Obama's anti-consumer vote

As Obama-mania sweeps across the land and has Democrats everywhere buzzing, I find myself a bit wary of it all. Not that I'm a single-issue voter, but when it comes to civil justice issues, Illinois senator Barack Obama is a bust. His willingness to buy the corporate line about class action "reform" last year prevents me from joining the hallelujah chorus.

The 2005 Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA), a pet cause of George W. Bush, essentially forced most state consumer class actions into the backlogged and Republican dominated federal courts. Like the bankruptcy bill before it, class action reform was a special interest extravaganza, with the insurance, credit card, banking, pharmaceutical and auto industries hiring so many lobbyists that there was nearly one for every member of Congress. (You can read more about some of the chicanery involved in selling CAFA in my book.)

Obama's state was also the focus of intense media campaigns surrounding the bill sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But when the bill came up for a vote, Obama's fellow Illinois democrat, Sen. Dick Durbin, didn't cave. Potential presidential rival Hillary Clinton voted against the bill. Even John Kerry, who went on national television during the 2004 presidential debates and said, "John Edwards and I support tort reform," voted against this bill.

So what's up with Obama? No surprise here, but maybe it's the $2 million in campaign contributions he got from law and lobbying firms that represent many of the big business interests behind the bill. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, he got $60,000 from Mayer, Brown Rowe & Maw, the heavyweight lobbying firm whose partners reportedly helped write CAFA. Obama also got  $70,000 from Sidley Austin, home of the notorious Dan Troy, the former FDA general counsel who used his government perch to help drug companies win lawsuits filed by injured consumers.   

Obviously the class action vote was just one among many, but I do find it telling. Either Obama didn't fully understand the implications of the bill for consumers (who may be shut out of court when they're ripped off for relatively small amounts of money), or he was voting with an eye on the White House and courting future campaign contributors in the business world. Neither scenario gets me especially excited about the Democratic Party's new rock star.

Comments

[Ted]

While plaintiffs' law firm contributions are often certainly coordinated (sometimes a bit too illegally, as when one firm was caught reimbursing its paralegals for donating to John Edwards), it's a mistake to think the same thing happens in the defense bar, where attorneys are donating on an individual basis because they perceive future government administration (or Article III) jobs of a certain political caliber as pay-to-play or because they're otherwise simply interested in the political process.

Obama's contributions from Sidley & Austin and Mayer Brown almost certainly result from the fact that those are *Chicago* firms, each with hundreds of Illinois Democratic attorneys making six- or seven-digit annual salaries, and for some of the younger of whom (like me) attended University of Chicago Law School when Obama was teaching there, and were almost certainly hit up by a classmate currently serving in the Illinois legislature. It takes precisely thirty such attorneys writing $2000 checks to generate $60,000; while some perhaps donated less, some perhaps donated in each of the two election cycles and donated more.

It's extraordinarily unlikely that Dan Troy issued an order from his FDA perch that he wanted his future law firm to send money Obama's way, so it's not clear why you even mention Troy, who wasn't with Sidley during the 2004 election cycle.

Too, your mischaracterization of CAFA suggests that Obama understands it better than you do. Please, explain the mechanism by which "CAFA shuts consumers out of court." Cite specific statutory language rather than ATLA press releases.

[Ted]

P.S. Why isn't Obama's vote the principled vote, and Durbin's vote the special-interest pandering vote caused by donations from the plaintiffs' law firms sucking millions of dollars out of the national economy in downstate Illinois?

[hammerdown]

I don't understand the implications of the critics of CAFA. Am I to believe that state courts are inherently more fair than the federal courts? Granted, the federal courts are loaded with neo-con appointees, but state courts are also inclined to bias toward the corporations doing business in their jurisdictions. I would not assume that Bush's support for this bill automatically makes this not in the general publics interest, nor would I assume that Democrats are always voting my best interest considering the support they get from lobbyists and special interest groups. Obama supposedly is a constitutional law scholar, are we implying that he is a fraud or just a confused professor?