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11/19/2008
Wednesday morning
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| 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. |
| Moreover, one prominent trial lawyer, Michael V. Ciresi of Minneapolis, who
represented the state of Minnesota in the tobacco litigation, was running for
the United States Senate in the Democratic primary there. Mr. Ciresi declined
to be interviewed. |
| If you had Bush in the White House and a Republican House, bingo, tort reform
would go to the top of the agenda, Mr. Makinson said. And the tobacco
settlement has been the pot of gold that has enabled trial lawyers to suddenly
have lots of capital behind them. |
| 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. |
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