http://www.washingtondispatch.com/article_9570.shtml

The RNC's Latest Political Target: Frivolous Lawsuits

by Kevin Kelton

July 16, 2004


Now that the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage has withered
on the vine, Republicans are in desperate need of a new wedge issue to
rally their base.

And tort reform is warming up in the bullpen.

With Sen. John Edwards on the opposing ticket, you can bet that
phrases like "jackpot justice" and "wealthy trial lawyer" will light
up the Republican campaign like fireworks on the Forth of July.

They'll try to convince you that frivolous lawsuits are the single
greatest danger to society since--well, since same-sex marriage.

Don't buy it.

Their angry tirades about the scourge of frivolous lawsuits are
disingenuous and hypocritical.

Everyone loves to hate lawyers until they need them.

And "need" is often in the eye of the beholder.

Conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly loves to rail against frivolous
lawsuits and the "pinheads" who bring them.

But he had no trouble filing his own lawsuit against Al Franken and
his book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," a lawsuit so
frivolous the judge literally laughed it out of court.

Then, in condemning the rapper Jadakiss for song lyrics implicating
President Bush in the 9/11 attack, O'Reilly actually urged his radio
listeners to go file class-action suits against the singer's record
company for having allowed the lyrics to be recorded and heard.

Yup, media hyped class-action lawsuits to stop freedom of speech.

Nothing frivolous there.

Fellow radio host and rightwing pit-bull Michael Savage was no less
worried about frivolous lawsuits when he filed suit against a handful
of small, independent websites who urged their readers to boycott the
advertisers on his race-bating, gay-bashing radio show.

Aside from trying to shut down the websites, Savage and company asked
for hundreds of thousands of dollars in punitive damages.

Of course, the suit went nowhere, much like the 1996 reverse
discrimination lawsuit that Savage brought against UC-Berkeley because
he was denied an interview for a job as a graduate school dean.

Imagine, suing for not getting a job interview.

Ah, the frivolity!

Similarly, fellow lawyer basher Rush Limbaugh filed suit in federal
court when a competing radio network ran a parody of his program.
Limbaugh and his producers sued for $15 million.

That weighty legal matter was also dismissed.

Seems conservatives aren't very good at the art of jackpot justice.

And just days ago, a Catholic lawyer (presumably Republican) filed an
"ecclesiastic class-action lawsuit" against none other than Sen. John
Kerry, accusing the Democratic presidential candidate of heresy and
bringing "most serious scandal to the American public."

His crime?

Receiving Holy Communion while being pro-choice.

So for practicing his religion, they sued him.

I kid you not.

It's true; we do live in a litigious society.

But trial attorneys are not the sole cause.

Our capitalist system by its very nature pits companies against
consumers, and the legal process is the only way to level the playing
field.

Remember the Ford Pinto, the once-popular economy car with the
tragically misplaced fuel tanks that blew up on the slightest impact?

And remember how Ford publicly denied there was a problem so they
could keep selling more Pintos to more unsuspecting drivers and
thereby fry more of them to death?

Ford finally stopped doing that.

Why?

Because of the consumer lawsuits that brought the issue to the
public's attention and forced the auto maker to do the right thing.

Class-action lawsuits also brought an end to the practice of
prescribing the drug thalidomide to pregnant woman (thereby sparing a
generation of babies from horrific birth defects), the use of
cancer-causing asbestos in your family's home, and the use of toxic
lead-based paint on your child's playground.

Know what every single one of those lawsuits had in common?

They were initially scorned as meritless or frivolous by the defendant
companies.

Those lawsuits also had one other thing in common: each has saved
thousands upon thousands of lives.

In those cases, trial lawyers weren't the enemy.

They were the heroes.

Today, whenever you hear of a defective product recall or a drug that
is pulled from the market, you can bet it was a lawsuit (or several
lawsuits) that made those companies reluctantly do the responsible
thing.

And when you hear talk show callers vent about absurd jury verdicts,
be discerning.

Take for instance the case of the guy who set the cruise control on
his RV, then got up to go get a sandwich, leading to a crash that he
blamed on the RV maker's poorly written owners' manual.

As was widely reported on the internet, a jury awarded him $1.7
million.

Sound implausible?

That's because it is -- the incident and jury verdict never actually
happened.

Like many other cases that are routinely paraded out by the
lawyer-bashers, it's mere urban legend.

(Indeed, the law firm that supposedly represented the plaintiff
doesn't even exist.)

Those big jury awards that are real often have mitigating
circumstances that are conveniently left out of the story to make it
seem more surreal.

But when a jury awards someone seven figures, you can be fairly
confident that they had some convincing evidence of gross negligence.

A perfect example is the infamous McDonalds coffee case, in which an
elderly lady sued after having burned herself with the defendant's hot
brew.

The $2.9 million verdict sounds ludicrous until you learn that
McDonalds had over 700 other cases of serious coffee burns prior to
that one -- some of them third degree burns demanding skin grafts --
and had settled many of them out of court, including one for $230,000.

That evidence proved the company knew about the coffee problem and did
nothing to correct it because it was more profitable not to,
regardless of the five and six figure settlements they were regularly
paying out.

The company willfully and callously exposed its millions of coffee
customers to serious injury, until a trial attorney (and a jury)
stepped in to stop them.

Whatever you may think of lawsuits and the lawyers that bring them,
you have to admit that in a capitalist society, being a civil
litigation attorney is one of the most capitalistic occupations
around.

What other professionals offer to work for years for free, only
getting paid if and when they get the promised results?

They take a huge financial risk by investing their time and overhead,
and only get rewarded by success.

What could be more entrepreneurial than that?

Conservative hitman Sean Hannity recently found a novel way to take a
potshot at Sen. Edwards and his heralded courtroom victory for a
five-year-old girl injured by a faulty pool drain that literally
sucked her intestines out of her body.

Edwards won a $25 million dollar verdict for the girl's family and,
yes, also got a handsome fee for his years of work on the case.

On his radio program, Hannity asked why Edwards "would take millions
of dollars away from the little girl" by accepting his fee.

That's good conservative values for you!

Edwards' efforts allowed the girl and her parents to afford the
expensive medical care she'll presumably need for the rest of her
life, yet Hannity found a way to demonize the man who made it happen
by objecting to his getting paid.

Hmm, I wonder how much of his salary Sean Hannity returns to his
listeners.

Woops, maybe I shouldn't say that.

I'd hate to give him a reason to sue me.

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Right wing hypocrisy of the worst kind.

Harry