 |
1/4/2009
Sunday morning
This topic is closed off and you will be taken directly to the website.
Topics taken from open source list. I hope you find this useful.
This site is for our clients only as an information resource.
| For trial lawyers, the stakes are enormous beyond calculation this year
because the potential is there for tort reform to move from the extreme back
burner right up to the front depending on how a couple of elections go, said
Larry Makinson, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a
Washington nonprofit group advocating campaign finance reform. |
| Of course, the animosity between trial lawyers and Mr. Bush went back further
than Mr. Bushs candidacy, extending to his father. Many remembered President
George Bushs derision of trial lawyers in their tasseled loafers during the
1992 campaign, and the words still smarted. |
| Now that they have triumphed over the tobacco industry, trial lawyers have
found a new target, Gov. George W. Bush, and they have been spending huge
amounts of money from the tobacco settlement to keep him and other Republicans
from being elected. |
| And money is what it is all about. When it comes to political action,
corporate America was the pioneer in spending money on campaigns, said Stanley
M. Chesley, a Cincinnati lawyer whose firm gave the Democrats $122,500. They
make trial lawyers look like Mickey Mouse. So trial lawyers are attempting not
only to catch up, but to be a copy cat. If Bush can raise $70 million, the
question is, How can you compete? And there is only one way and that is to
raise that kind of money. |
| The Democratic haul was more than double the $1.12 million in soft money
donations from trial lawyers in 1995, the year prior to the last presidential
race. And, the largest portion of the 1999 money, $1.65 million, went to a
Democratic Party committee supporting Congressional candidates, reflecting the
view of many trial lawyers that a Democratically controlled House could halt
tort reform. |
|
