A Gain for Equal Justice

When it radically restructured federal welfare rules in 1996, Congress required most recipients to find gainful employment. Job programs would train welfare clients for the work force, teaching them job skills that would allow them to build new lives. That’s if they speak English. In Los Angeles County, as elsewhere, job-training options are extremely limited for non-English speakers. Yet until the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week in favor of legal aid for the poor, welfare recipients had no way to push counties, for example, to expand their limited training offerings in other languages--or to mount other challenges to the fairness of welfare laws. Congress should see the court’s decision as a warning that there are limits to punishing poor people who need legal help.

A sharply divided high court correctly ruled that legal aid lawyers cannot be barred from challenging welfare laws on behalf of their indigent clients. The 5-4 ruling overturns a restriction Congress punitively imposed in 1996, blocking lawyers at the federally funded Legal Services Corp. or groups that receive federal legal aid funds from suing the government over the effects of welfare laws.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said the restriction violated free-speech rights, distorted the legal system and illegally insulated federal laws from legal challenge. Congress is not required to underwrite legal aid for indigent clients, he wrote. But if Congress does fund legal services in a particular area, Kennedy concluded, its funding decision “cannot be aimed at the suppression of ideas thought inimical to the government’s own interest.”

The court’s decision, however, is unlikely to end attacks on the Legal Services Corp., a favorite target of congressional conservatives. The agency distributed $329 million this year to hundreds of legal services programs across the country, including in Southern California. These groups primarily provide basic legal services like writing a will, handling an adoption or divorce or resolving problems such as landlord-tenant or credit disputes.

Yet the agency’s budget has generated fierce partisan battles, with Republican leaders cutting more than $100 million in recent years in a misguided effort to curtail litigation on behalf of the poor. Last year, for the first time in five years, Legal Services Corp. saw its budget rise by 10%. The Bush administration says it will not seek further cuts in 2002 but neither will it offer increased funding.

The court’s narrow ruling, while ending the ban on welfare rights cases, still leaves in place several other unwarranted restrictions. Legal Services Corp. lawyers, for example, still cannot pursue class actions on behalf of indigent clients.

That poor people have a right to the basic legal rights enjoyed by those who can afford to pay an attorney shouldn’t be so wild a notion. The high court took an important step toward restoring a measure of dignity to indigent clients. Congress should at least leave the agency’s budget intact and lift other harsh restrictions.