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Perry’s Political Success Subsidized By Right-Wing Ideologue

By Guest Blogger on Aug 19, 2011 at 4:31 pm

Our guest blogger is Sarah Bufkin, a former ThinkProgress intern and student at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Faced with flagging poll numbers and a campaign chest close to empty, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Rick Perry was running into trouble three weeks before voters headed to the polls in 1998 to choose a new state lieutenant governor. But all that changed when Dr. James Leininger, a Texas millionaire and right-wing ideologue, guaranteed a $1.1 million loan to Perry’s campaign on Oct. 25, enabling a $1 million advertising blitz to hit the airwaves.

Leininger’s loan arguably saved Perry from political obscurity, putting him in the Lieutenant Governor’s office just two years before then-Gov. George W. Bush left Texas for the White House. But Leininger has not drawn much media attention outside of his home state. With Perry planning to meet with Leininger at a “call-to-action” retreat on Aug. 27 as a newly-declared presidential candidate, however, additional scrutiny will fall on the pro-voucher, anti-gay, hard-line conservative.

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times’ Matea Gold and Melanie Mason reported that Perry “has received a total of $37 million over the last decade from just 150 individuals and couples, who are likely to form the backbone of his new effort to win the Republican presidential nomination.” Indeed, Leininger — who wasn’t mentioned in the article — is one key part of such the backbone.

Over the past two decades, Leininger has funded the rightward shift in Texas politics through his “vast web of interlocking and overlapping pressure groups.” But unlike other GOP corporate donors, he is ideologically motivated and has “almost exclusively [donated] to help Republican candidates who agree with his hardright public policy agenda”:

School Vouchers: His biggest pet project, Leininger has donated millions over the years to fill both the state legislature and the State Board of Education with pro-voucher candidates. He also worked on attracting public support both by founding a pro-voucher think tank and by starting up his own voucher program in San Antonio in 1992.

Tort Reform: Leininger founded and provided 86 percent of the funding for a PAC he called Texans for Justice in order to put conservatives on the state Supreme Court in 1988. Buoyed by donations from Texans for Justice and other conservative groups, four GOP candidates won seats on the court that year, effectively transforming it from a “fairly populist” body to one considered “among the most pro-business in the country.”

Anti-gay: Over the years, Leininger has contributed over $1 million to anti-gay PACs and organizations including Texans FOR Marriage, the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group. Texans for Governmental Integrity—a PAC he founded and controlled—distributed a mailer in 1994 that showed a white man and a black man kissing to warn voters away from a State Board of Education candidate because she supported homosexuality and abortion.

Pro-Life: In addition to sending out an anti-abortion mailer through Texans for Governmental Integrity, Leininger supports several pro-life PACs independent of his control, including Texas Right to Life, the Republican National Coalition for Life and Texas Alliance for Life.

The friendship between Perry and Leininger, however, stretches back decades and is padded with over $1.3 million in campaign contributions.

The “biggest beneficiary” of Leininger cash over the years, Perry has supported policy initiatives in line with the businessman’s agenda. While serving as lieutenant governor in 1998, he pushed “intensely” to bring a school vouchers bill to a vote on the Texas Senate floor. Although the legislation ultimately failed, Perry has continued to push education reform proposals from Leininger’s think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation. And this past legislative session, Perry designated anti-abortion, tort-reform and eminent -domain bills as “emergency items” in order to bring them to a vote.

In turn, Perry has benefited from his relationship with Leininger in more than just campaign cash. Back in early 1996, Perry even made over $38,000 after purchasing close to 3,000 shares of stock in one of Leininger’s companies. In what he termed “a coincidence,” Perry picked up his shares on the same day that he and Leininger talked together at a luncheon and that a new investment group sent the stock’s value skyrocketing. Around that time, the lieutenant governor candidate convinced Leininger to go in with him on a private plane with a sticker price of $475,000. Perry, who only paid 10 percent of the plane’s cost at the outset, made headlines months later when Leininger and his brother decided to sell him their portions for below the market price.

With Perry poised to run for the presidency, Leininger is likely hoping for an even bigger return on his political investment.

Health

The Texas Unmiracle: Malpractice Reform Edition

By Igor Volsky on Aug 15, 2011 at 3:45 pm

Rick Perry doesn’t have much of a health care record to run on. A quarter of Texans are uninsured, the highest in the country, Texas has the narrowest Medicaid eligibility standards, and spends the least of any state on mental health and the second to least on health care for the poor. Perry’s sole accomplishment seems to be the 2003 overhaul of the state’s malpractice system, which the newly-minted candidate promoted during a stop in New Hampshire on Sunday:

The two top issues in the election, he told voters, are jobs and debt, which Romney, too, hammers on the campaign trail. But while Romney tells voters repeatedly how much he knows about the economy from working 25 years in the private sector (and spends little time talking about his record as governor of Massachusetts), Perry weaved together his vision for the nation’s economy by tying it to his accomplishments in Texas.

“We’ve had the most sweeping tort reform in the nation,” he said, asserting that as a result of the law passed in 2003, there are 20,000 more physicians in Texas. He spoke of cutting taxes and sparking the best job growth of any state in the nation.

And instead of blasting President Obama in the ways his competitors have, Perry chose his words carefully, explaining that he’s not angry but indignant about the federal government.

It’s hard to know if malpractice is to credit for the additional physicians, but it’s certainly not responsible for lowering the state’s health care costs and that serves as an uncomfortable case study for how the GOP’s favorite reform prescription — tort reform! — falls short of expectations.

When Texas capped non economic medical malpractice damages to $250,000 in 2003, most conservatives argued that the reform would free doctors from having to prescribe unnecessary treatment to avoid lawsuits. It didn’t work out that way. According to the Dartmouth research on disparities in health care spending, many Texan doctors are still prescribing aggressive treatments that don’t improve outcomes. In fact, as you can see from the chart below, Texas’ Medicare spending “seems to have gone up faster than the nation’s since 2003“:

The truth of the matter is, despite conservative claims to the contrary, malpractice costs make up only a very small percentage of health care spending. And most health experts believe that while fear of lawsuits may certainly be motivating doctors to practice defensive medicine (over prescribe unnecessary treatments and procedures) the nation’s fee-for-service reimbursement system bares more of the blame. Texas’ experience seems to validate that theory.

Alyssa

‘Hot Coffee,’ Tort Reform, and the Next John Grisham Project

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 28, 2011 at 9:48 am

The McDonald's manual that was evidence in Stella Liebeck's suit against McDonald's.

Hot Coffee, Susan Saladoff’s documentary about the corporate fight to limit individual citizens’ access to the courts and to justice from the courts through caps on damages, influence on judicial elections, and clauses in contracts requiring that employees and consumers give up their rights to sue companies and arbitrate disputes, is a pretty good movie. Seeing Stella Liebeck’s burns from the McDonald’s coffee that injured her, or hearing Jamie Leigh Jones talk about being raped by her Halliburton colleagues is useful and powerful. The problem is, the lies about Liebeck’s case in particular are so ingrained in our culture — the documentary opens with scenes from Seinfeld of Kramer getting excited about suing somebody and Bart Simpson writing “I will not file frivolous lawsuits” on his classroom blackboard — that it’s hard to imagine how to push back this late in the fight.

An intriguing alternative presents itself in Hot Coffee, though, when John Grisham shows up to talk about his novel The Appeal. The book is inspired by the case of Oliver Diaz, a Mississippi judge who fought off an election challenge from a Chamber of Commerce-backed opponent, only to find himself the target of an ethics probe. (In the documentary, he insists it’s meaningless, though the relationships in question looked improper.) For a long time, Grisham was an incredibly powerful critic of corporate power. He was absolutely over the top, a melodramatist who wasn’t shy about alleging that companies would murder Supreme Court justices or rig juries to secure successful verdicts, and his novels don’t really have any ambivalence about whether his plaintiffs have been injured in a way that demands redress.

I don’t know if he got bored by telling similar stories, or if he just succumbed to the lure of CIA stories (his CIA director, Teddy Maynard, is a fairly boring manipulative genius), but I would love to see Grisham bring back his scrappy young lawyers and his flawed but appealing victims. And if I were Grisham or a liberal studio head, I’d be riding the wave of the downturn and the financial crisis and pushing to get every damn corporate malfeasance story I’d written but that hadn’t made it to the screen sold and adapted. Washington stories are hot at HBO, so sell The Street Lawyer to them as a miniseries or to a movie studio. Maybe convince someone to do The Appeal as a Wire-style Appalachia story about Massey Energy, and mining, and Don Blankenship. This is a great market opportunity for Grisham — if he can shift his audience’s attention in what happens to be a politically useful direction.

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