By now you’ve likely heard liberals screech that the Citizens United ruling will allow corporate interests to dominate the political process. Lost in the noise is the reality that all it does is give business interests a fighting chance to go toe to toe with the trial bar.

In “The Majority Leader of the Lawsuit Lobby” at National Review, our friend Jim Copland takes a look at the “unprecedented” bidding being done on behalf of the trial bar by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. That’s the same Harry Reid who’s taken in over $2m from non-lobbyist lawyers.  Copland notes:

Over this election cycle, Senator Reid’s campaign and leadership committees have raked in over $2 million from non-lobbyist lawyers, more than twice as much as he has received from any other industry or profession. Four of Reid’s seven largest campaign donors are law firms, and these aren’t corporate-law firms helping to structure the financials for Las Vegas casinos but rather out-of-state plaintiffs’ firms, including asbestos firms in New York, Maryland, and Illinois, as well as a toxic-tort firm in California.

Copland explores the substantial return that the trial bar has received on their investment in Reid. He finds that the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act ended up a “bonanza for the litigation industry”, that the trial bar used the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to gut “the statute of limitations in pay-discrimination claims”, and that the trial bar/Reid agenda is just getting going.

So in the eyes of big government liberals all is well when the trial bar steers millions to the Senate majority leader but it’s a crisis for the Supreme Court to allow corporations to exercise free speech. Only in Washington.