Dear Congressman:
The most recent outrage committed by grantees of the Legal Services
Corporation provides new proof that this corrupt agency cannot be reformed, and must
be abolished. Congress must not allow taxpayer-subsidized lawyers to overturn an
election because the LSC lawyers didn't like the results.
The LSC grantee, Texas Rural Legal Aid (TRLA), which gets 80 percent of its
funding from the U.S. taxpayers, is trying to overturn the narrow elections of a
Republican County Commissioner and a Republican Sheriff by suing to get a federal
court to void the absentee ballots of 800 U.S. active duty military personnel and their
families. TRLA's outlandish argument is that the military absentees diluted the votes
of Hispanic residents.
U.S. District Judge George J. Korbel authorized discovery, and so TRLA sent a
24-page, 54-question deposition to all Val Verde County, Texas voters who cast
absentee ballots in the November 1996 election. This extremely nosy questionnaire
demands very personal information in extraordinary detail.
The questionnaire demands lengthy written answers to questions about each
voter's credit cards, bank accounts, stock brokerage accounts, insurance, the names of
every organization to which the voter belongs, all schools and college attended by the
voter's children and whether tuition was paid or not, and where the voter's spouse
sleeps at night.
LSC lawyers have no intention of abiding by the restrictions Congress passed
last year. Radical leftwing activism is part and parcel of the Legal Services
Corporation. It is a fraud on the public to pretend it can be reformed. This scandal-ridden agency must be completely abolished. The 1996 Republican Party Platform
called for the elimination of the Legal Services Corporation. It's time to fulfill that
pledge before LSC engages in any more mischief.
Sincerely,
