a state-of- the-art stereo system."

Shamelessly, Legal Services programs sue housing authorities for the very conditions their lawsuits make inevitable. In the June 1994 Clearinghouse Review, literally sandwiched between reports on two suits brought by Legal Services programs on behalf of tenants who could not "foresee" their sons' drug dealing, is a report on a suit brought by Southeastern Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation against the New Bedford Housing Authority. The projects, claimed the suit, "were plagued by drug-related crime," and the housing authority "violated a state law requiring PHAs to take action against persons involved in drug dealing and acts of violence on housing authority property." First Legal Services stops the housing authorities from screening out drug dealers; then it protects the drug dealers from eviction; then it sues the housing authority because there are drug dealers.

Encouraging Poverty

IN CHOOSING drug dealers and their enablers as clients, Legal Services programs demonstrate the same elitism, the same sportiveness and contempt for the poor, as in their suits against farmers. It is in the welfare area, however, that Legal Services has wreaked its greatest devastation on the poor.

A number of writers have now identified fatherless families as the chief cause of violence among young males, and the widely used term "feminization of poverty" is no more than the recognition that single women raising children are likely to be poor. Yet as James Wootton, who heads The Safe Streets Alliance, points out, the explosion of fatherless families can be traced to LSC litigation. In a series of cases beginning with the landmark King v. Smith in 1968, Legal Services has attacked any "moral" conditions that states have attached to welfare, on the grounds that such conditions amount to unconstitutional discrimination. In 1973, Newark - Essex Legal Services won a suit against the state of New Jersey, which had limited its family-assistance program to married couples with children. Subsequently, Legal Services programs brought a series of suits whose end result was to entitle children having children to their own separate Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) check and their own government-funded apartment. Although Congress had specified that food stamps were to go to families, a Legal Services support center successfully challenged this provision on the grounds that to treat the family differently from other groups discriminated against households of "unrelated individuals."

In a real sense, Legal Services is a giant enabling program for dysfunctional behavior. Although poor young girls who have children are on a surefire path to a life of dependency, Legal Services programs explore ways to achieve ever more "rights" for what they euphemistically term "parenting adolescents." A recent article in Clearinghouse Review raised the possibility that a high school's failure to provide on-site child care could be subject to legal challenge. Over the last several years, Legal Services suits have put monthly government disability checks into the hands of some 250,000 alcoholics and drug addicts.

Currently Legal Services programs are on the ramparts, fighting welfare reform. In 1988 Congress passed the Family Support Act, encouraging states to obtain waivers of normal federal AFDC requirements to try to devise a better welfare system. Some seek to discourage illegitimate births by denying extra benefits to mothers who have additional children while on welfare; some set a time limit on benefits; some require work or training for work in exchange for benefits.

Determined to stop most such efforts in their tracks, Legal Services programs have sued California, New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New Jersey, among others. The New Jersey case has become the standardbearer, whose result will affect other states that have enacted welfare caps for mothers who have additional children. Legal Services is arguing that a benefit cap interferes with a woman's right to procreate and -- an imaginative ploy -- violates laws (designed to regulate medical experiments) prohibiting experimentation on human subjects without their informed consent.

Given the level of activity against even modest state reform efforts, Legal Services programs are certain to mount a massive onslaught against any congressional legislation to reduce welfare dependency. Despite overwhelming evidence that policies favoring families are the most likely to help the poor escape poverty, Legal Services attorneys are as committed as ever to treating each man, woman, and child as an isolated entity, whose umbilical cord is to the government.

The ways in which Legal Services victimizes the poor go on and on. In their prison-conditions suits, Legal Services programs pit the interests of the law-breaking against the law-abiding poor. This is because the costs of implementing the improvements imposed by the courts are extremely high, absorbing scarce city and state dollars that could otherwise go to public services benefiting the law- abiding poor. Worse, these suits dump large numbers of felons back into the community, where the poor become their chief prey.

In 1974 the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago, a Legal Services program, filed a suit against the Cook County jail system which has already brought the Foundation a bonanza of $660,000 in legal fees and continues with no end in sight. Michael Mahoney, president of the John Howard Association, which monitors court orders and consent decrees arising from the litigation, says that as a result of the prison "population cap" that has been established, as many as 36,000 felons have been released in a single year.

Legal Services plays an important role in virtually all prison- conditions litigation, though often behind the scenes. In many cases which are filed pro se, with the prisoner initiating the suit, the judge will eventually appoint counsel from a major law firm. Says Mahoney: "They assign a young associate who hasn't a clue about prison litigation and they use Legal Services Corporation and local [Legal Services] organizations. They may not be counsel of record but they clearly have a major role to play in a clearinghouse, technical assistance effort."

Almost Smothered at Birth

SURPRISINGLY, in view of its subsequent resilience, the Legal Services Corporation almost died at its birth in 1974. Originally created under President Lyndon Johnson as a subdivision of the newly established Office of Economic Opportunity, Legal Services was the subject of 1974 legislation to make it an independent entity. According to Howard Phillips, who was briefly head of the OEO, President Nixon promised a group of conservative senators that he would veto the bill establishing the Corporation. But Nixon backed down when liberal senators warned him that to keep the money to pay his Watergate lawyers, he would have to give up his opposition. The bill establishing the Legal Services Corporation was one of the last Nixon signed; he left office two weeks later.

When Ronald Reagan became President, one of his avowed aims was to eliminate Legal Services, which had expanded greatly in the Carter years, when Hillary Clinton was chairman of the Corporation board. But because he wanted to close the Corporation down, Reagan made the fatal strategic error of failing to appoint his own board to oversee it. This gave the field programs and Corporation staff time to organize a vast (illegal) grassroots "survival" campaign and to transfer what the self-styled "generals" in this campaign called "the rubies" -- the most political parts of the program -- to outside entities (along with the money to finance them) for the duration of the Reagan era.

The lobbying campaign was a brilliant success. Reagan was unable to kill the program, and the board he finally appointed could do little to rein in local programs. To add insult to injury, Republican Senator Warren Rudman emerged as the chief champion of Legal Services. His strategic position as chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the LSC permitted him to veto each and every initiative of the Reagan-appointed board, from major ones like closing down the national support centers, which served as radical think tanks for the system, to housekeeping matters such as purchasing computer hardware to facilitate data- keeping (and thus accountability).

Legal Services' triumph was capped when its former board chairman became First Lady. The new Clinton-appointed board, headed by Douglas Eakeley, an old friend of Bill Clinton's at Oxford and Yale Law School, was made up almost entirely of former staff attorneys on local programs or members of their boards. Included on the new board was Hulett (Bucky) Askew, who had been one of the "generals" in the campaign to save the "rubies." In effect, the LSC had been taken over by the organizations it was required to oversee.

The new board moved quickly, appointing a small transition team that included some of the most militant elements in the Legal Services "movement." For example, Ada Shen-Jaffe, executive director of Evergreen Legal Services, was a member of the team. Only two years earlier, the LSC's monitoring staff had ruled that "Evergreen Legal Services systematically violated the LSC Act and regulations over a period of years." Among the most serious violations was the involvement of Evergreen staff attorneys in suits in support of political projects of the National Lawyers Guild, which one Evergreen attorney described as a "charitable organization" and which Evergreen, in its official defense of its actions to the LSC, called a "community group."

This description of the National Lawyers Guild is worthy of going down in the annals of the Medes and Persians. The Guild is a far- left organization, whose annual resolutions have included attacks on the American system of justice for being "used to hound, attack, imprison, and execute the oppressed minorities, workers, and political activists." Some years ago its incoming president (formerly a Legal Services staff attorney) announced that the organization's primary goal was "direct control by the people over the resources of this country. . . . We want not just a piece of the pie, but the whole damn pie shop." In replying to Evergreen, the LSC's then president, John O'Hara, noted drily that the NLG "bears no apparent resemblance to the local church, . . . the local Rotary Club, . . . the Boy Scout troops and Little League, . . . contemplated by members of Congress in permitting uncompensated outside practice."

Most of Evergreen's staff attorneys and paralegals are dues-paying members of the National Lawyers Guild. Ironically, because Legal Services programs pay staff members' dues for legal associations to which they belong, it is, as Howard Phillips observes, the taxpayer "who keeps alive left-wing relics of the 1930s by giving them money."

Not surprisingly, the first action of the transition team was to emasculate the LSC's monitoring program. One-half of the professional staff (14 of 28) of the Office of Program Evaluation, Analysis, and Review (OPEAR) was summarily fired. The chief function of the LSC -- monitoring the grantees' use of LSC funds -- was effectively ended. John Tull, a member of the transition team, who had served as a private consultant to Legal Services programs which ran afoul of the LSC's monitoring teams, became head of OPEAR -- in other words, head of the program he had helped to defang. Although the LSC typically sent out over 125 monitoring teams to evaluate field programs each year, in 1994 less than half a dozen were sent. "Peer review" -- i.e., You're all right, I'm all right -- was now to substitute for oversight by the LSC.

With Democrats in charge of both houses of Congress and Hillary in the White House, the new LSC leadership grew increasingly arrogant and careless. Normally, when the LSC went to Congress to ask for appropriations, it came armed with a thick book of arguments and figures to justify its request. But this time its representatives, who had called for doubling the previous year's budget to $848 million, sailed into the hearing with only a couple of pages. A furious Appropriations subcommittee threw them out, voting to suspend the hearings on the grounds that the LSC was totally unprepared.

Kenneth Boehm, formerly assistant to the LSC president and counsel to the board (and one of the first to be purged), believes arrogance was only part of the problem. Alexander Forger, the LSC's recently appointed president, was simultaneously absorbed in managing the estimated $200-million estate of Jacqueline Onassis. According to the LSC Act the president is not supposed to have an outside earned income without express permission of the board; Boehm learned that Forger had obtained that permission in secret session. Boehm says: "If a conservative was making far more money from a lucrative professional service done for multimillionaires on the side while being paid to work full time for the anti-poverty program, the editorialists would string him up by the thumbs."

But in the end, the LSC's self-confidence was well placed. Its leaders were hammered in congressional hearings for reorganizing the Corporation (i.e., gutting monitoring) without obtaining approval of the Appropriations subcommittee as they were legally bound to do, but there were no sanctions. The budget was not doubled, but Congress did provide a small increase.

Danger in the House

THE REPUBLICAN sweep of both houses of Congress last fall offers the first opportunity since 1974 to deal effectively with Legal Services. Because of the controversy swirling around the program, it was last authorized (for three years) in 1977. The program has survived since on a year-to-year basis, as Congress bends its own rule that an unauthorized program cannot be funded. Confident of four undisturbed years under President Clinton, the LSC missed its opportunity to get the program reauthorized with virtually no restrictions. The Clintons were busy with health care, and the Legal Services leadership was content to wait a little.

There is a danger that the Republicans will choose the easy way, cutting back funding and restricting the kinds of cases that can be brought, and then pretending they have solved the problem. That way they would avoid the media frenzy attendant upon genuine reform. Congressmen can all too well imagine the epithets -- "enemy of the poor" will be the least of them -- raining down from the entire liberal media.

If they take the easy way, congressmen will also avoid the wrath of the American Bar Association, whose president, George Bushnell, has described any who would tamper with Legal Services as "reptilian bastards." The ABA has already set aside $200,000 to fight for Legal Services. For the ABA, Legal Services hits a triple. It offers employment for thousands of lawyers; it indirectly provides employment for many thousands more who defend against the suits the programs bring; and it permits the bar to avoid pressures to provide pro-bono services to the poor.

But however tempting, tinkering with Legal Services will do nothing about the abuses that have been examined here. For years now in the House, Republican Bill McCollum and Democrat Charles Stenholm have vainly sought to attach a rider with a laundry list of restrictions to the Legal Services appropriation, and that rider is likely to be reintroduced. But as former senator Jeremiah Denton once put it, the Legal Services Act is one where the loopholes have loopholes, and no rider will cure that. Legal Services programs are already enjoined from involvement in abortion cases, grassroots lobbying, union organizing, school desegregation cases, and redistricting cases, with very little effect.

Indeed, the language in the McCollum - Stenholm riders clearly fails to address the problems effectively. McCollum - Stenholm would prevent Legal Services programs from representing convicted drug dealers (they defend them prior to conviction and defend the "innocent" tenant from whose apartment the drug dealer operates). McCollum - Stenholm would permit the farmer, if he won in court, to collect legal fees from the program that had sued him. But, not having the funds to sustain these legal cases through the appeals process, the farmer typically folds long before he is in a position to collect fees. And he is likely to be found in violation of some regulation, even if it is no more than an unposted sign or a torn (by the worker) screen. The point is that insubstantial violations should not trigger a federal lawsuit in the first place, destroying the livelihood of farmer and farmworker alike.

Laundering Operation

ADDRESSING the real problem means addressing the structure of Legal Services. In effect, as one critic has pointed out, the Legal Services Corporation is a giant laundering operation that converts federal into private dollars. Once the money is in the hands of the local programs it is private money, not subject to the laws governing waste, fraud, and abuse in federal agencies.

Furthermore, the LSC, whatever the composition of the board, has no real control over the local programs. Each program enjoys "presumptive re-funding," regardless of its performance. In punishing Evergreen Legal Services, the Corporation dared do no more than administer a light slap on the wrist, withholding $35,000 of Evergreen's grant. Although there are programs where monitoring staff has found embezzlement, mismanagement, and negligence, de- funding a program is so onerous, and so expensive, that the LSC has not even tried to do so since 1986.

The central problem of Legal Services lies in the staff-attorney system, which gives power and control to the provider, not the consumer, of legal aid. The staff system produces clientless lawyering, with Legal Services attorneys providing for the needs of real clients only in order to be able to engage in the core activity of the program, which is public-interest law in pursuit of wealth redistribution and distorted notions of "social justice."

The only way to overcome this central difficulty is to restore control to the client. The best way to achieve this is to incorporate funding for legal aid to the poor in block grants to the states, eliminating "presumptive refunding" of existing programs, de-funding the national support centers, and encouraging the states to experiment with vouchers, mediation programs, co- payments, and competitive bidding. There are nine hundred existing legal-aid programs not affiliated with Legal Services that could then seek to provide more efficient service.

Heretical though it may sound, it is questionable whether federal funds are needed to provide legal aid. Many Legal Services programs now receive substantial sums from IOLTA (Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts), private funds, the United Way, and state and local governments. In 1993 non-LSC funding for Legal Services programs reached $246 million, compared to $357 million from the Federal Government. There is also significant pro-bono work by the private bar, which could be sharply increased if the government were to offer attorneys tax credits for pro-bono work, with a cap to avoid misuse. Even now, the extent of pro-bono hours contributed nationally is much greater than generally recognized. Florida requires attorneys to make sworn statements annually on the number of pro-bono hours they have provided. Even if their work is valued modestly at $50 an hour, Florida's attorneys alone would be contributing over half a billion dollars.

The American Bar Association repeatedly asserts that only 20 per cent of the legal needs of the poor are currently being met, a figure parroted by congressmen at every hearing on Legal Services. The Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation conducted a study which found that only 15 per cent of the need was being met. If so, federal money would still be required to fill the huge remaining gap. But these figures are based on highly questionable data. The Massachusetts study includes unrecognized legal needs, identified through questions as to whether the person has had problems with roaches or other pests or has not gone to the doctor or hospital because he could not afford it. If the study is reanalyzed to identify only those instances where there is a recognized need for legal aid, the unmet need falls from 320,000 to 7,000.

The unmet need might dwindle to zero if alternative dispute- resolution mechanisms were used. In roughly 20 per cent of their cases, Legal Services attorneys are suing another branch of government on behalf of an individual denied a government benefit. An ombudsman could handle these cases more cheaply and efficiently.

A deficit-conscious Congress cannot afford to fund the Legal Services Corporation. Number-crunchers may see a "mere" half- billion-dollar annual saving if the program were eliminated. But the financial impact of Legal Services is much greater than its up- front expenses. Over twenty years ago, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare calculated that two of the early Legal Services welfare suits added $300 to $400 million a year to welfare costs. Subsequent cases have added untold billions. Moreover, unlike entitlements, whose costs can at least be estimated in advance, Legal Services suits impose huge unanticipated and hence incalculable costs.

A Republican Congress cannot afford to maintain the Legal Services Corporation, for if it does, it will be fueling the engine that will bring its Contract with America to a screeching halt. So certain is it that Legal Services programs will ensnarl congressional reforms in decades of litigation that it can be considered the test of Republican sincerity whether the Congress uses its power to eliminate the Legal Services Corporation. If it fails to do so, it is only paying lip service to its commitments, knowing Legal Services will undo what it does.

But above all, the poor cannot afford the Legal Services Corporation. It uses its federal war chest to mire more and more poor people, generation after generation, in despair and dependency. It makes the poor seeking a better life prey to the worst elements in their midst. It deprives hard-working people of jobs by bankrupting their employers and bypasses the political process to misallocate resources which could otherwise benefit the people it is supposed to be helping.