Pete Domenici: “I just want to read one more time and make one more observation, there is no doubt that the principal concern about the…”

“I just want to read one more time and make one more observation, there is no doubt that the principal concern about the Legal Services Corporation has been class action lawsuits, lobbying, soliciting work, and a number of issues, and I will go through a list in a minute. But I want to remind everyone again, we have never been able to literally write all of these prohibitions into the law. Again, I want everyone to know the reason for the prohibitions is because legal services, when it was founded by Richard Nixon in association with the American Bar, intended this to represent individual poor people in individual cases, not to represent a class of poor people suing a welfare agency or suing a legislature or suing the farmers as a class. We have never been able to put those kinds of prohibitions into law because we never had agreement between the House and the Senate. So I want everyone to know that, with few exceptions, the House has already agreed to the same kind of prohibitions that are in this bill. The House does not block grant this in their appropriations bill. They have funded it. So with reference to the House, the only difference is that we seek to add some money so that this program gets cut 15 percent, which we think, in comparison to other things, is clearly fair, and we put the same prohibitions and some additional ones in.”