Poor Need Legal Help Now More Than Ever

The war on the poor continues to escalate.

First, health care reforms were shot down. Then lawmakers set their sights on welfare, promising to knock people off public assistance. School lunch programs that feed children from lowincome families are one of the latest targets and even the food stamp program - which can mean the difference between another meal and starvation - has been blasted of late.

Now the bomb is dropping close to home. A subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives approved a $7.3 billion reduction in public housing modernization, rent assistance for the poor and other housing programs. The squeeze continues from all sides.

Evidence of that - and a glimmer of just how bad it could get - lies in the offices of Spokane Legal Services. There, 10 attorneys labor to represent Spokane’s poorest in matters ranging from child custody to public assistance problems. Much of their work, however, is defending people who think they are being unlawfully evicted from rental homes, a problem exacerbated by Spokane’s tight housing market.

For all their time and hard work, the attorneys still are only able to take on about a fourth of the cases that come their way.

Amid all this need, in the thick of the increasing intolerance for the poor, Washington lawmakers are looking at cutting state funding to Spokane Legal Services and other organizations like it. They’re bowing to pressure from central Washington orchard owners who don’t want Seattle-based Evergreen Legal Services fighting for the rights of migrant farm workers.

Some in Congress also want to cut federal funding, which makes up about half of Spokane Legal Services’ budget. Conservatives don’t think legal services for the poor is a good use of public money.

So, while one hand is busy taking away benefits and aid to the poor, the other is doing its best to see to it those people have no legal way to defend themselves. It’s unconscionable, an abandonment of the country’s moral duty to the less fortunate.

Yes, legal aid programs have their problems. Critics accuse the lawyers of targeting and portraying certain groups (landlords, employers) unfairly; they say the attorneys go out looking for clients, stirring up trouble where there is none.

But the vast good they do far outweighs the occasional misstep by the few. Here’s a group of lawyers who have devoted themselves to the complicated work of defending the defenseless. And these days, the poor can use all the help they can get.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Anne Windishar/For the editorial board