BASF and Others Urge Senate to Reject Legal Aid Nom

The Bar Associate of San Francisco, and over 70 other organizations, is protesting President Obama's nomination of a Sacramento-area attorney to the board of Legal Services Corp., an agency responsible for overseeing federal legal aid programs that subsidize lawyers for the poor.

The protesting bodies say that nominee Sharon Browne has spent much of her 25-year career working to undermine the very legal aid programs she could now be overseeing, if the Senate confirms her nomination.

From SFGate's story:

Browne "has spearheaded numerous efforts at odds with the mission of the Legal Services Corp.," Arturo González, head of the Bar Association of San Francisco, said in a letter to the Senate committee reviewing the nomination.

Among other cited examples, Browne backed Prop 209 and Prop 227 and a challenge of the California State Bar's program that used dues money to mentor parolees and minority lawyers. Her foundation, Pacific Legal Foundation, also unsuccessfully challenged state programs that pool interest generated by trust accounts held for poor clients by their lawyers. The Supreme Court upheld those programs in 2003.

Pacific Legal Foundation, according to its site "is the oldest and most successful public-interest legal organization that litigates for property rights, limited government, free enterprise and a balanced approach to environmental regulation, in courts across the country."

— Cynthia Foster

Comments

[Steve White]

What more will it take for people to finally see that Obama is a not at all a sincere reformer? He's got as much opportunity to make real changes as any president since FDR, but fritters it away with trying to make peace with the fanatics who now control the Republican party, becuase he thinks that's the way to get re-elected. What he should do instead is use the bully pulpit he's got to rouse public anger at all the special interests and scammers who control the government, but no, this man is a fake, he's not going to do anything that might anger anybody, no matter how much it's in the public interest.