P.I.S.S.D. -- Personal Injury, Social Security Disability. Dallas Texas Lawyers

"Credibility Problem" Of The Texas Supreme Court

The Dallas Morning News published an editorial today regarding the credibility problem of our current Texas Supreme Court. The newspaper is definitely right in saying the Court has a credibility problem, but the paper is misinformed in one of its statements, and in my opinion is wrong in its suggested solution.

The misinformation is in the statement that "Texas trial lawyers who argue directly before the justices also have been huge contributors." The implication is that plaintiff lawyers are contributing to the justices. This may have been true in the past, but I don't think there are many plaintiff lawyers now who would even consider making a contribution to any of the nine sitting Republican justices.

The newspaper's conclusion that the best solution to the current problem would be appointed justices is, again in my opinion, simply wrong. This would be dangerously close to the federal judicial system of appointments for life. And while there are many fine federal judges, there are some who never should have been appointed, and who will never leave the bench.

The correct solution is fair and open elections, with full disclosure of campaign contributions, combined with an educated electorate who understand the influence that campaign contributions can have on judges' legal opinions. Full public financing of judicial elections would be even better.

Here is the text of the editorial:

The reputation of our state's judiciary has been tarnished for years. As then-state Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Phillips told the Legislature all the way back in 2001, when judges owe their jobs to an electoral system dominated by political parties and big campaign donors, their judicial objectivity comes into question. 

Nothing underscores this point better than the May 2 Texas Supreme Court decision favoring Perry Homes over homeowners Jane and Robert Cull. The court's decision, overturning two lower courts' rulings to compensate the Culls for a defective home, probably will be debated for years.

But what isn't debatable is that the founder of Perry Homes, Bob Perry, is a major donor to the campaigns of the Supreme Court's justices. He, his family and their political action committees have donated more than $250,000 to the nine justices – all Republicans – including those who dissented in the Cull case.

The justices may have used flawless legal analysis in ruling against the Culls. That's not the point. In the public's eye, their decision is tainted by the fact that they owe their elected positions, at least in part, to Mr. Perry.

He isn't the only big donor with business before the court. Texas trial lawyers who argue directly before the justices also have been huge contributors.

And to add to the credibility problem, three Supreme Court justices are fending off allegations that they abused their campaign funds. And a report yesterday by the judicial watchdog group Texas Watch criticized the court for relying too heavily on anonymous opinions, which effectively reduces the panel's public accountability.

The method of electing Texas judges – from the Supreme Court all the way down – is badly in need of modernization. Campaign donations from special interests should have no place in an independent judiciary.

The state needs a system in which the governor appoints judicial nominees by merit, with Senate confirmation, and voters regularly decide whether or not to retain them. That would help remove partisan politics and make court decisions less suspect.

That's one of several options put forth by Mr. Phillips in 2001. His argument made sense then, and it's no less valid today.

Danger Ahead For The Social Security System

According to a CNN story today, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is warning about the same dangers I mentioned in a January post on this blog — we're about to run out of money for Social Security and Medicare. Here are excerpts from the article:

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, saying that Social Security is "financially unsustainable," called Tuesday for quick action to keep the system strong and released a report detailing the program's funding shortfalls.

The federal government will have to start paying back what it owes the Social Security trust fund in 2017 so the program can continue paying 100% of benefits. By 2041, if the system is left unchanged, Social Security will only be able to pay out 78% of benefits promised to future retirees.

Shoring up Social Security is one of the main economic issues that will face the next president. Most proposals involve raising taxes or reducing benefits. Democrats typically have opposed benefit reductions while Republicans have opposed tax increases. 

"This year's Social Security Report again demonstrates that the Social Security program is financially unsustainable and requires reform," Paulson said at a briefing. "The sooner we take action ... the less drastic needed changes will be."

Borrowing from the future

For years, the Social Security program has been taking in more in payroll taxes from existing workers than it needed to fund benefits. The government borrowed that surplus and promised to pay it back with interest by issuing special issue bonds to the program.

But the proceeds from those bonds are finite, which is why the trustees estimate that the trust fund will run dry by 2041. Without that cushion, Social Security would only be able to pay out the money it collects in payroll taxes.

Demographics are a major reason for the funding shortfall. The number of workers, compared to retirees, has begun to shrink. That means the system will produce a smaller surplus, then none at all, and eventually it won't be able to pay out all benefits promised to future retirees.

Last year, the trustees also estimated that the government would need to start paying back the program in 2017, and that the Social Security trust fund would be exhausted by 2041.

Currently, the first $102,000 of wages are subject to the 12.4% payroll tax that funds Social Security. Typically, half the tax is paid by workers, and the other half is paid by employers.

To keep the system solvent over the next 75 years, the trustees estimated that the Social Security payroll tax rate would need to increase to 14.1%, up from the current 12.4%. Or lawmakers could bring it into balance by cutting benefits by 12%.

Nonpartisan experts say the pain of fixing Social Security can be lessened in two ways: Make changes soon so that they affect more people but in a less dramatic manner, and implement a combination of tax increases and benefit reductions so that neither is particularly steep.

Medicare a bigger problem

Medicare, which was also addressed in Tuesday's report, has an even larger and more immediate funding deficit to address.

The Medicare program is already taking in less than it has committed to pay out, and the trustees forecast that the Medicare trust fund will be depleted by 2019, at which point Medicare would only be able to pay out 78% of costs.

Medicare was designed to be funded by three sources: payroll taxes; Medicare premiums paid by beneficiaries; and general revenue or money from income taxes.

The payroll tax portion of that funding comes from a 2.9% tax on all wages - half of which is paid by workers and half by their employers. To make Medicare solvent over the next 75 years, the trustees estimate that 6.44% of wages would need to be taxed.

Another Twist In Bizarre Case Of Supreme Court Justice Medina

As reported in the Dallas Morning News, the arson case against the family of Texas Supreme Court justice David Medina just won't go away. Here are excerpts from the latest story:

Six members of the grand jury that indicted a Texas Supreme Court justice and his wife over a house fire have filed a lawsuit so they can speak about evidence in the case.

By law, grand jury proceedings are secret.

But the grand jury members say they want to disclose details they heard to a new grand jury. They also want to defend themselves from accusations alleging they were a "runaway grand jury," said Jeffrey Dorrell, an attorney who served as the group's assistant foreman.

They were part of a grand jury that indicted Texas Supreme Court Justice David Medina last month on a charge of tampering with a document; his wife, Francisca Medina, was indicted on an arson charge.

The charges are related to a June 28 fire that destroyed the Medinas' house in the Houston suburb of Spring.

Hours after the indictment, Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal dismissed the charges, citing "insufficient evidence."

Mr. Dorrell said he didn't believe the district attorney's office planned to properly investigate the case. Grand jurors had asked the prosecutor to bring them witnesses and evidence, but that never happened, Mr. Dorrell said.

Which Presidential Candidate Is Your Best Match?

This is another of those Web sites that lets you put in your political priorities, and then it tells you which presidential candidate best matches up with your interests. This one is a little better than most because it lets you put extra weight on you most important interests. Check it out.

VoteMatch USA 2008 helps you to determine your preference for one of the candidates taking part in the United States Presidential Primaries.

Answer the statements by clicking on agree, disagree or don't know. You can add extra weight to any statements you find especially important. On a separate screen, you will be able to choose which candidates you would like to include in your results calculation.

The results screen will reveal which candidate you agree with most, and the other candidates will follow in descending order. Below, you can see all the candidates’ opinions and click on them for further explanation.

Virginia "Bad Driver" Law Is Backfiring

My friend, Virginia lawyer Ben Glass, has written about the recent (and ridiculous) Virginia laws that charge bad drivers enormous fines. Besides the outrage from drivers being fined literally thousands of dollars for minor traffic violations, there now exists the very real possibility that hundreds of thousands of drivers could have their licenses suspended for inability to pay the fines.

The latest development is that the Legislature was going to try to just order the courts not to collect the fines. Oops -- there happens to be a 130-year-old state law that prohibits lawmakers doing that. So back to the drawing board...

Texas Supreme Court Backlog Reaches Record Level

I have mixed feelings about the story in the Dallas Morning News today reporting that the backlog of cases pending before the Texas Supreme Court has reached a record level. On the one hand, if the justices would quit illegally using their campaign funds for frequent trips home, maybe they could clear more cases. On the other hand, since this Court finds in favor of big corporations about 70% of the time, maybe we're better off with the Court just leaving all the cases piled up in the corner. Here are excerpts from the Dallas Morning News article:

The Texas Supreme Court left a record number of cases pending at the end of the 2007 fiscal year, even as it agreed to hear more cases.

The delay is drawing fire from at least one candidate for the Supreme Court.

"Texans don't need to be told they need to take a number and get in line and wait," said Jim Jordan, a Democrat challenging Republican Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson. "These kinds of delays create a distrust in the legal system."

Jordan, a Dallas trial judge, said parties that reach the Supreme Court have already spent considerable time and money in the legal process.

But Justice Paul Green, who wrote the fewest opinions during the fiscal year, defended the time he and others spend outside the office, speaking to groups and doing other appearances outside the court.

Texas Supreme Court & Ethics Laws -- A Bad Mix?

This is getting ridiculous. Now we have three Texas Supreme Court justices under ethics investigations. And one of the three just had criminal charges controversially dismissed in an unrelated matter. There have been a series of stories recently in the Dallas Morning News about these justices. Here are excerpts from the latest:

Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht said Wednesday he used campaign cash to pay for dozens of flights to his hometown last year because he was campaigning, even though he's not up for re-election until 2012.

Justice Hecht reported 48 payments to airlines for in-state trips last year and acknowledged that "a good bit" of them were for travel to his hometown of Carrollton, where he still owns a home and attends church.

Using political contributions for personal use is against state law, and the Texas Ethics Commission has interpreted the law to ban appellate judges from using campaign donations to pay the costs of commuting between the judge's home city and the city where the court is located.

Justice Hecht told The Associated Press that his homestead has been in Travis County for 20 years. "[But] I feel like it advances my campaign to go up there [to Carrollton] and I almost always work when I'm there," he said.

Justice Hecht was re-elected to a six-year term in 2006.

He refused to produce documents proving that trips to Carrollton were business related.

"I think this is a waste of time," he said.

He is the third Supreme Court justice to face similar campaign finance questions recently.

Texas Watch accused Justice Paul Green of improperly using campaign funds to reimburse his mileage expenses between his home in San Antonio and the court in Austin.

Justice David Medina has said he will repay political funds that he used for commuting between Houston and Austin. He said he received incorrect advice when he used the campaign funds.

Baby Boomer Retirement - What Effect Will It Have On Social Security Solvency?

(This post was written for inclusion in the upcoming Facing Up blog carnival on Social Security.)

What effect will aging Baby Boomers have on the Social Security retirement and disability programs? Huge might be an understatement. The Baby Boom generation is defined as those roughly 80 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. The first of the Baby Boomers began to turn 62 in January of 2008. That, of course, is the early retirement age for Social Security benefits. The Social Security Administration predicts that about a million Baby Boomers will take early retirement, even though their monthly checks will be 25 percent lower than if they waited until the normal retirement age of 66.

As "Boomers" begin to retire, the effect on the Social Security system will be twofold – first, there will be more retirees receiving benefits. Second, there will be fewer workers paying into the system to support those retirees. Boomers didn’t have as many children per family as our preceding generation did. We had about two children per family, compared with three children per family in our parents’ generation. So we didn’t produce as many new workers to support the old workers now retiring.

In fact, experts say that we have gone from about 16 workers paying into Social Security for every person drawing benefits in 1950, to a little more than three to one today. In a few more years we’ll be down to about two to one. This is not guesswork. We absolutely know how many new adult workers we will have 20 years from now, because they have already been born. We’re not going to have a sudden, unexpected increase in the number of workers. (Unless we have a major change in our immigration laws.)

Economic predictions are all over the map on this, but one guesstimate is that about the year 2017 the Social Security system will start to see that incoming payroll taxes aren’t enough to match outgoing retirement and disability benefits. The timing is less important than the inevitability of the event. Every year from 2008 until 2025 will see another wave of Boomers retiring. Somewhere during that time span, the benefits will outgrow the income.

That doesn’t mean the system will collapse at that time, because there’s enough money in the Social Security Trust Fund to carry us for another 20-25 years beyond the point at which benefits begin to outweigh income. Or at least there is supposed to be money in the Social Security Trust Fund. Unfortunately, the politicians have been raiding that fund for years, and it now consists primarily of IOUs from the federal government.

When the Trust Fund runs out of money, that’s when the crunch will come. Politicians will have to make some difficult decisions – increase taxes, decrease benefits, or both. We all know that politicians are loath to make hard choices, but it’s going to have to be done. And really, it won’t take all that much of a change to get the Social Security system back in balance.

But an even bigger problem will be the Medicare and Medicaid crisis looming ahead of us. These programs face not only the demographic changes the aging Baby Boomers present, but also the runaway inflationary costs of medical and pharmaceutical care. The Medicare shortfall could be roughly five times as large as the Social Security shortfall. That should well and truly frighten you.

Some estimates are that by the year 2040, Social Security and Medicare will consume as much as 60 percent of income taxes collected. The remaining 40 percent of tax revenue would have to finance all the rest of the federal government.

My own, uneducated, guess is that Congress will not significantly reduce benefits for people already receiving Social Security retirement benefits, but will probably have to make major changes to Medicare and thereby reduce medical benefits. I suspect the government will also tighten rules even more on disability benefits, and try to save money by denying obviously qualified Social Security disability applicants.

The future is not hopeless for Social Security and Medicare but it’s certainly not rosy. Big changes are coming, and the sooner they come, the better off we’ll be. The question is whether Congress and the Administration will have the political willpower to deal with the tidal wave on the horizon or whether they will hide their heads in the sand, as usual.

Is There Anything Politicians Won't Lie About?

OK, this is just a silly little thing, but it completely plays into the attitude so many people have now about our politicians -- they never let truth stand in the way of getting a vote. According to CNN,

A mailer from a congressional candidate's campaign contains a photo of his head attached to an image of a different body that makes him look thinner.

Dean Hrbacek's flier shows his head on another's body.

The photo is presented as a true image of Dean Hrbacek, a Republican former mayor of Sugar Land, Texas. In reality, it is a computerized composite of Hrbacek's face and someone else's slimmer figure, in suit and tie, from neck to knee.

Hrbacek, a tax lawyer and accountant, did not immediately return a call to his campaign headquarters Friday by The Associated Press. He is seeking the nomination to run against Democratic U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson.

Campaign manager Scott Broschart acknowledged to The Houston Chronicle that the image is a fake. Hrbacek has been so busy that he had no time to pose for a full-length photo for the mailing, Broschart said.

"He may appreciate that we took a few pounds off him," Broschart said. "I think the voters ... are more concerned with the issues as opposed to pretty photo shoots."

Republican political consultant Allen Blakemore of Houston, who has no client in the congressional race, said there's no law against the practice "other than the laws of gravity -- the negative effect on your polling numbers and popularity when you do such things."

Indictment Against Texas Supreme Court Justice Is Dismissed

The curious story of Republican Texas Supreme Court Justice David Medina and his wife just keeps getting curiouser. Justice Medina and his wife have been the subject of a great deal of talk since their suburban Houston home burned down last summer. At the time, the Medinas were in financial distress.

Yesterday, the Medinas were indicted by a Harris County grand jury for arson in her case and evidence tampering on his part. Within hours of the indictment, the Republican Harris County District Attorney, who is leaving office after salacious e-mails from him were discovered, announced he would not prosecute the case. Today, a Republican Harris County State District Judge has thrown out all charges against Justice Medina and his wife. Here are excerpts from two stories in the Dallas Morning News:

"A prosecutor certainly has discretion not to pursue a case because the evidence is just not there," said University of Texas criminal law scholar Steven Goode, who is not familiar with the case and declined to speculate on Mr. Rosenthal's motives. "But in this case, it does sound very unusual for a prosecutor to decide so soon to seek dismissal of the charges in a well-publicized case."

A fellow Houston Republican, Mr. Rosenthal decided last month not to run for re-election, facing pressure from his party for writing romantic e-mails to his personal assistant using his county e-mail account.

Harris County fire officials believe the June blaze, which destroyed the Medina home and a neighbor's house and did nearly $1 million in damage, was intentionally set. Their initial investigation focused on six people close to the justice, and was fueled by a trail of financial troubles for Mr. Medina's family.

In an interview with the Quorum Report, Jeffrey Dorrell, the assistant foreman of the grand jury, accused Mr. Rosenthal of playing politics to protect Mr. Medina.

"Rosenthal resisted these indictments with a vigor I have never seen or heard before," Mr. Dorrell told the online newsletter. "The [district attorney's] office called my office last week and said we should not meet, the case was not viable and we should not indict. Obviously, that came from the top."

Mr. Yates, Mr. Medina's attorney, said the indictments won't affect the justice's work; Mr. Medina met with Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson on Thursday, Mr. Yates said, and has no intention of resigning.

Under Texas' rules for the removal of judges, any justice under indictment may be suspended by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct – but only if that body takes action. As of Thursday, it didn't appear Mr. Medina's job was in immediate danger.

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A judge Friday dismissed indictments handed up a day before against Texas Supreme Court Justice David Medina and his wife that accused them of burning down their suburban house in the midst of financial troubles last summer.

Medina was indicted Thursday on charges of evidence tampering. His wife, Francisca, was charged with arson in the June 28 blaze.

State District Judge Brian Rains ruled on the motions from the prosecutor's office at a brief hearing.

The grand jurors also said that if the charges are dismissed the panel, which is in session until February, may reconvene next week and re-indict the pair.

"This is ludicrous. This is not right. This is a miscarriage of justice," Ryan told the newspaper. "If this was David Medina, comma, truck driver, comma, Baytown, Texas, he would have been indicted three months ago."

The dismissal spares Medina scrutiny by the state Commission on Judicial Conduct.

The commission can suspend a judge who is under indictment, but Seana Willing, the commission's executive director, said there was no point in taking any action now.

Medina's indictment and swift dismissal comes a week after Rosenthal became entangled in a scandal that forced him off the GOP ballot for re-election. Rosenthal was embarrassed – and is under state investigation – after dozens of e-mails of his were released, a file that included pornography, racist humor, love notes to his secretary and campaign strategizing on a county computer.

The Harris County Fire Marshal's office has said the fire was not electrical or accidental. A dog detected an accelerant at the scene, and authorities identified six "persons of interest."

Investigators became suspicious after discovering that a mortgage company sued in June 2006 to foreclose on the home. The suit, filed after the family missed payments for five months, was settled in December.