Republicans Seeking to Cut Legal Aid to the Poor

Filed under: News, Politics

In a set of spending cuts proposed by the Republican Study Committee, legal aid programs that help women in distress are among the items on the chopping block. According to their website, the Republican Study Committee is "a group of over 165 House Republicans organized for the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda in the House of Representatives." They plan to keep spending at 2006 levels, cut some programs and get rid of some programs altogether.

One eye-popping development is that the RSC is seeking to significantly cut the funding for the Legal Services Corporation, an organization that offers civil legal support to those with incomes below 125 percent of the poverty line. By cutting services, the RSC estimates that they can save $420 million. This would cause the constituency of the Legal Services Corporation, consisting mostly of women, to look elsewhere for support on domestic violence cases, child custody cases and eviction problems.

LSC is listed as America's largest provider of civil legal support for the poor. Started in 1974, the group distributes 95 percent of its funding to 136 nonprofit legal aid programs across the country. LSC also closes nearly one million cases per year and helps five million Americans. By eliminating such a program in its entirety, Republicans would only be serving to destroy millions of families and the futures of countless children. It would seem that cutting a program that helps families would be highly inconsistent with the Republican claim to support family values. Perhaps families only matter when they are rich.

The broader Republican push to slice programs that provide support to the poor is not surprising. These efforts are in line with their work last month to cut unemployment benefits at Christmas in exchange for tax cuts for the wealthy. It's interesting to see that the Republicans appear to be concerned about the deficit when it comes to cutting resources to struggling Americans, but they become fiscally flamboyant when it's time to give tax cuts to the wealthy.

Inequality in our justice system is a serious and growing problem in America, and it has a significant impact on the black community. The price of high paid attorneys is typically too much to afford for quite a few American families, leading to the mass incarceration problem that has served to destroy urban America. Programs such as the Legal Services Corporation deserve our support, along with groups like the ACLU, the Sentencing Project and many others that work to level the playing field. But Republicans aren't so keen on making playing fields level, and that is incredibly unfortunate.


Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and a Scholarship in Action Resident of the Institute for Black Public Policy. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.

 

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Julie Berry Lori Heuring Nicole Scherzinger Jill Arrington Tami Donaldson