Money For Justice

Los Angeles County literally cannot afford to keep open its courtrooms open much longer because California's tax laws are broken.

The Los Angeles court system has already closed 17 courtrooms and another 50 will be shut down come September unless something is done to find more money. The closures have disrupted everything from divorce and custody proceedings to traffic ticket disputes.

The judicial council scheduled a meeting Friday to deal with the request from presiding Superior Court Judge Charles W. McCoy Jr. to divert $47 million in funds from the courthouse construction budget to help stave off more courtroom closings and staff layoffs.

McCoy predicts chaos and a logjam of civil and family law cases if additional funds are not found.
He said the Los Angeles court's budgetary shortfall is $133 million which will be permanent each year unless there is an influx of funds from somewhere.

The Los Angeles system has already laid off 329 workers – about 6 percent of its 5,400-person work force. About 500 more jobs are at risk later this year. McCoy raised the prospect of a cumulative cut of 1,800 people from the 5,400-member work force over two and a half years.

With resulting cutbacks in services, he said, "confidence in the courts would be lost."

"It's unprecedented," said McCoy. "Even during the Great Depression we did not close down court operations. We kept the courts open."

The crisis results from the financially troubled state's decision to slash $393 million from state trial courts in the budget this year. The state also has been closing all California courthouses on the third Wednesday of every month, with employees unpaid for those days.

And that $393 million budget cut from the state is directly because it is impossible to raise a dime in taxes in California.  The state's budget at this point has been cut so dramatically that basic government functions are starting to fail.

Sometimes you have to raise taxes if you want a government, people.  That's how it works in a democracy.  But California is literally unable to do it because of their 2/3rds majority in both the state Assembly and the Senate in order to raise a single extra tax dollar for anything.  That means all they can do is cut, cut, cut.  And you can only cut so much before you start suffering from blood loss.

California's literally coming apart, but that's exactly what the Club For Growth people want.  The solution they will want is of course a private sector one.  But how do you privatize a court system and still expect justice?

But that's the rub:  cripple government until it cannot work, and then say we need free market solutions to take over government functions.  You may not be able to raise taxes to fund the courts in California, but you can certainly charge anyone in the courts a hefty and profitable fee for their use and raise that fee as necessary.

Same goes with every other piece of government infrastructure that corporations are salivating over profiting from:  water, power, roads, public safety, and now courts.  The slow death of one-seventh of America's state government continues unabated.