Maybe trial lawyers need to dig a little deeper

While I was perusing the ever-entertaining website of Texans for Lawsuit Reform, I noticed that they had circulated an outraged press release back in November complaining that the local campaign finance watchdog group, Texans for Public Justice, was "funded by trial lawyers." TLR apparently got TPJ's tax filings and discovered the shocking news that three big plaintiffs law firms had given the group a grand total of $50,000, which constituted more than a third of its budget.

I wasn't especially surprised to find trial lawyers among TPJ's donors, given the paucity of other sources of funding for progressive politics in Texas. What did suprise me, though, was that TPJ's budget was so tiny! The whole shop runs on $160,000 a year. That's barely enough to keep the lights on and the web site up. By comparison, the tort reform group, which got $15,000 in seed money from the tobacco industry, has a PAC that spent more than $3 million in the last election. It's really a credit to TPJ's clearly underpaid staffers that it has made such an impact on the Texas political scene with the budget of an ankle-biter.