The Republicans want to end frivolous lawsuits that result in huge payouts to litigants, right?
Well, yes, but not when they themselves stand to cash the check. The Prez himself collected $2500 from a car rental company when he was Governor of Texas.
Blogger Dwight Meredith skewers George Bush, DeLay, Santorum, and Schwarznegger, all of whom have been plaintiffs claiming big bucks.
Thanks to Dan Gillmor (http://dangillmor.typepad.com/) for bringing this to my attention.
More to follow.
Dwight Meredith (
http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/001836.html) has done his homework on Republican hyprocrisy regarding tort reform.
His lead example? Shrub himself:
Republicans think that the joint and several liability rule should be reformed. At least one politician did not think that a search for a deep pocket was all that bad, at least not when he was doing the searching.
When one of his twin daughters was involved in a fender bender (in which no one was hurt), then Governor Bush filed a lawsuit to recover property damage to the car. I do not know which driver was at fault, but I found it interesting that Bush sued Enterprise Rental-A-Car.
His theory was that the other driver did not have a valid driver's license and, therefore, that Enterprise should not have rented him a car. I leave it to you to decide if that is an example of looking for a deep pocket with only a tangential relationship to the damage. Bush collected a $2,500 settlement from Enterprise.
But Bush is small potatoes compared to his fellow tort-reformers. Meredith goes on to detail similar cases involving DeLay ($250,000), Santorum ($500,000), and Schwarznegger ($37 million).
As if we didn't already know how two-faced these guys are.
Read the whole thing here.