Vol. 8, No. 2, Pg. 45. Services: Block Grants Would Improve Delivery.

• Author: By Rep. Bob Inglis

South Carolina Lawyer

1996.

Vol. 8, No. 2, Pg. 45.

Services: Block Grants Would Improve Delivery

45SERVICES: Block Grants Would Improve DeliveryBy Rep. Bob InglisSome people in Washington are in the manufacturing business. Their product: fear. Their marketing strategy: claiming pernicious Republican plots against programs that protect health and safety. Their target audience: those who receive Medicare, federally funded school lunches and student loans.

The latest target is the people who receive low cost legal services from local agencies. As with those other issues, I can assure everyone involved that Republicans have no evil intent. In this case, we do not want to prevent anybody from getting help with their legal problems. The situation is complicated and, therefore, easily given to mistaken identity. I'll explain fully to make certain we don't convict the wrong suspect.

The Legal Service Corporation (LSC) is a quasi-governmental corporation chartered in Washington, D.C. It is the bureaucracy--the parent corporation--that administers the Legal Services program. As such it dispenses grants to local grantees such as the six Legal Services offices in South Carolina.

By all accounts, these local agencies do a fine job. They provide direct services at the field level in cases involving child abuse and neglect, child custody, bankruptcy, landlord-tenant and other actions. They help people protect their basic rights and interests in the court system. My impression is that these agencies do just what we would like for them to do--they help people who need civil legal help and otherwise might not be able to afford a lawyer.

However, the Central Bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., is quite another story. It is a conduit for the delivery of federal funding to local grantees. The corporation provides no direct field services to any South Carolinians.

Many of the actions taken by the Central Bureaucracy have been rotten to the core. In my opinion, and in the opinion of many others, it needs to be eliminated--the sooner the better. It has a history of either directing or allowing many of its grantee agencies to participate in an agenda of using public money to conduct politically oriented and other questionable litigation. Additionally, it has repeatedly rebuffed the efforts of this Congress and previous Congresses to rein in its politically...