NY Times, Bob Barr, Chuck Colson
and NCC Agree:
it's time to stop restricting legal aid for low-income families
by Philip E. Jenks
New
York,
December 13 2005 – What do the New York Times, former Congressman Bob
Barr, conservative commentator Chuck Colson and the National Council of
Churches have in common?
Usually not much. But they do
agree on one thing: it's time to end a law that restricts legal help for
poor families.
The law
prohibits the use of federal grant money for certain types of legal
representation and prevents legal aid organizations
from spending their own funds unless they establish a physically
separate office with separate staff, office space, and equipment -- a
prohibitively expensive proposition.
On November 29, the NCC and
30 faith groups wrote to the chair and ranking
member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee to call for an end to
the restriction on legal aids groups who work primarily with poor
families.
Here is a copy of
the letter to Congress.
The House Appropriations Subcommittee allocates funds to the
federal Legal Services Corporation (LSC) that funds legal aid groups
that make these services available to the estimated 80 percent of poor
people who can't afford a lawyer.
On December 6, New York Times
weighed in with an
editorial calling on a three-judge
federal appeals panel to reject an appeal of a federal district court
ruling that the "separate facilities" rule is unconstitutional.
"The fact that Washington
provides money for legal representation does not give it unlimited
authority to control what lawyers say or do, or to restrict the use of
private money so severely," the Times wrote.
Immediately after the Times
editorial appeared, the Rev. Dr. Eileen Lindner, deputy general
secretary of the NCC for Research and Planning, wrote
a letter to the editor pointing out that there is more than one remedy to the problem.
"Congress, too, can fix this
dangerous rule, which forces cash-strapped nonprofits to waste
charitable donations on separate offices instead of on assisting the
needy," Lindner wrote. "By acting, Congress will ensure that many more
vulnerable, low-income people have access to legal council."
"It's time for Congress top
stand up for those who without a helping hand from legal services
organizations and the shared blessings of others have no place else to
turn for legal help."
Yesterday, Barr -- perhaps
best known as the Republican Georgia Congressman who led the campaign to
impeach President Bill Clinton in 1999 -- said he agreed with Lindner
and the Times.
"As a member of Congress in
1996, I voted for a series of restrictions -- which President Clinton
signed into law -- that put a severe damper on the controversial Legal
Services Corp.," Barr wrote in LegalTimes.com.
Unfortunately, Barr said, the
physical-separation requirement "limits the work LSC grantees can do . .
. Because setting up a separate organization with its own office,
executive director, computers, copiers, and personnel costs so much, few
organizations can bear the financial burden of complying."
The result, Barr concluded,
is that "lawyers fighting civil legal battles each year on behalf of our
nation's low-income families must turn away thousands of poor Americans
who need legal help." See Barr's essay
here.
The NCC and faith groups
couldn't have put it better. “Our faith
calls us to advocate for the ‘least of these’ within our society, and to
seek the common good,” said Lindner. “The protection of the access to
legal counsel for rich and poor alike stands at the heart of the
commonweal and is consistent with our moral precepts.”
Last year Colson, who was
jailed for his Watergate crimes and later founded Prison Fellowship
International, reached a similar conclusion. Prison Fellowship sent a letter to Congress expressing concern about
the physical separation requirement. "Clearly," Barr wrote, "it's time
for the broader conservative community to mobilize against this
pernicious restriction."
In the
Nov. 29 letter to Congressmen Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Alan Mollohan (D-WV),
respectively the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Appropriations
Subcommittee,
the NCC and other faith-based groups restated the claim that the compulsory physical
separation imposes unnecessary expenses on legal aid programs and
creates costly obstacles to private philanthropy. As a result,
legal aid organizations are unable to help low-income people in a number
of important types of cases even with non-federal funds.
In addition
to being troubled by the harm this law inflicts on low-income people,
faith-based service providers are concerned that if the physical
separation model were to be imported into faith-based settings (as may
occur if the government continues to defend this model in litigation and
policy debates), the result – equivalent physical separation of secular
and faith-based activities – would undermine the public-private
partnership model that delivers important social services to low-income
communities.
The
so-called “private money restriction” interferes with the ability of
legal services lawyers to help low-income individuals and families in a
wide array of cases, including unlawful evictions, prisoner reentry,
religious asylum, domestic violence, predatory lending, disaster relief,
and many others.
“Our faith
calls us to advocate for the ‘least of these’ within our society, and to
seek the common good,” Lindner wrote to the Congressional
representatives. “The protection of
the access to legal counsel for rich and poor alike stands at the heart
of the commonweal and is consistent with our moral precepts.”
The
parallel effort to fix the private money restriction in the courts is
led by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, which is
representing three New York legal aid programs to challenge the
constitutionality of the physical separation requirement.
A federal
District Court judge ruled last year that the application of the
restriction to the three programs violated their First Amendment rights
to advocate for their clients. But the government appealed the District
Court ruling in the case – Velazquez v. LSC – so the future of
legal services for the poor remains in jeopardy.
Since its
founding in 1950, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the
USA has been the leading force for ecumenical cooperation among
Christians in the United States. The NCC's member faith groups –
representing a wide spectrum of Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, historic
African American and Living Peace churches – include 45 million persons
in more than 100,000 local congregations in communities across the
nation.
For more information about the private money
restriction or to join the growing campaign to restore justice to legal
aid funding, go to
www.brennancenter.org.
Contact NCC News, Philip E. Jenks, 212-870-2252,
pjenks@ncccusa.org; Leslie Tune, 202-544-2350,
ltune@ncccusa.org
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