Posted on 04/27/2007 5:15:12 AM PDT by Brilliant
Most Republicans viewed Barney Frank's recent hearing on subprime mortgages as ...typical Democratic corporation-bashing... The House Financial Services chief is surely grinning that so few picked up on his bigger purpose: bestowing a big, wet smooch on the trial bar.
Democrats devoted their first months in the majority to paying back unions... Now it's time for the other huge campaign bankrollers. Since 1994, ...lawyers have thrown a half-billion dollars at getting lawsuit-friendly Democrats back in the majority. They've also taken ...their own to Washington. Of the 30 House seats Dems won in 2006, 14 were claimed by former attorneys...
Democrats will rely on... hearings, which gets us back to Mr. Frank's... The stated point ...was to give outside groups an opportunity to publicly advise Congress... Mr. Frank ...pointedly used the hearing to further a notion ...that any company that has ever touched a subprime loan should be ...legally liable if a homeowner ...defaults.
...this has been a goal of the tort bar for years. Lawyers don't spend time suing companies that are broke... The real money is in suing those (to use Mr. Frank's words) "up the chain" -- investment banks that package these loans or even purchasers ...on the secondary market...
Mr. Frank also knows...a few carefully planned hearings can go a long way toward ...a new jackpot for his lawyer friends. This first hearing was designed to get the press interested in the issue... Later hearings ...will focus on subpoenaing ...investment banks ...and then selectively leaking the damaging parts. That "public" information can then be used in lawsuits.
Using hearing and subpoena power to aid the trial bar is an old play... Remember the 1998 Big Tobacco settlement, one of the biggest paydays in trial-lawyer history? The groundwork was initially laid in Congress with Mr. Waxman's 1994 hearings...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The only thing lower than a tort lawyer is a bigoted low-life new York Congressman.
Sorry but, it’s not like the other party here doesn’t pay back whoever supports them. They are all bought and paid for. Every damn one of them on BOTH sides of the aisle. Nobody’s destroying industry, nobody’s “taking government off of people’s backs”. A whole lot of people are shoveling hundreds of millions into their own pockets.
It does make a difference who you support. The tort bar is bloated, excessive and destructive. “Pay backs” to productive elements of society are much less harmful.
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