Trial Lawyers Lobby Sinks $6.2 Million In Debt

by S.A. Miller and Kara Rowland - September 28th, 2009 - Washington Times

The American Association for Justice, the most prominent group representing plaintiffs' attorneys, has seen a shake-up in its executive suite and has struggled to deal with what appears to be a mounting budget shortfall. To help it fight congressional efforts to make it harder for patients to sue doctors and lawyers, it recently sent out an extra solicitation to its members, asking them to fork over money for a lobbying campaign.

The most striking evidence of its financial woes is a swift decline in income, which resulted in a more than $6.2 million deficit in its operating budget for the fiscal year ending July 31, 2008, the most recent year for which data are available.

The reality is that most of the money that lawyers win in lawsuits goes into the pockets of lawyers, not the people who may or may not have been mis-treated by doctors. In most cases, they are winning lawsuits like John Edwards won them, based on fraudulent claims. It is now well known that increasing the frequency of Cesarean section deliveries does not protect either the babies or the mothers, especially when a singnificant number die as a result. John Edwards got rich by killing mothers based on a lie.

When do we get to sue him for his fraud?

Misplayed

by Jeffrey Rosen - September 10th, 2009 - The New Republic

Hasen calls Austin “the first and only case in which a majority of the Court accepted … the equality rationale as a permissible state interest.” That’s why the conservative justices on the Roberts Court seem poised to overturn it, and why Kagan was reluctant to defend the case in explicitly egalitarian terms. But there is a subtler way of defending the Court’s focus on the “distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth”--and it has to do less with equality than with democratic legitimacy. In The Constitution in 2020, Robert Post, the new Dean of Yale Law School, rejects an egalitarian defense of campaign laws, on the grounds that if the government attempts to prevent speakers with intense convictions from drowning out those who are less engaged, it would thwart one of the basic principles of self-government: namely, that individuals should be able do whatever they think necessary to convince the public to embrace their views.

Government, whether of the executive branch variety, or the judicial variety, always wants to pick winners and losers. It seems to be something in the genes of people attracted to the power of government, they just have to use that power. Therein lies the problem with our current courts. Judges want to create specific legal circumstances where they can award victory to those who share their political preferences.

It is the reason that those leftist judges (who see themselves as sympathetic to the poor and downtrodden) wish to shut down the political influence of those they see as serving the rich and powerful. That permits for the bizarre situation where a small group of middle class conservatives can have their rights trampled by the congregated wealth of corrupt trade unions. The judges do not decided these issues by the relative actual wealth but by their perception of whose interests are served.

It is the reason that our courts have permitted such things as the multi billion dollar extortion of the tobacco industry, a product that was never illegal to sell but which the leftists judges found too reprehensible to retain the profits it created. Thus the law was effectively changed after the fact [a clear ex post facto violation of the Constitution] and civil courts were used to sanctimoniously punish people for acts that were not crimes at the time they occurred. If you look at where this "tobacco" money is going today it is clear that the beneficiaries are left wing groups unrelated to the perceived victims that these extorted dollars were supposed to help. This entire process is corrupt when viewed by any objective observer. It is a clear example of judicial corruption that many of us feel a strong necessity to end.

I am disturbed how the leftist magazine, The New Republic, can be so clearly upset at the possibility that government will not continue to interfere with political speech. This is creating tyranny against some and is clearly subverting the free speech right guaranteed in our Constitution. There was a time when liberals were defenders of freedom rather than advocates for tyranny.

Sign Up For Harassment

by Paul Jacob - September 6th, 2009 - Townhall.com

Specifically, Judge Settle must resolve whether Washington state’s Public Disclosure Act, requiring the Secretary of State to publically disclose the signers of petitions, violates First Amendment protections for voters signing a petition.

As noted in the article, the premise of secret ballots has been extended to citizens signing petitions on behalf of and against the NAACP, the Socialist Worker’s Party and the Communist Party. Yet liberals argue that protection granted the Communist Party should not be granted to citizen's who oppose gay marriage because it does not "constitute a small minority which has been marginalized or historically disadvantaged relative to their opponents... " In other words, American Citizens who love our nation as it is do not deserve the same protection as those who wish to destroy our nation.

It is going to be interesting to see whether the liberal extremists in our unelected federal judiciary agree that destroying our country deserves more protection than defending it.

Judge Rules That He Too Can Grant Access To U.S. Secrets

by Michael Doyle - August 27th, 2009 - McClatchy

In a highly unusual legal step, a federal judge has ordered the government to grant an attorney a security clearance so he can represent a disgruntled former narcotics officer in a lawsuit against a former CIA officer.

As usual, the judges of our land think that NO LAW applies to them. They can decide that someone who has a grievance can see any record that the judge deems appropriate, legislatively passed statutes not withstanding. Top Secret and critical to our nation? No problem. Who cares how many of our agents and soldiers die if a judge thinks it unimportant to his search for perfect justice in a single case.

Our courts are corrupt beyond belief.

Trial Lawyers Are The Fourth Branch Of Government

by Daniel J. Popeo - August 20th, 2009 - San Francisco Examiner

Ten years ago, notorious trial lawyer Dickie Scruggs, apparently frustrated with elected officials’ inaction on health care, decided to take matters into his own hands, filing class-action lawsuits against HMOs.

Reporting on the suits, Time magazine asked Scruggs whether the plaintiffs’ bar was trying to run America. His response, accompanied by laughter, was, “Somebody’s got to do it.”

Today, even though Scruggs is in jail, his manifest-destiny vision of private lawyers making public policy has become a troubling reality.

In arguments with lawyers I never seem to make any progress on getting them to accept that just because they think that something should be public policy does not mean that they should be able to get this from judges instead of through the legislative process. There also seems to be no respect for the concept that if something is legal under the law they should not also be permitted to punish those who they see as evil anyway.

The contemptible courts of our corrupt judicial system have subverted our form of government for so long that none of them see it as evil any longer. As noted in the article, billions of dollars in judgements have been won against people who never broke a law. They simply did something that trial lawyers saw as immoral, and corrupt judges with corrupt juries proceeded to extort money from them.

The courts are no longer a third branch of government with an appropriate role to control that the other two act responsibly under the law. They have become a fourth branch of government that acts as legislative and executive too with no meaningful restraints. An unelected and unregulated and uncontrolled fourth branch of government that is totally corrupt and totally evil.