Revoking legal services: Republicans want to keep lawyers from the poor

Progressive, The, April, 1996 by Steven Stycos

Two days before Christmas 1994, Helga Bidawid got the bad news. Facing an Illinois State Board of Education order to mix special-education students with regular students, Chicago Public Schools administrators had decided to close the Jacqueline Vaughn Occupational High School and transfer its 140 low-income, mentally retarded students to Taft High School.

Bidawid, president of the local school council, was outraged. Her son John, a nineteen-year-old with Down's syndrome, was benefiting from the special programs at Vaughn--learning skills he needed to find a job and live an independent life. But Taft, she says, "had nothing remotely resembling the programs at Vaughn." Without special training, many of the mentally retarded white, black, Hispanic, and Asian students at Vaughn were likely to end up on welfare, she says.

Other Vaughn parents shared Bidawid's outrage. They met with the board of education. They met with aldermen. They held demonstrations. But they could not reverse the closing.

"We had to get at it with a legal angle," explains Bidawid. "They wouldn't listen to reason."

Parents called many law firms, Bidawid says, and finally the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago, a legal-services agency, agreed to take the case. Staff attorney Shelley Davis filed a class-action suit to keep the school open.

And the parents won.

Cook County circuit court judge Erwin Berman agreed with parents that closing Vaughn would irreparably harm their children and issued an injunction against the closing.

Although not yet approved by the state, a plan to keep Vaughn open while main-streaming its students for some programs has been developed by school administrators and parents.

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Helga Bidawid says it's a great victory. But it probably won't happen again.

Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, Congressman George Gekas, Republican of Pennsylvania, the American Farm Bureau, the Christian Coalition, and other conservative groups have persuaded Congress to place a series of restrictions on federally funded legal-services agencies that would prevent them from ever again filing a lawsuit like Bidawid's.

Conservatives say the restrictions are necessary to keep legal services focused on the day-to-day legal needs of the poor--fighting unfair evictions, appealing denial of welfare benefits, and handling child-custody cases. But legal-services lawyers, who already spend most of their time on those mundane matters, say the new restrictions would simply ensure that poor people cannot effectively sue the government, the rich, and the influential. Those who would lose the most, they say, are America's least powerful residents--migrant farmworkers, battered women, low-wage factory workers, welfare recipients, and disabled people like John Bidawid.

Poor people charged with crimes would still be represented for free by public defenders throughout the country. But because of the restrictions and Congressional funding cuts, poor people with other legal problems would find it more difficult to get free legal help from the country's 323 legal-service agencies.

Since President Richard Nixon signed the bill creating legal services in 1974, Congress has appropriated several hundred million dollars a year to the Legal Services Corporation. The Corporation in turn makes grants to local legal-services agencies, which also receive supplemental funds from Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts and, in some cases, from state and local governments.

Gramm and Gekas wanted to eliminate the Legal Services Corporation entirely by turning the agency's annual appropriation into state block grants and phasing out federal support in two years. Those efforts failed, but conservatives are on the verge of drastically weakening the Corporation by enacting restrictions on its grant recipients and cutting its $400 million budget by more than 25 percent.

The Congressionally approved legislation also would prohibit legal-services agencies from accepting court-awarded legal fees, thus depriving these agencies of about another $15 million a year, according to Adam Goldberg, a government-relations specialist for the Legal Services Corporation.

And conservatives would eliminate federal funds for thirteen support centers that give front-line legal-services lawyers advice on difficult cases.

In December, President Clinton vetoed the conservative package of legal-services restrictions and funding cuts. The legislation is now caught in the budget logjam.

Conservatives, who have fought Legal Services for years, sense that it is still within their grasp to bring the agency to ruin. And Clinton's veto message of the appropriations bill containing the changes suggests that legal aid for the poor is not his top priority.

It was fifth in his list of objections to the bill--after cuts in funds for local police, drug enforcement, technology subsidies for business, and peacekeeping.

The Legal Services Corporation has survived meat-ax budget cuts before. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan's first budget slashed its funding by 25 percent. But never before has Legal Services faced debilitating restrictions that strike at the heart of its mission to represent those who cannot afford to hire a lawyer.