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During the 1992 election, Vice-President Dan Quayle, a lawyer married to a lawyer, said that he supported tort reform, whereas all those greedy ambulance-chaser contingency-fee trial lawyers were supporting Bill Clinton, also a lawyer married to a lawyer, because he would continue the present system.
The main Clinton statement I recall about lawyers was that Superfund money should go toward cleaning toxic sites, rather than to legal fees (the program spends $7 on lawyering and administration for every dollar that fuels a front-end loader to move stuff from one hole in the ground to another hole in the ground), but President Clinton now has good reasons to want changes in our legal system.
His defense in the Whitewater matter and the Paula Jones allegations could cost $10 million, and he is not a man of means.
That's a lot of money, and I'm still trying to understand why Paula Jones would dare show her face in public, let alone file a suit.
Assume she is telling the truth. She's so stupid she went into a strange man's hotel room by herself upon the invitation of a stranger, and she's so delicate that she suffered permanent emotional harm when the man in the room dropped his trousers. And she thinks people will admire her for such stupidity and hyperdelicacy?
Maybe she figured Anita Hill was a good precedent. Assume Hill was telling the truth, and you've got an ambitious attorney who had a choice years ago -- report her boss for some disgusting conduct, which might derail her from that all-important career-track, or keep quiet and keep her job.
We can all understand people trying to keep their jobs (though it's hard to see know why a Yale law graduate would have trouble finding another one if she found Clarence Thomas so awful to work for), but it's hardly an act of moral courage to put money and career prospects ahead of personal honor and dignity.
I hope my daughters grow up with more integrity than that, and with more common sense and sophistication than Paula Jones, who should be packed off to a cloister so she wouldn't have a chance to be lured into hotel rooms and see shocking portions of male anatomy.
Defending himself against those charges shouldn't cost 10 cents, let alone $10 million, but Clinton also has Whitewater to worry about. The same Republican senators who didn't think there was any reason to hold hearings when the savings-and-loan scandals erupted during the Reagan regime now consider it a matter of vital national interest.
There are many reasons that nobody important looked into the savings-and-loan mess when it might have done some good, but part of it is that our press pretty much ignored the story.
Some papers tried. One small paper got a whiff of something funny at the local thrift -- owned by Charles Keating -- and ran some stories. Keating responded with a big libel suit.
The paper eventually won, but victory cost $150,000 in legal fees. If you were a newspaper executive, just how many stories would you run about a Keating thrift when you knew that it would cost $150,000, plus lots of time wasted on depositions, discovery and similar horrors?
The press is supposed to alert us when government doesn't seem to be doing the job, but how alert can the press be when wealthy, powerful people like Keating use our court system as a machine to thwart anyone who crosses them?
Under our system as it was set up, you have a guaranteed recourse if you don't like what a newspaper prints about you -- the constitutional right to start your own paper.
Nor is Keating the only abuser. Developers, exploiters, promoters and others of that ilk use a tool called SLAP -- Strategic Lawsuit Against Public participation.
Say you discover a proposed change in local zoning that would allow a cadmium smelter next door. You start organizing the neighbors and writing letters to the paper -- you're exercising your rights as a citizen, right? Then the smelter promoters exercise their rights as a corporation, and file suit against you.
The suit might be totally groundless, but you can't ignore it. You'll need lawyers, which cost money, and you'll spend your time dealing with the suit, not the smelter.
The corporation doesn't care that the suit is specious. They've got more money than you do, and they'll keep feeding it into the legal system until you run out of resources.
In military circles, this strategy is known as a war
of attrition,
but in modern America, it is often called
justice.
Some good could come of President Clinton's anticipated $10 million legal bill. Instead of raising money so that his attorneys can make their yacht payments, he could support some reforms that would eliminate the use of our court system as a cudgel wielded by the wealthy.
Failing that, note that we will soon celebrate Independence Day. One American complaint was that the British had closed the courts. We could ask Queen Elizabeth to take us back, providing she restores the status quo of 1776.
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