Senator Hutchison's Principled Stand
Legal background compels Senate's highest-ranking
woman to push for LSC increase

Early last summer, as congressional leaders were emphasizing the importance of fiscal austerity in order to fund important homeland security and anti-terrorism priorities, a Senate majority wrote to request additional funding to address a domestic issue they could no longer ignore.

“Additional funds are clearly needed to see that the doors of justice are open to those in society who are unable to afford access to the legal system,” wrote a bipartisan coalition of 52 Senators in a June 17 letter to the leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee. These Senators went on the record in support of a four percent, or $13.6 million, funding increase for the national legal services program. Their letter concluded, “Clearly, large numbers of Americans do not have access to the legal representation they need. Without this modest increase in federal funding, many more will be denied fair representation. We urge you to fund the Legal Services Corporation at no less than $352.4 million to help meet this urgent need.”

In the end, fiscal discipline ruled the day and no increase was approved. However, the letter was a clear indication of the bipartisan support that now exists for an active federal role in ensuring access to justice for low-income Americans.

Indeed, among the GOP signatories of the letter were both of the Senators from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, two leaders whose conservative credentials are beyond question. Their endorsement of LSC is the latest indication that support for legal services has begun to transcend party affiliation and political orientation.

“Senator Cornyn and I are lawyers,” Senator Hutchison says. “We have had experience with the importance of providing access to justice. It was instilled in us in law school and beyond that we had a responsibility to make a contribution.”

The Texas Senators’ backing of an LSC funding increase can be traced back to 1995 and 1996, when Congress enacted a series of congressional reforms redefining what LSC-funded lawyers could and could not do. As a result, LSC stopped filing class action lawsuits, representing prisoners and most aliens, engaging in lobbying activities, collecting attorney’s fees, and filing suits dealing with controversial issues like abortion and political redistricting. Instead, LSC instructed its grantees to focus exclusively on helping individual clients with critical, day-to-day legal problems.

“The Legal Services Corporation has done some very good things in the last 10 years,” Senator Hutchison says. “Its leaders have really gotten better at determining what the proper role for legal services ought to be—and then doing the outreach to make sure they reach the people who need their services. Without the reforms, Legal Services would not have gotten the bipartisan support it has and perhaps would have faced some reprisals in Congress.”

Senator Cornyn says LSC’s willingness to build a consensus agenda was critical to gaining his support upon taking office in 2002. A former Texas Supreme Court Justice and state Attorney General, he already had a track record of intervening on behalf of legal aid programs committed to carrying out their core functions. While Attorney General, Cornyn steered $5 million from the state’s Crime Victims Compensation Fund to Texas legal services programs so they could better assist victims of domestic violence—an unprecedented use of the Fund.

“There is broad public consensus supporting the provision of legal assistance to people who are victims of crime and domestic violence,” Cornyn notes. “I think it is very smart to build a consensus agenda and leave out the controversial things because they undermine that important bipartisan support. Given the overwhelming need, I’m glad to see the focus is on core legal services.”

Hutchison has been fully cognizant of the Legal Services Corporation’s value to low-income families ever since she was approached by the Texas Bar Association not long after her historic swearing-in as Texas’ first female Senator in 1994. She credits the Bar for making a passionate and persuasive case that LSC assistance was critical to low-income Texans who had no other way to obtain essential legal advice and assistance. The Bar’s outreach reinforced her own positive experiences helping low-income clients as a student in the clinical program of the University of Texas School of Law and later as a private attorney doing indigent defense work.

Hutchison was re-elected to the Senate in a landslide in 2000, and then was elected Vice Chairman of the Republican Conference, making her the highest-ranking woman in the Senate. Today, she continues to find compelling new reasons to champion legal services. “They’re helping people from military families,” she notes. “We particularly need to make sure we are helping the lower-income members of the military who might not have another way to get a lawyer.”

Hutchison’s continued support is especially important because she sits on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee with funding authority over LSC. The key funding panel has a brand-new Chairman in Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL), and Hutchison promises that “I will be one of the advocates of LSC talking to him about the important role that it plays in fulfilling a need that must be filled. If we don’t fill it, then people will not have access to courts and the representation that everyone deserves.”