How the Plaintiffs Bar Bought the Senate – The Wall Street Journal
Onerous campaign finance laws have long served to hamper the business world’s influence on political elections while, at the same time, providing a huge advantage for trial attorneys. In a recent Wall Street Journal Opinion piece James Copland explains that Corporations' interests have traditionally been dispersed among “a host of competing tax and regulatory concerns,” meaning that each individual company or industry has its own agenda when backing a political candidate. The result is this: achieving substantial aggregate sums of financial backing for a single issue has been a near impossibility.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Plaintiff’s Attorneys, in part through professional associations, have been well positioned to game the system by focusing on a narrow set of issues that are beneficial to their interests. Wealthy plaintiff’s attorneys have been more than willing to shell out the $2000.00 campaign contribution limit each election cycle. Two Thousand Dollars sounds like a reasonable amount, right? According to Copeland’s article the aggregate amount donated to federal political campaigns by lawyers exceeds $1 billion. Copland goes on to state that this dizzying amount is the reason Plaintiff’s Attorneys have been able to keep tort reform out of the health-care reform bills, he adds “Congressional campaign contributions by lawyers in the last election cycle were about $25 million more than the combined total of political donations from doctors, pharmaceutical companies, HMOs, hospitals and nursing homes.”
The Manhattan Institute estimates that donations from the plaintiffs bar can exceed donations from defense attorneys by up to 120 times, depending on the firm. Citizens United may change this by allowing corporations to match the amounts laid out by the plaintiff's bar. Copland is optimistic that this decision may “help break the trial attorney stranglehold on national politics.”
Only time will tell if Citizens United is a game changer, or just a speed bump on the Washington Beltway.
clip in hair extensions