Letter to Congressman Fox on Funding for the Legal Services Corporation

Note: Republican efforts to eliminate funding for the Legal Services Corporation because of its many abuses continue to falter because of the lackluster support for reform shown by many moderate Republican Members of Congress. This letter, being circulated by the National Legal and Policy Center among conservative groups on Capitol Hill for signatures, shows the effort being brought to bear on some of the LSC’s most ardent defenders.


May 15, 1997

Hon. Jon D. Fox
435 CHOB
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Congressman Fox,

We object to your on-going efforts to save the federal legal services program. As you know, much of the $283 million in taxpayer funds that is provided to the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) is a direct subsidy to liberal legal and political activism.

It is bad enough that it was your amendment that forestalled additional cuts in legal services funding in 1996. We now learn in 1997 that you have hypocritically torpedoed one of the reforms that you argued in 1996 would help clean up the program.

The reform was to allow for competition for LSC grants instead of the presumptive refunding that all grantees previously enjoyed. LSC awarded exactly one grant out of nearly 300 on a truly competitive basis. But that was too much for you, apparently because it was your ox that was being gored.

According to press reports, you successfully requested that the winning grantee, the Dessen, Moses & sheinhoff law firm, turn down the grant. You demanded that LSC redirect the grant to the former grantee, Montgomery County Legal Aid, on whose board you previously served.

It appears that your professed concern for the poor is insincere and that your real motivation is the continued flow of pork to your lawyer friends.

There is not an organization listed below that has not had its agenda damaged by legal services activists. Your continued support of federal funding for legal services will be considered an offensive action against us. We ask that you cease and desist any further support for legal services funding.

Sincerely,

[Signatures]

For more information, contact the National Legal and Policy Center at 703/847-3088.



The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century.