“Defund the Left!” was the rallying cry of conservatives in the early Reagan years who had high hopes of taking out the Legal Services Corporation – – a high-minded-sounding federal agency that had veered from low-glamour work like representing the indigent in divorce court to the more exciting challenge of using class-action litigation to achieve left-wing political goals that the electorate had mulishly refused to approve legislatively.
Anyone under the mistaken impression that the conservative crusade ever got anywhere should note the latest suit of Texas Rural Legal Aid (TRLA). This local chapter of the Legal Services machine has shamelessly gone to court for two Democratic politicians who lost elections in which absentee ballots from military personnel provided the margins of victory. Last November, a couple of Republicans were elected county commissioner and county sheriff in the Texas precinct containing Laughlin Air Force Base. One won by 113 votes, the other by 267 votes; about 800 absentee ballots came in from servicemen. The TRLA has challenged the results in federal district court on grounds that the absentee military ballots were somehow improper. Texas Republicans are understandably exercised over this, since the tentacles of the Legal Services Corporation are supposedly prohibited from extending to partisan activity. George Washington Plunkitt, however, would not have been surprised. As one of his Tammany Hall cronies said: What’s the Constitution among friends?
