The right’s war on the poor hits a new low with attack on legal aid

There is nothing particularly new about conservative American politicians and their allies resisting public efforts to aid Americans in need. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law 90 years ago during the depths of the Great Depression, the political right has relentlessly derided and sought to undermine anti-poverty programs of all kinds.

Some of this effort – think of Donald Trump and the brigands on the make with whom he surrounds himself – is just plain old, run-of-the-mill greed. As they see it with crude, near-term accuracy, less money going to aid average Americans leaves more for them to plunder.

For others, the reasoning is weirdly and perversely ideological. This is the self-described “libertarian” crowd that clings stubbornly to the delusional notion that helping average Americans to remain middle class through public structures and systems somehow cultivates indolence and immorality. Think of Ronald Reagan’s fairy tales about “welfare queens” and the efforts of groups like the Heritage Foundation and John Locke Foundation to oppose everything from Medicaid to subsidized school lunches.

Both of these patterns are on stark display right now at the national level in the ongoing effort to decimate the Affordable Care Act and SNAP food assistance.

Meanwhile, here in North Carolina – a place where the legislature’s Republican majority long fought Medicaid expansion tooth and nail and has slashed everything from public education to affordable housing to aid for hurricane victims – the latest target is, of all things, a modest program that funds legal aid programs known as IOLTA.

As NC Newsline’s Brandon Kingdollar reported recently, IOLTA — is an ingenious system devised decades ago and employed across the country in which the separate bank accounts that attorneys long maintained to hold client funds in trust for brief periods (and that did not generate meaningful interest on their own) were instead pooled into a single large account that generates millions of dollars each year for the public purpose of funding legal aid.

It’s an inventive, win-win tactic that helps tackle an outsized societal need without using public tax dollars – the dearth of attorneys available, willing and capable of helping the millions of North Carolinians who need, but cannot afford, civil (as opposed to criminal) legal assistance. Think of women seeking to escape domestic violence, consumers ripped off by loan sharks, tenants illegally locked out of their homes, people with mental and physical disabilities denied services to which they are entitled, and hourly workers wrongfully underpaid by their employers who would, ordinarily, have no chance of finding a lawyer willing to take their cases. Rural “legal deserts” are among the areas that benefit the most.

Unfortunately, for the thousands of people of modest means who benefit from them, IOLTA funding and legal aid programs more generally have always been a bee in the bonnet of the political right. Not only does legal aid for people of low income offend their notions of societal order and “merit,” they do something that makes many conservatives even crazier: they fund lawyers who can occasionally win important legal and policy reforms. Think of a class action suit to validate the rights of a group of underpaid farmworkers or, God forbid, lawyers representing the rights of immigrants facing deportation.

And so it is that Republicans at the North Carolina legislature – with the assent of their most reliable of rubber stamps, state Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby – recently enacted a law to bar the state IOLTA program from making grants during the current fiscal year that commenced July 1.

As a result, millions of dollars that would have gone to support legal aid programs – programs that even under the best of circumstances operate on a shoestring and are able to handle only a tiny fraction of the eligible clients who seek their help – are frozen. The cuts are already having a big and destructive impact. Last month, Legal Aid of North Carolina – one of IOLTA’s biggest grant recipients – announced it was closing offices in two of the state’s neediest communities: Rocky Mount and Pembroke.

In defense of their action, the legislative authors of the funding freeze have dredged up the old chestnut long employed by legal aid opponents that IOLTA funds have been funneled to “leftist groups with leftist ideologies.” It’s the same bogus claim made by those who would defund environmental protection and mental health programs because the professionals they employ tend to – surprise, surprise! – identify with the plight of their clients.

What’s more, as is made plain in a pair of powerful recent letters authored by Supreme Court Justices Anita Earls and Allison Riggs and a coalition of dozens of the state’s most prominent private attorneys, this claim is utterly specious. As the letters explain, IOLTA funding for civil legal aid is a critical component in the construction and maintenance of a well-functioning legal system, and the freeze will do much to undermine that cause.

The bottom line: in a nation in which the yawning gap between the wealthy and everyone else continues to metastasize, the IOLTA freeze is just the latest broadside in a longstanding and hugely destructive war on the poor.