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Another skeleton Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers was deeply involved in an American Bar Association scheme that forces lawyers to pool their clients' funds into checking accounts and pass on the interest to "public interest" law firms

Anyone who beleives that it is ok to do that without the permision of the clients is not a conservative.

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How much do you want to bet that she would have come down on the wrong side of the Beck decision?

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Anyone who promoted or approved of such a concept sounds to me like a socialist, because it yet another example of those who think they deserve to organize a society of their inferiors acquiring our own money to help control us.

Also, if these accounts are interest-bearing, who pays the taxes on the interest? a) The client who never sees the interest, b) the lawyers who are forced to send the money in and don't see the interest, or c) no one, since the interest is credited to an exempt "non-profit" organization. But if so, how could the transfer of the pricipal INTO the non-profit's control and then back OUT of the non-profit not be illegal? Surely the "account" has to contain the principal in order to earn interest on the principal?

What does the IRS think of this?

It works so well because a lawyer's trust account is a lot like a fast running river--no given amount of water (money) is there for a very long time but the actual amount of water that's consistently there is quite large. A lawyer will receive, for example, a $50,000 settlement check for a client, deposit it in his trust account, and, within less than a week, disburse the settlement to the client. In that time lots of other similar checks will have been received. The short holding period means clients usually don't particularly care about the interest. However, the high average balances can produce a significant amount of interest that's essentially "free" money. Harriet & Co. battened on to that "free" money to fund all sorts of left wing causes.

IOLA accounts are my pet peeve. To the best of my knowledge, they have survived every legal challenge, including a challenge in the United States Supreme Court in a case entitled, Brown v. Legal Foundation of Washington, 538 U.S. 216 (2003)(Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist, and Kennedy dissented).

Most of the legal challenges have argued that the confiscation of interest from an IOLA account constitutes a deprivation of property without due process of law and violates equal protection of the laws in that it treats lawyers' escrow accounts differently than other types of escrow/trust accounts. I am unaware of any case, however, where someone has challenged IOLA under the First Amendment in that IOLA effectively forces a person to associate with groups, ideas, or interests that the person would rather not be involved with for moral, religious, political, or any number of other reasons. Although state legislatures often give away our tax dollars to objectionable groups and causes, if we don't like the way the the legislature is spending our money, then at least we can try to vote them out of office. IOLA accounts are different in that the money is not allocated from tax revenues by an elected legislative body, but rather, the money is collected from attorney escrow accounts, without the knowledge or consent of the client, and then deposited into a special trust account that is managed by an unelected board of trustees, consisting of 15 members appointed (in New York, for example) by the governor. The board of trustees is given broad discretion to spend the money on legal services to the poor and other groups that are "underserved by the legal profession" (whatever that means), and for "the improvement of the administration of justice" (whatever that means).

I am also unaware of any challenge to an IOLA law on the ground that it constitutes an unlawful tax under state law. For instance, under New York Law, all state expenditures must be approved by the State Legislature on an annual basis as part of a budget bill, and those expenditures must come from the general fund, which consists of tax revenues that the State has raised through tax laws enacted by the Legislature. (The primary exception concerns user and service fees that in theory, have some rational relationship to the benefit or service provided to the user (i.e., tolls, park entrance fees, filing fees, etc.). IOLA funds, in contrast, are raised by the State and arguably used for a State purpose, but they don't come from the general fund and the expenditures aren't approved on an annual basis by the Legislature as part of a budget bill, as required by law.

Sorry for rambling, but this whole IOLA thing really pisses me off. Maybe The Great One, Mark Levin, will read this and start a lawsuit challenging IOLA laws on the grounds that I have suggested.