It's critical that Americans learn of the importance that the Founding Fathers gave to the right to civil jury trials for all causes and in all courts, state and federal. Historian Pauline Maier's book, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788, has drawn rave reviews from a number of conservative legal scholars. Randy Barnett called it "marvelous" and described it as "the first comprehensive narrative of the ratification of the U.S Constitution, from the Philadelphia convention, through each of the states (in order of deliberation) and the drafting and adoption of the first 10 amendments." So I downloaded it on Kindle and searched for references to the right to a civil jury trial. And the book refers to a number of instances in which the states discussed and debated the need to protect that right in explicitly in the Bill of Rights after the delegates to the Constitutional Convention rejected motions to do so in the Constitution.
The benefit of the right to civil jury trials and the need to protect that right was a part of numerous state ratification conventions. For instance, the delegates to the Pennsylvania ratification delegation entered into a heated argument over whether Sweden had utilized, and then eliminated, civil jury trials and the impact on civil justice, which was resolved only when a commentary by the English jurist William Blackstone proved that civil jury trials had been commonplace thoughout Europe. The book documents similar debates in Connecticut and Virginia, the latter resolved by reference to the same Blackstone commentary that determined the debate in Pennsylvania. No less a patriot than Patrick Henry argued that the lack of explicit protection of jury trials for civil and criminal cases would lead to the loss of all rights. It was these debates that eventually led James Madison to propose the inclusion of what became the Seventh Amendment in the package of constitutional amendments proposed during the first Congress. And as I've documented in posts here, most state constitutions explicitly protect the right to civil jury trials.
I hope tomorrow's events in Nashville will be a springboard to a nationwide discussion on the meaning of the Seventh Amendment and the need to protect the God-given right to civil jury trials in state and federal courts. It's clear from the documentation of the state ratification conventions that the Founders did not intend to see this precious right limited or eliminated in state courts.
]]>The Founders didn't limit the exercise of that God-given right to certain causes or to one group of citizens over another group of citizens. As the shackles of racism and sexism were removed, all Americans were eventually afforded that right to seek justice before a jury for their claims. So trespass cases, medical malpractice claims, property rights claims, and lawsuits to protect religious liberty under the First Amendment are equal under the Constitution and Bill of Rights, just as each so if is equal in the eyes of God.
Today on the nationally syndicated What's Up broadcast on Sirius Channel 131 and 12 radio stations, I discussed the fight for religious liberty brewing over the Obama Administration's "compromise" on the mandate for insurers to provide contraceptives, some of which act as abortifacients. Those of us who own a business and are faithful to the teachings of the Catholic Church, and non-Catholic business owners whose religious convictions oppose abortion, will find it impossible to reconcile that mandate with our religious convictions. Eventually, we might have to seek justice, and prevent the imposition of that mandate, by filing suit in federal court. In so doing, we would follow in the footsteps of our forefathers who sought protection from excessive power wielded by the sovereign, through an appeal in the halls of civil justice. Regardless of anyone's views on the underlying issues, all Americans should respect the conscientious objections to certain types of medical services, and all Americans should respect the constitutionally protected right to defend such objections in a court of law.
You can download my audio interview from the What's Up program:
Segment 1
Segment 2
Terry interviewed me for today's broadcast, and we discussed recent congressional action to assist property rights owners, victims of forced abortions, and American victims of Iranian terrorism by enabling their lawsuits. I noted the inconsistency between the protection by many Congressmen of those groups' 7th Amendment rights and the attacks by some of the same Congressmen on medical malpractice lawsuits. As I noted, the Founders built a civil justice system to enable Americans to have their civil suits heard before juries in all types of cases. The Founders didn't differentiate between lawsuits to protect property rights and medmal claims, and neither should Congress. See my post of January 25 on the reasons for Republicans and Tea Partiers to support open courtrooms for all.
You can download listen to the first interview segment here and to the second interview segment here.
]]>Articles from the pro- and anti-abortion commentators have focused on the criminal side of the bill and its potential impact on abortion rights. But I want to focus on another section of the bill, one which enables civil suits by the woman whose baby could be forcibly aborted, or by certain family members. That's a remarkable development for the Republicans serving on the Judiciary Committee, considering where they stand on other types of lawsuits.
Most of the House Republicans on that committee have been openly hostile to victims of medical malpractice, and last year approved H.R. 5, a bill designed to impose national limits on awards in medmal suits and impose wage limits on the attorneys who try such cases in court. So House Republican Judiciary Committee members are simultaneously opposing lawsuits filed in cases of personal injury or death, but creating a private right of action when race or sex is used as an excuse for abortion. Moreover, the committee Republicans backing H.R. 3541 have also backed H.R. 1433, titled "The Private Property Rights Protection Act," which enables civil suits by property owners against abusive eminent domain actions by local governments. There's no logical basis for the inconsistent treatment between medmal lawsuits on one hand, and certain abortion or property rights cases on the other.
I'm not against either of the two bills creating new private rights of action. As a pro-life conservative, I'm all for new legal tools to limit abortion on demand. But let's be consistent, just as the Founding Fathers were, when it comes to the civil justice system. They protected open courtrooms for all causes and cases, and so should Congress. Medical malpractice victims, victims of forced abortions, and property owners are equal under the law and have an equally unalienable right to bring their cases before a local jury.
]]>The Dalkon Shield IUD was implanted in an estimated 2.5 million women from January 1971 through June 1974 before it was taken off the market, thanks to civil litigation brought by injured women. At the time, medical devices were not required to receive pre-market approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Approximately 200,000 women claimed they were injured by the device and filed lawsuits against the company. The Dalkon Shield IUD often became imbedded in the uterus, and the multifilament tail string on the device became a vehicle for bacteria. As a result, women wearing the shield were seven times more likely to develop pelvic infections than women using no contraceptives. There were over 200 documented cases of a rare, potentially lethal type of infected miscarriage called spontaneous septic abortion. Twenty women died of complications associated with the Dalkon Shield. The dangers of the Dalkon Shield were not revealed until the first device lawsuit went to trial in 1974, where the public found out that the IUD's manufacturer knew about the life-threatening risks of the device but withheld this information.
Meanwhile, thanks to aggressive marketing efforts, about 10 million women in the U.S. used the Copper-7 IUD between 1974 and 1986. By 1986, hundreds of lawsuits were filed claiming that the Copper-7 caused pelvic inflammatory diseases, ectopic pregnancies, perforated uteruses and sterility. As a result, the Copper-7 was taken off the market, solely because of the lawsuits brought against the manufacturers. But the FDA never withdrew its approval of the Copper-7.
RU-486 was never tested in uncontrolled trials or tested for use by women under 18, despite being approved for any age. By approving RU-486, the FDA also mandated a previously unapproved use of misprostol over the objections of its manufacturer Searle, who originally created misprostol to reduce the risk of ulcers. According to 9,300 pages of documents uncovered by Judicial Watch, standard procedural and scientific requirements were circumvented during the expedited FDA approval of RU-486 in 2000. A host of pro-life organizations, including the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetric Gynecologists and the Christian Medical Association, have opposed RU-486 from its testing period to today.
The Ortho Evra transdermal birth control patch was approved by the FDA in 2002 as a supposedly safe alternative to the birth control pill - this despite the FDA's own pre-approval findings that the patch led to three times as many non-fatal blood clots. This FDA finding was kept quiet as women switched over to the patch - by 2004, 800,000 women were on the patch. A 2005 FOIA request finally revealed that the FDA had received 16,000 different adverse reaction reports associated with the patch, including 17 deaths that appeared to be clot-related. The women who died included Kathleen Thoren, a 25-year-old mother of three; Sasha Webber, a 25-year-old mother of two; and Zakiya Kennedy, an 18-year-old Manhattan fashion student. Ortho Evra's manufacturer waited until 2006 to warn women that the patch would expose them to the possibility of blood clots. Worse still, FDA kept that information quiet in 2002 when it approved the patch. Lawsuits continue against the company.
Norplant was introduced in 1991, and women began noticing that Norplant's label inadequately warned about severe side effects like excessive menstrual bleeding, headaches, nausea, dizziness, and depression. In a complaint filed against Norplant's manufacturer Wyeth-Ayerst, women who used the system suffered significant weight gain, felt numbness and pain in their arms (where the silicone rods were implanted), and experienced excessive bleeding for two
weeks. Many of these women also experienced great difficulty exiting from the Norplant protocol - some women became scarred after having to undergo surgery under a general anesthetic to remove the implants. In 1999, Wyeth-Ayerst agreed to pay out at least $50 million to settle the claims of 36,000 women. The American Life League maintains a Norplant page on its website, explaining its qualities and the testing deficiencies.
Last year, the FDA approved the pill "Ella," a product of the French maker HRA Pharma, which reduces the chance of pregnancy up to five days after sex. The pro-life Family Research Council claims that Ella blocks progesterone receptor proteins, and thereby starves a developing baby of this needed protein, much like RU-486. FRC cites numerous studies in Europe that show "that Ella causes abortions in animals, including rats, rabbits, guinea pigs and macaques (similar to monkeys)."
And FRC says that "there is compelling reason to believe that it (Ella) will likely have similar side effects" as RU-486, such as "excessive bleeding and increase(d) vulnerability to infection." In other words, trial lawyers exercising the 7th Amendment right to a jury trial for civil suits may have to ride to the rescue of the women who will be harmed by Ella, just as they have with respect to other devices and drugs dangerous to women.
]]>I can understand the desire of the doctors' groups to rationalize the process and avoid painful SGR cuts, which could result in an actual reduction in medical services for those who most need them. But already we've seen political allies of the AMA recommend that Congress pay for the "doc fix" by crushing the constitutional rights of all Americans and instituting sweeping nationwide limits on medical malpractice and health care-related lawsuits. Numerous conservatives and Tea Party-side legal experts have condemned any such federal tort reform law as an unconstitutional infringement on states' and individual rights. That's reason alone to not pursue that option.
But there's another reason why Congress shouldn't try to pay for the "doc fix" with medmal limits: the CBO's estimates of revenues resulting from the institution of federal limits on medmal lawsuits are fatally flawed. The AMA and its allies continuously promote a CBO estimate, released during the ObamaCare debate, that medmal limits would save close to $60 billion over ten years. Here are the flaws in that estimate:
First, CBO not only has a lousy record of estimating ten-year budget deficits and projections of policy impacts, but it's missed often on just year-to-year projections. It's no wonder that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor accused the CBO of outright "budget gimmickry" in its calculations last year on the supposed "savings" that would result from enactment of the Affordable Care Act, or that Cantor and House Speaker John Boehner criticized CBO for predicting that repealing ObamaCare would cost $145 billion.
Second, CBO admitted in 2010 that it did not "consider the effect of tort reform on patient health and medical outcomes." Remarkably, the CBO determined that "many studies of malpractice costs do not examine health outcomes." In fact, implementing CBO's projection of "savings" could actually result in more deaths and injuries. CBO admitted in its estimate that limits on medmal lawsuits could "an additional 4,853 Americans killed every year by medical malpractice, or 48,250 Americans over the ten-year period CBO examines." And another 400,000 or more patients could be injured during the same 10 years. That's not a cost that CBO can estimate, but it's one we don't want to bear.
Third, the CBO can't estimate the impact that sweeping limits on medmal lawsuits would have on federal health care costs paid for by Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration. If someone is brain-damaged, mutilated or rendered paraplegic as a result of medical negligence, but cannot obtain compensation from the culpable party through the tort system, he or she may be forced to turn to those programs for compensation. None of these increased Medicaid or VA hospital costs are considered in the CBO estimate.
Whenever there is a successful medical malpractice lawsuit involving an elderly or poor person, Medicare and Medicaid can claim either an interest in whatever the patient recovers, so the victim reimburses the government for some of the health care expenditures. Without the lawsuit, Medicare and Medicaid will lose funds that the government would otherwise be able to recoup. And none of these lost funds are considered by the CBO. In fact, Congressmen and Senators of both parties are sponsoring legislation to improve that process and return even more revenue to the Treasury, but CBO still can't count that money properly.
Fourth, CBO guesstimated that imposing federal lawsuit limits would result in a reduction in a drop in liability insurance premiums, but provided no raw data, explanations, or sources to back up its estimate. Numerous states have already imposed caps on medmal lawsuit damages, with no impact on personal health insurance premiums. In fact, a study by the Commonwealth Fund shows health insurance premiums rising rapidly in California since 2003, despite the state's very tough limits on awards in health care-related lawsuits. CBO makes the assumption that Uncle Sam can wave a wand and magically force health insurance premiums to drop. How's that one working out in California?
In conclusion: Anyone betting on federal lawsuit limits to pay for the "doc fix" is wasting their time. Not only is it unconstitutional, but it won't raise real money and solve our budget problems. Congress should reject any proposal to impose federal limits on health care-related lawsuits, and instead spend its valuable time designing a constitutional and mathematically reliable "doc fix" solution.
]]>In 1983, an Iranian suicide agent exploded a massive truck bomb, destroying a U.S military barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The blast killed 241 American Marines, soldiers and sailors and injured hundreds more. The mass murder was a brutal, unprovoked attack on American servicemen. It also was a terrorist assault on the United States by the most active sponsor of State terrorism in the world, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Over 1000 family members of the victims exercised their constitutional right to hold Iran accountable and sued in U.S. courts for that vicious attack. In 2007, the Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia found Iran liable for the Beirut bombing. He ordered it to pay $2.65 billion to the surviving victims and families. The families' attorneys identified an account of Iranian funds, laundered through Europe into the U.S. and stashed in an account at a bank in New York City, and the judge froze that account in order to satisfy the judgment.
But central banks of countries are granted immunity from attachment, even if the central bank is of a state sponsor of terrorism. The Iranian central bank has already notified a federal court in NYC of its intent to file a motion to lift the attachment. Absent special legislation, the order freezing the account could be lifted, and Iran could regain the funds in the account for use in its nuclear proliferation and terrorism activities.
So the families have turned to Congress to ask for legislation that would
clarify that state central banks of terrorist states (Iran, Cuba, Sudan and North Korea) forfeit the immunity when their assets are surreptitiously laundered into the United States through money laundering jurisdictions. The bill language would affect only the central banks of the four state sponsors of terrorism, when they are caught surreptitiously laundering assets through the U.S. financial system.
On Thursday, the Senate Banking Committee will act on S. 1048, the Senate version of a bill designed to impose new sanctions on Iran. The House approved their version of this bill in December. The families are asking the Banking Committee to add the special language described above to the bill prior to action by the full Senate. I have been working with the families as a paid consultant as they seek justice through the enactment of this special legislation.
Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is opposed to the families' effort, apparently concerned that other countries might refuse to invest their funds in the U.S. or treat the Federal Reserve similarly. The families responded in a press release on Monday. Spokesperson Lynn Derbyshire, whose brother was killed in the attacks, said, "Everyone agrees that the most effective way to hold Iran accountable, short of war, is to deliver a blow to its government finances. The Obama Administration has been encouraging other nations to impose economic sanctions on Iran. Incredibly, however, it is opposing a clear and effective way to take $2.65 billion out of the Iranian financial system and directly punish Iran for a specific act of terrorism Iran would like America to forget."
The families deserve some measure of justice and the Congress must act to prevent Iran from accessing the $2+ billion in frozen funds. Hopefully the Senate Banking Committee will ignore the Obama Administration and add the special language to the Iran sanctions bill.
]]>When Frances Barnes had a stroke in August 2008, she was taken by ambulance to Howard University Hospital. The 80-year-old grandmother was there for about two weeks when she began complaining about pain in her legs. Her daughter Althea Hart pulled back her mother's blankets and noticed a strange odor. Hart thought the smell was coming from the compression stockings wrapped around Barnes's legs to help with circulation, so she took them off. She found that her mother's left foot had turned black.
Hospital staff had failed to follow physician orders, which required taking off the compression stockings after each shift for at least 30 minutes, according to a DC Department of Health investigation.
"We called a nurse right away, and they tried to heal her infection," says Patricia Moss, another of Barnes's daughters. "But they couldn't."
Barnes's family moved her to Providence Hospital in Northeast DC, where she had to have her lower leg amputated. Barnes moved to a nursing home, where she continued to get infections; she died at Providence in February 2009, five months after her foot turned black. Barnes left behind eight children, 15 grandchildren, and 16 great-grandchildren.
The facts are startling. Medical malpractice appears to be worsening. "In 2010, the federal government estimated that faulty medical care contributed to the death of about 15,000 Medicare patients per month. By these measures, faulty hospital care is one of the leading causes of death, behind heart disease and cancer." And surgery on the wrong location in body happens "as often as 40 times a week in US hospitals and clinics," according to the Joint Commission, which accredits American hospitals. All this despite the use of a universal protocol in accredited hospitals as a way to eliminate wrong-site surgeries.
On March 23 of last year, I wrote about surveys of operating room and critical care nurses that revealed shocking instances of medical malpractice. For instance, 85% of 2,383 nurses surveyed said they'd been in a situation where measures such as checklists and protocols warned them of a problem that would have otherwise harmed a patient. But 58% of the nurses said they'd been in situations where it was either unsafe to speak up or they were unable to get others to listen.
Tort reformers screaming for an unconstitutional federal takeover of state courtrooms and tort law should think a little more logically. The most important and successful way to institute valuable reforms in the medmal area is to institute cost-effective prevention mechanisms. State legislatures and Medicare should concentrate on requiring such protocols, not trying to limit the damage on the back end through limits on medical malpractice lawsuits. As the libertarian Cato Institute demonstrated last year, caps on medmal awards only hurt consumers, they don't reduce deadly medical errors.
Fix the problem at its source and you'll see real reductions in the number of medical malpractice lawsuits.
]]>So wrote Justice Clarence Thomas in his opinion for a unanimous Supreme Court, when it ruled in a 1998 copyright infringement case that the Seventh Amendment requires the right to a jury trial where the copyright owner elects to recover statutory damages. In Feltner v. Columbia Pictures Television, Inc., the Court overruled the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had affirmed a district court's ruling denying Feltner's motion for a jury trial. Justice Thomas' opinion included a discussion of the applicability of the Seventh Amendment to copyright infringement cases and, in effect, a terrific defense of the right to a civil jury trial and the role of local juries. Justice Thomas noted that even before adoption of the Constitution, in England and in the American colonies, "copyright suits for monetary damages were tried in courts of law, and thus before juries." And he wrote that the Copyright Act of 1790 didn't change that practice.
Ironically, the attorney asserting Mr. Feltner's Seventh Amendment rights was John Roberts, now the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and during oral argument before the Court, he eloquently noted the historical role and significance of civil jury rights enumerated under the Seventh Amendment:
In light of clear historical practice on both sides of the Atlantic prior to 1971, Feltner had a right under the Seventh Amendment to have a jury make that finding and others on which the award was based and determine the amount of damages to be imposed within the statutory limits.
The idea that... when Congress fixes the amount of the penalty it can therefore delegate that task to judges ignores the whole purpose of the Seventh Amendment.
The Seventh Amendment is to protect against judicial bias and corruption and overreaching and, while that's not implicated when Congress fixes the amount because Congress is doing that, the judge is just applying it, when you give that task to the judge the whole reason for having the Seventh Amendment comes into play...
As someone who has criticized the Roberts Court for decisions denying civil jury trials in a number of preemption and arbitration cases, I was surprised to learn of this defense of the Seventh Amendment by Justice Thomas. My thanks to Bob Peck of the Center for Constitutional Litigation in Washington for pointing it out. Now if only the Roberts Court would only take a realistic view of the practical and harmful impacts of federal preemption and forced arbitration clauses on our right to a civil jury trial.
]]>Why doesn't he realize that his beloved federal cap on medmal lawsuit awards shares the same basis in constitutional theory as the Obamacare he wishes so hard to replace? Both are fundamentally based on the expansion of the Commerce Clause initiated after the Supreme Court's decision in Wickard v. Filburn. The Obama Justice Department cited that case in its briefs in Obamacare cases (page 18), and the American Tort Reform Association cited it in a paper supporting federal medmal limits (page 2). Or does Rep. Pitts recognize only those limits on federal power with which he agrees?
And why - WHY - does Rep. Pitts want to reward the pro-Obamacare and pro-abortion AMA and their buddies among medical groups, who shoved the individual mandate down our throats? Why does he want to give them partial civil immunity from deadly medical errors when they're pursuing the federal takeover of all health care?
Maybe most importantly, is Rep. Pitts speaking just for himself or for most or all of the House GOP? If he took off on his own to propose an unconstitutional and hypocritical bill, then it's easy to predict the bill won't enjoy even the support of too many Republicans. Let's hope so.
]]>1. CIVIL SUITS CAN KILL OBAMACARE: The Republicans and Tea Partiers are rightly cheering on those state Attorneys General who have sued in federal court to declare ObamaCare unconstitutional. But it's rather disingenous to trash trial lawyers and then turn around and enthusiatically back the anti-ObamaCare lawsuits filed by a state's top official trial lawyer. At least it guarantees that we won't hear anyone of either party refer to the state AG suits as "junk lawsuits" and trash the AGs as "power-greedy trial lawyers."
2. CIVIL SUITS PROTECT THE UNBORN & WOMENS' HEALTH: I posted in August 2010 that trial lawyers have assisted the pro-life and womens' health causes for decades, by pursuing dangerous abortifacients, and unsafe drugs, and defective medical devices, all approved by a FDA asleep at the switch. And civil suits will be the last line of defense for champions of the unborn against the next wave of abortifacient techonology.
3. CIVIL SUITS PROTECT RELIGIOUS LIBERTY, GUN RIGHTS & PROPERTY OWNERS: "The 7th Amendment is the "sword and shield" enabling us to defend our religious liberty against government interference and intolerant institutions, e.g., pompous and overbearing university administrators. The Alliance Defense Fund successfully reversed attempts at university firings in the Howell and Sheldon cases by first suing the respective universities, and ADF prevents many other illegal actions just by threatening a suit. I didn't see anyone cracking on them as "sharks" and decrying their filings as "junk lawsuits." And of course, it took two civil lawsuits, filed by Americans exercising their 7th Amendment rights, to finally ensure that the correct, Constitutionally conservative view of the Second Amendment is the law of the land. Meanwhile, local governments try to use eminent domain often to take over private property - what would happen if their actions were impervious to legal challenge?
4. CIVIL SUITS PUNISH TERRORIST FINANCIERS: As I posted in June 2010, the 7th Amendment has been an important tool for the pursuit of terrorist financing, and civil lawsuits have resulted in some important judgments. The family of David Boim, an American killed by Hamas terrorists in Israel, successfully won a $156 million judgment against the Dallas-based Holy Land Foundation for its role as the biggest Hamas fundraiser in the U.S. And terrorism victims' attorneys from the Motley Rice law firm (one of my consulting clients), who are pursuing the Arab Bank in a civil suit for its alleged role as a conduit for terrorist funds, were able to access information gathered by Israeli intelligence for presentation when the case comes before a jury, hopefully soon. A former official of the NSC under Presidents Clinton and Bush testifed to Congress that, "civil litigation can substantially enhance the financial consequences that such entities face" (referring specifically to terrorist financiers).
5. THE 7TH AMENDMENT REPRESENTS A MAJOR DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW AND ISLAMIC SHARIAH LAW: As I posted in August 2010, there are never any juries under Islamic shariah law for any case, civil or criminal - 800 years of American constitutional and Western jurisprudence go down the tubes, and a local imam picks the winner. The results are not just primitive, but barbarous, especially for women.
6. LIMITING CIVIL JUSTICE EMPOWERS JUDGES, BUREAUCRATS & "RULING CLASS," AND DEGRADES LOCAL CONTROL: We already see a chasm between the ruling class and the rest of the country along numerous political and social fault lines. Federally imposed limits on the civil justice process, such as the preemption of state statutory and common law for certain claims or restrictions in federal civil pleading standards, only cede more power to the judiciary and federal bureaucrats. Putting complete control over certain products or services (e.g., implantable medical devices or financial services) in the hands of federal bureaucrats (the FDA or Treasury, respectively), with total immunity for the companies involved, is simply not the system of justice that the Founding Fathers intended to build. To reiterate what another conservative said, "The tort system promotes local control. Through the jury system, people at the local level decide what is reasonable behavior within their own communities. Ordinary citizens, applying a common sense standard of reasonable care, making decisions about acceptable and unacceptable conduct within their community - that is the essence of local government. And, as a result of those decisions, suppliers of goods and services within the marketplace will often modify their own behaviors... without the necessity of yet another costly and intrusive governmental bureaucracy..."
7. MOST IMPORTANTLY: BECAUSE THE FOUNDING FATHERS SAID IT'S A PRIORITY FOR ALL AMERICANS: There is no question that the Founding Fathers - from Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton, to John Adams, to George Mason, all explicitly said that citizens have the right to have their claims against their neighbors heard by a jury of their peers. It's mentioned in the Declaration of Indepedence and was protected in the first Virginia Declaration of Rights.
Promoting the 7th Amendment is the "right" thing to do to avoid being a political hypocrite of the type that Tea Partiers want to remove from power. Republicans and Tea Partiers uphold the 1st Amendment in the face of a biased and inaccurate media elite, and we defend the 2d Amendment in the face of serial shooters. We should protect and promote the 7th Amendment at all times as we do all other Amendments in the Bill of Rights.
]]>The House Judiciary Committee voted to approve H.R. 1433, titled The Private Property Rights Protection Act. Co-sponsored by a bipartisan group of Representatives including many Republicans the bill is aimed at stopping municipalities from condemning private property for private land development. The bill was inspired in part by the case of a group of homeowners in Long Beach, New Jersey, who successfully fought the city's efforts to take their homes and allow developers to make millions building upscale condos. Section 4 of the bill creates a private right of action to fight local eminent domain actions.
It's too bad the committee Republicans aren't as committed to protecing our lives from the impact of deadly medical errors by negligent health care personnel. Many of the Republicans voting for H.R. 1433 also voted last year to crush most medical malpractice lawsuits, as provided for in H.R. 5. That bill imposes caps on noneconomic damages, which would eliminate an incentive for lawsuits filed by the elderly and infirm. That bill would tell states how to manage their courtrooms and mandate a wage scale for the attoneys filing the cases, the only federally imposed wage scale approved by any set of Republicans.
It's ridiculously inconsistent for the Republican co-sponsors of H.R. 1433 to also co-sponsor H.R. 5. The two bills couldn't be more contradictory in intent, spirit, and basis in American Constitutional law. House Judciary Republicans should think twice before placing a higher value on property rights than on human life.
]]>I thought it was time to go back and research President Reagan's personal stance on federal tort reform. I knew a number of senior officials in the Reagan Administration who were for some federal interference with the right to a jury trial for civil suits and states' rights, notably then-Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige, for whom it became a personal crusade. But when reviewing President Reagan's major speeches, from before the 1980 election to the end of his Presidency in 1989, I found the following:
1. Ronald Reagan never proposed any tort reform measure during any of his eight State of the Union speeches, and never criticized trial lawyers in them either. I've searched every word of his SOTUs. It's a strange fact that President Obama proposed more tort reform in this year's SOTU than Ronald Reagan did in eight SOTUs (I wonder if Republicans are comfortable with that).
2. Reagan didn't criticize trial lawyers or propose tort reform in his major address to Congress on April 28, 1981, in which he proposed his economic plan. This was his first speech since the assassination attempt on his life, and it set up the entire Reagan Revolution.
3. Reagan didn't criticize trial lawyers or propose tort reform in either of his Inaugural Addresses in 1981 and 1985. Neither did he in either of his speeches accepting the Republican nomination for President in 1980 and 1984.
4. I can find no mention of this topic in any of his major speeches prior to his election: not in his famous "Time For Choosing" speech in 1964; not in his speech to the first CPAC conference in 1974; not in a speech at Hillsdale College in 1977 titled, "Whatever Happened to Free Enterprise" - none of them. It's obvious that Ronald Reagan wasn't interested in limiting civil suits.
In 1986, President Reagan gave a speech at the Chamber of Commerce, in which he backed the findings of a "Tort Reform Working Group" (TRWG) inside the Administration. To backtrack: The Reagan White House created a number of "Working Groups" to address a variety of topics. For instance, I worked on a "Consulting Services Working Group" that changed the procurement of outside consultants and saved the Commerce Department several million dollars. The TRWG proposed a group of sweeping tort reform proposals, many of which are also included in H.R. 5, the bill reported last week by the House Judiciary Committee to impose federal limits on health care lawsuits.
Here's what Reagan said about the TRWG proposals in his 1986 speech, and note the emphasis on protecting states' rights:
Earlier this year I endorsed the report of my Domestic Policy Council's Tort Policy Working Group. This report contains a number of recommendations, recommendations that include fixed-dollar limitations for certain kinds of awards and the establishment of assurances that liability judgments go to those actually wronged or injured and not to the lining of their attorney's pockets. Now, one of the report's most important recommendations urged our administration to submit reform legislation to the Congress.
This legislation, carefully drafted, has now been introduced in the Congress by Senator Robert Kasten and Congressman Hamilton Fish. It restores the fault standard, which requires that actual fault or wrongdoing must be established in most cases before liability can be assessed. It limits pain-and-suffering and punitive damage awards, awards the amount contingency-fee lawyers could earn, and restricts the joint and several liability doctrine that can force a single defendant to pay all damages even if he is only partly to blame. To be sure, much tort law would remain to be reformed by the 50 States, not the Federal Government. And in our Federal system of government this is only right. Many of the Tort Policy Working Group recommendations, for example, would have to be implemented at the State level to be fully effective. This administration's bill represents a much-needed overhaul of Federal laws governing interstate commerce -- one of the fields of authority the Federal Government is specifically granted by the Constitution -- and sets an example of common sense for the rest of the Nation to follow.
To my knowledge, and with the limitations that come with Internet research, this is the only speech in Ronald Reagan's long political career that comes close to proposing specific federal tort reform measures. And he recognized that states are the proper venue for the debate over tort reform, under "our Federal system of government," not the federal government. And he said it ONCE. He didn't follow up that speech with any other, not at the 1987 CPAC conference, not at the 1988 Republican convention, nowhere. You can do your own research and try to prove me wrong (I suggest you start at this website and at this website, where I found links to every speech cited in this post).
Anyone asserting that "Ronald Reagan was for tort reform" is mistating the Reagan record. It wasn't a priority for him, he didn't see civil litigation as a major problem, and it appears that he gave only one speech on it. That's certainly no basis for sweeping away states' rights in a new federal tort reform law.
]]>It wasn't the first time the court voided part of the state "Civil Justice Reform Act of 2003" and protected the rights of plaintiffs. Late last year, the court ruled that the section of that law capping punitive damages was unconstitutional, and in 2009, ruled that sections of the law limiting evidence of medical costs and allowing defendants to reduce their liability by naming "non-parties at fault" were unconstitutional for the same reason.
Let's hope other state supreme courts follow the Arkansas court's lead in protecting the right to a civil jury trial, and then take it a step further by striking down all onerous limitations on the right to a jury trial for civil suits.
]]>Gov. Perry ended his campaign today by endorsing Newt Gingrich. It's time to ask the same question about Newt Gingrich, still one of the frontrunners for the GOP nomination. Will we see a states' rights champion or an advocate for closing courtrooms and crushing constitutional rights?
I see Gingrich as evolving in his position during the past year or two. The "Old Newt" was a hardcore tort reformer with no respect for the right to a civil jury trial or states' rights. "Old Newt" developed a "Contract With America" in 1994 which propelled Republicans into a House majority and Gingrich into the Speaker's chair. It was blatantly pro-federal tort reform and didn't protect state authority for any purpose whatsoever. And an early version of a new "Contract," posted in early 2010 on the conservative Newsmax website, included a call for "Litigation Reform." But Gingrich has championed his support for states' rights in recent years, most notably in the books such as "Fed Up" (ironically co-authored with Rick Perry). As his Presidential campaign revived, he proposed enforcing the 10th Amendment "to return power back home" to the states, as part of the new "Contract With America."
So, you might ask, where is Newt now on this issue? Interestingly, Gingrich hasn't mentioned federal tort reform at all in the Presidential debates. When Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli called out Bachmann over her disrespect for state civil justice systems, Gingrich didn't respond either way. Although his campaign website proposes in one sentence to "Stop junk lawsuits that drive up the cost of medicine with medical malpractice reform," I'm not aware of any forum in which he's proposed it. When Rick Santorum, an unrepentant non-states'-righter, slammed Ron Paul over Paul's principled criticism of a national tort law, once again Gingrich didn't take the bait and didn't jump in on either side. It's fair to say that with the exception of that one sentence, Gingrich can claim that he's not for federal tort reform. Does he stand by that sentence or was it just an addition by a campaign staffer to make some contributors happy? If reports on the Internet about Gingrich and Perry building a pro-10th Amendment platform are true, we'll have a real means of judging Gingrich's fidelity to constitutional principle.
Will he recognize that the Founding Fathers unreservedly left authority over tort law out of the hands of the national government when they drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights? Does he agree with conservatives such as VA AG Ken Cuccinelli, Sens. Tom Coburn and Mike Lee, Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips, Tea Party Patriots leader Mark Meckler, and top anti-Obamacare legal experts such as Randy Barnett and Walter Olson, all of whom said last year that federal tort reform is an unconstitutional abridgment of states' rights and that tort law isn't an enumerated power for Uncle Sam under the Constitution? Will he see the folly of rewarding the AMA and their associated medical groups, who want to use an unlimited Commerce Clause to justify national healthcare as well as special immunity from liability for harmful medical errors? Does he now realize that trial lawyers and civil suits had nothing to do with the Wall Street crash, the housing bubble and its collapse, the BP oilspill, and that those actors in those types of scandals need to be held accountable before local juries as the Founders intended?
Let's hope we see the "New Newt" standing for open courtrooms and state sovereignty, not the "Old Newt" who sought unconstitutional legal protection for selected sections of American business.
]]>