With the Swift Boat slime more or less played out, we were wondering where the next one was going to be aimed. MoJo says John Edwards is a good bet.
The White House has long been laying the groundwork for a campaign against the North Carolina senator, who made his fortune representing people with injury claims against doctors and corporations. Bush and other Republicans have blamed lawsuits for everything from rising health care costs to unemployment; with Edwards on the Democratic ticket, the GOP — and its allies in the corporate world — have dramatically turned up the volume. Treasury Secretary John Snow fired the first shot, two days after John Kerry announced his selection: “An abusive lawsuit has never created a single job, except for personal injury lawyers,” he told an audience in Maine, “but baseless and excessive suits have killed many.” Vice President Dick Cheney struck the same chord at a July 12 fundraiser in Pennsylvania, saying, “For the good of this economy, we need to end lawsuit abuse. Junk and frivolous lawsuits put people out of work.” The Bush campaign has also unleashed a new TV ad, attacking Kerry for missing a vote “to lower health care costs by reducing frivolous lawsuits against doctors.”
But this time it’s no off-the-rack, Bob Perry bought-and-paid-for hustle-of-the-minute. No, this one’s been in the works for a looooong time.
Behind those slogans are years of painstaking fine-tuning by Republican consultants, focus groups, and corporate think tanks. The term “lawsuit abuse” was coined in the early 1990s by Jan van Lohuizan, a Washington pollster wholater helped plan Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. More than 100 corporate-funded groups have been working to convince the public that the legal system is out of control; organizations such as the American Tort Reform Association and Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, using expensive PR firms and funds from companies like Philip Morris, have spent years testing sound bites and spreading stories of a court system out of control.
That multimillion-dollar investment has turned corporate concerns about such esoteric things as “joint and several liability” into a populist crusade to “stop lawsuit abuse” and return the country to the good old days when old ladies who spilled hot coffee on themselves got sympathy, not punitive damages. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has spent more than $100 million over the past three years on TV ads and lobbying for legislation to restrict citizens’ right to sue, a goal known as “tort reform.” (In the courts, “tort” means an injury, which can include anything from libel to malpractice.) The issue is such a high priority for the Chamber that its president, Thomas J. Donohue, moved in the wake of Edwards’ selection toward abandoning a longstanding policy of neutrality in presidential elections. Jerry Jasinowski, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, told the New York Times that businesspeople are “more frightened by [trial lawyers] than terrorists.”
This may be a mite earlier than they originally intended–they were probably planning an all-out assault for early in Junior’s second term–but Kerry’s selection of a trial lawyer as a running mate is too good an opportunity to miss.
I am sometimes asked, ‘Why all this emphasis on trial lawyers?’ and I usually give an answer I cribbed from radio’s Michael Feldman (What D’ya Know?): ‘It’s mostly Democratic trial lawyers who are collecting in lawsuits and Republicans who are paying.’ That’s a paraphrase–he said it better–but it gets at the point. Trial lawyers support Democrats because Republicans are always trying to get out from under responsibility for the injuries their faulty if not shoddy products cause by changing the laws so they don’t apply.
The conservative effort to disembowel any and all legal protections against the harm that might come from corporate cost-cutting and corner-shaving has been going under the harmless-sounding rubric ‘tort reform’, but the trial lawyers know that it means people will no longer be protected from corporate bean-counters who decide that it’s cheaper to pay $3Mil in negotiated, low-balled wrongful death settlements than $30Mil for a product recall just because the flaw in it might kill a few thousand of the people who use it. What the hell, they would have died eventually anyway, and $27Mil is $27Mil. We’re talking profits here, and those damn trial lawyers just can’t get their priorities straight.
However, there’s more going on here than corporate self-protection at our expense. If you think about how much corporations hate paying for their mistakes–or greed–it won’t come as much of a surprise that the ‘tort reform’ issue has proven to be a great fund-raiser for the Pubs.
In 2000, one of the Bush presidential campaign’s cochairs was Ralph Wayne, the president of the Texas Civil Justice League, a tort reform group whose board members include executives from Halliburton, Dow Chemical, and other major oil and chemical companies. Wayne told reporters that three-quarters of the league’s members supported Bush’s 2000 bid.
Many of them have signed on for 2004 as well. Among Bush’s major fundraisers this year is Allan “Bud” Shivers Jr., a board member of Texans for Lawsuit Reform. And the Bush campaign’s list of “Rangers” — people who’ve pledged to raise at least $200,000 — includes Maurice Greenberg, chief executive of AIG, the nation’s largest liability insurance company. Greenberg, whose company foots the bill when doctors or companies lose lawsuits, has been a vocal tort reform advocate. Changes to the court system are also an issue for many of Bush’s other corporate backers, including Exxon — which still hasn’t paid a $4.5 billion judgment from the Exxon Valdez spill — and Halliburton, which has lobbied hard to limit asbestos claims, a move that would save it hundreds of millions of dollars.
If it ever paid them.
Then there’s the effect of using tort reform as a way to deflect concerns and criticism over the Pubs’ disinterest in doing anything to ease, let alone solve, the health care crisis. Conservatives, who contemptuously label the single-payer system ‘socialized medicine’ and are not-so-secretly terrified of its inevitable creation, want a return to pay-as-you-go because they believe–mnistakenly–that their premiums will go down. As it happens, they won’t. After Junior claimed that Pennsylvania was suffering from a ‘malpractice insurance crisis’, a study showed quite the opposite.
[T]he state’s deputy insurance commissioner reported that malpractice payouts had fallen for the second year in a row, and lawsuit filings were also declining. (Not that doctors necessarily benefited: Insurers, in Pennsylvania and nationwide, have raised premiums even as malpractice suits have declined.)
What a shock. Conservative greed and naivete seem to go hand-in-hand, don’t they?
Unfortunately, we live in a time when the press is apathetic to facts–having swallowed hook-line-and-sinker the conservative claim that their job is simply to repeat what’s said about an issue and that fact-checking proves bias–and the appeal of an attack on lawyers, especially trial lawyers, is an easy sell.
Michael McCann, the director of the Comparative Law and Society Studies Center at the University of Washington, says anti-lawsuit rhetoric works in spite of the facts because it feeds into well-established stereotypes. “The image of the irresponsible plaintiff is right up there with the welfare queen,” says McCann. “That’s why Americans respond to this because it’s a morality tale.” Pollster Frank Luntz once told Republican members of Congress that “it’s almost impossible to go too far when it comes to demonizing lawyers.”
So look for ‘John Edwards: Demon!’ Coming soon to your tv.
Arranology 