Members of Congress Launch Bipartisan Legal Aid Caucus

A strong conservative joins the struggle for more legal aid funding.

Legal aid has a reputation as a liberal darling. But I’ve written before about how it’s actually consistent with conservative principles. Now two members of Congress are joining hands across the proverbial aisle to launch a new caucus devoted to legal aid. When it comes to legal aid funding, maybe we can all just get along after all.

On December 1, Representatives Joe Kennedy III (D-MA) and Susan Brooks (R-IN) issued a joint press release announcing the “Access to Civil Legal Services Caucus.” This caucus’s goal? “Expanding access to legal representation for low-income families.” And the press release goes on to explain why this is important.

Both representatives are quoted outlining the challenges facing “low-income families, veterans, and victims of domestic violence.” A quote from Rep. Brooks does this particularly well: “Without legal advice to help guide them through the complicated judicial process, and with court personnel and systems often overwhelmed, they can face enormous burdens that devastate families, result in a further descent into poverty, and cause homelessness.”  

And, too frequently, they face these enormous burdens alone. The press release goes on to cite a report from the Boston Bar Association stating that, in 2013, 64% of legal aid-eligible cases in Massachusetts were rejected simply because legal aid organizations lacked the resources to take them on.  

Naturally, then, one of the caucus’s goals should be to ensure adequate funding for legal aid at the national level. And indeed, a quote from Rep. Kennedy makes the caucus’s tie to legal aid funding explicit: “Through this caucus, we can build a strong coalition in Congress to advocate for civil legal aid programs and ensure access to representation is never limited by income.”

What’s particularly cheering about all this is the involvement of Rep. Brooks. Rep. Kennedy is a recent federal officeholder from the always-liberal Kennedy family, so his support for legal aid is no surprise. But Rep. Brooks is not who you’d typically think of as a legal aid supporter. She’s pro-life and has voted to defund Planned Parenthood; she’s a self-professed “strong supporter of the Second Amendment,” which her record seems to bear out; and on the same day that she announced the new legal aid caucus, she also took to the House Floor to speak out against “burdensome” new EPA regulations.  

None of these positions has anything to do with legal aid, but they do suggest that Rep. Brooks is pretty conservative. And in this era of increasing polarization, it’s rare to find a conservative Republican lining up with a liberal Democrat on an issue — like legal aid — that folks tend to think of as dividing along liberal-conservative lines.

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And maybe I’m falling into the same trap of thinking along liberal-conservative lines, but I doubt Rep. Kennedy will have much trouble lining up Democratic allies for this new legal aid caucus. But Rep. Brooks, on the other hand, may have her work cut out for her. Remember that earlier this year, Rep. Alan Mooney (R-WV) proposed cutting federal funding for the Legal Services Corporation — the main federal funding source for legal aid programs — claiming that “Defunding this organization would remove a Federal agency operating outside of its mandate and would also save taxpayers millions of dollars.”

So, Rep. Brooks, thank you for looking to line up Republican allies in the fight to fund legal aid. Please make sure you remind your colleagues of the many benefits of legal aid — not just helping those in need, but also generating economic returns. And make sure you knock down their straw-man conceptions of what legal aid lawyers do and let them know the truth: that most legal aid work is not trying to dismantle the system, but instead it’s just helping individuals with family-law issues and families with housing cases (as you’ve helpfully pointed out). And, finally, good luck!


Sam Wright is a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government. If you have ideas, questions, kudos, or complaints about his column or public interest law in general, send him an email at PublicInterestATL@gmail.com.

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