Monday, January 25, 2010
Tracking the trail of attorney fees
Wyoming attorney Karen Budd-Falen has worked in recent months with the Western Legacy Alliance, a group formed in Idaho to promote ranching, mining and other “traditional” public-lands interests. The alliance tracks money the federal government pays to cover attorney fees for groups such as Western Watersheds Project, WildEarth Guardians and the Sierra Club. The groups are high-profile targets — the net worth of many measured in millions of dollars. Budd-Falen argues the money is a large part of what allows such groups to tie environmental issues up in the courts and maintain the cycle of court filings. Plaintiffs must be considered to have “prevailed” over the government to collect EAJA fees. Individuals must have a net worth of no more than $2 million; the limit rises to $4 million for organizations. But nonprofits such as many environmental groups have no limit. A $125-per-hour cap on legal fees can also be waived in special cases — and often when environmental lawyers get involved, Budd-Falen alleged. In December, Budd-Falen said she’d tracked $34.3 million in payments from 13 environmental groups in 18 states. The fees were requested in nearly half of 1,159 cases; in 47 of those, the amount paid by the government was not publicly revealed...read more
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2 comments:
I am sure that all the people who prattle on for hours (here and elsewhere) about the "welfare ranchers" will be front and center in the effort to stop this silly subsidy of multimillion-dollar environmental groups known as EAJA. After all, one wouldn't want to be taking any entitlement money, right? Just like one wouldn't want to consider oneself a private interest with its own biases and objectives when it is demonstrably so.
After thinking about this for a while, it occurred to me that I was being a little less than clear about the EAJA and what it was about. It is important that people realize that the way the law is used today is a perversion of what it was originally intended to do. There is no question that some kind of reform is needed with the policy, though.
The EAJA started out with the best of intentions. It was supposed to be an assistance program to help disadvantaged people, mostly in the ag sector, enforce and protect their water and other property rights from encroachment by other groups (ie developers). The fact that high-dollar groups and their high-dollar attorneys have managed to twist the law as they have is shameful.
Once people lose sight of what the original intent of legislation or any other form of rulemaking was, it leaves the field wide open for others to come in and not only retool the policies in their own image, but also to supplant the true history with mythology that strengthens their agenda.
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