The Hidden Cause of BLM Riots

2022-06-20 · Guest: Bill Maurer (Institute for Justice) · 52:31

policing for profit and abusive municipal fines

Bob Zadek interviews Bill Maurer of the Institute for Justice about the predatory practice of “policing for profit.” They discuss how municipalities use abusive fines, fees, and civil asset forfeiture to generate revenue, often at the expense of their poorest citizens, and the legal battles IJ is fighting to curb these constitutional violations.

Topics: Policing for Profit, Civil Asset Forfeiture, Excessive Fines Clause, Due Process, Institute for Justice, Timbs v. Indiana, Municipal Corruption

Speakers: Bob Zadek, Bill Maurer

Introduction to Policing for Profit [00:00]

Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running libertarian show in all of radio. Thank you so much for sparing an hour of your time with us this morning. We have a wonderful show in store for you.

About a decade ago, the most important, at least in my opinion, public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, published a data-filled and, I have to say, shocking compendium entitled “Policing for Profit.” And the Institute for Justice, known as IJ, pointed out an abuse that exists throughout the country, in communities large and small throughout the country, whereby because of, perhaps we should call them loopholes in constitutional law, in judicial decisions, in statutes—but the statutes were kind of intentional—a system was developed whereby law enforcement was allowed to keep and enjoy the benefits of citizens’ property that they were able to confiscate.

Confiscate is perhaps the wrong word; the word is “obtain through forfeiture.” Forfeiture is a word for the next hour you will learn to abhor as I do. And I would like to spend this hour having my friends out there understand the process by which the property of a—and I will say law-abiding citizen, and by that I mean a citizen who has not committed a crime and is not accused of committing a crime—has his or her property taken from that citizen by law enforcement, retained not by the individual police officer (hopefully not), but by the police department or by the municipality for whom the police department serves, without a crime ever being accused, without any conviction at all. It is unfair. It creates a, unsurprisingly, a huge amount of distrust and anger and tension between the citizen and law enforcement, where there should be not that anger, but rather cooperation. This is an insidious process that it is important that all of you understand, understand how it works, know how to recognize it, and do all you can with the ballot box and whatever other tools you have as a citizen to undo this process and just have it go away.

With that introduction, I’m delighted to welcome to the show Bill Maurer. Bill is a managing attorney in the Washington State office of IJ, the Institute for Justice. And IJ engages in litigation—litigation which is free to its clients. It litigates in the area of economic liberty, private property rights, educational choice, and freedom of speech. What could be more important than that collection of rights? I asked Bill to join me for this hour when Bill wrote a piece for an IJ publication where he called my, and therefore our, attention to—I’ll give you the topic—abusive fines and fees. It is a system by which municipalities, mostly small but Bill will explain some large cities as well, but municipalities have learned to live off, more or less, fines—and remember we have the modifier “excessive fines”—fines and fees paid by, often, the portion of their voters least able to afford it. The municipality lives off other people’s property, not by the front door of taxation, but with the back door of taking their property under the guise of fines and fees. Bill, welcome to the show and thank you so much for bringing our attention to this abuse. Now, tell us in general, to introduce the topic, what caught your attention about abusive fines and fees? IJ has lots of work to do around the country, lots of citizens to protect and to help them recover their property. What caused IJ to devote as much attention as you have been to this topic?

The Pagedale Story [06:17]

Bill Maurer: Well, first, thanks for having me on, Bob. It’s always great to talk to you. And the way we came to learn of this rather significant problem across the United States was because of a tweet. And probably one of the few positive things ever to run, ever to come out of the use of Twitter, was the fact that I had a free speech case in St. Louis. And so I was subscribed to the Twitter feed of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. And one day I was kind of scrolling to see if there had been any news on my case or anything that would revolve or involve the case I was working on, and I saw an article from one of the reporters there about a small suburb outside of St. Louis called Pagedale.

And Pagedale had basically made everything illegal. They had done things like made it illegal to have a kiddie pool in your front yard, to having a TV dish out on the front of your house, having an unpainted foundation, having a crack in your driveway, having mismatched curtains, having no drapes on your basement windows. And what Pagedale was doing—Missouri had restricted the amount of revenue that municipalities keep from traffic tickets. So Pagedale, instead of saying, “Well, we need to live within our means” or “We need to find an alternative source of revenue,” Pagedale basically said, “Well, we’re going to turn our code enforcement system into a revenue generation machine.”

And the city began to generate about 20% of its entire revenue stream from fines and fees. And this was a city of about 3,000 people, the vast majority of whom lived under the poverty level. And on Thursday nights, when the municipal court heard cases regarding tickets issued by the city of Pagedale, the line would be out the door. Literally, the city seemed like it was empty because everybody was down at the municipal court. And the municipal court was hearing so many cases that it averaged, in a two-and-a-half-hour hearing every other Thursday night, it averaged 241 cases per evening. That’s roughly about less than 30 seconds per hearing. And you know, a lot of these folks were getting these tickets that they were simply impossible for them to pay.

And when we heard about this, I thought to myself, “That can’t be constitutional, and it can’t be right.” And we went to Pagedale, and Pagedale shares a lot of similarities with a town that’s very nearby it, which was the city of Ferguson. And Ferguson had been doing the same thing. All of the cities within this little area were woefully underfunded. They did not have a diverse or successful tax base. And so they were using fines and fees as a means to complement, and sometimes to overwhelm, their ability to bring in revenue. And it was destroying people’s lives. You know, we had one of our clients was a woman in her 80s. She got a list of over 20 things that she needed to do around her house. And if she didn’t do those things, she was going to be fined to the extent that she would not be able to pay. And if you couldn’t pay, then a lot of people simply wouldn’t show up for their hearing, at which point they would receive another violation of failure to appear, at which point they would get arrested and jailed. They would lose their jobs. They would lose their ability to get to school or care for their children. It was just a really, really abusive system, and one I think you know, you saw the ultimate expression of people’s frustration with it when Ferguson actually kind of exploded into domestic unrest simply because of the municipality’s greed. And Pagedale, unfortunately, was not an outlier. It wasn’t even an outlier in St. Louis County. In fact, it was kind of in the middle of municipalities in St. Louis County in terms of the amount or the percentage they received from fines and fees as a portion of their general revenue.

But we found out that this was an issue all over the country. Cities in Colorado received over 90% of their revenue from fines and fees. And it was, as you said, oftentimes small cities, but it’s also large cities as well. Chicago and New York both get a considerable amount of money, in the millions and millions of dollars, sometimes over $100 million, from various kinds of fines and fees. And while it’s not a high percentage of the revenue that the city brings in—a city like Chicago or New York brings in—it’s still a lot of money. And so what you know, this is an issue because when you’re dealing with the government’s ability to deprive somebody of their liberty or their property, the chance for government abuse is at its zenith. And that’s why traditionally the ability to fine someone or even impose fees on their participation in the criminal justice system has been strictly limited.

The Failure of the Political Process [12:44]

Bob Zadek: Bill, one question if I may. These fines were established by local government, obviously. Local government has means—a city council or some such organization—which are elected. And we have 3,000 citizens you mentioned in Pagedale. Why weren’t the citizens simply—why didn’t they vote out of office those elected officials who imposed these fines? Why didn’t candidates run for office on a platform of “We will undo these patently unfair fines”? Why didn’t the political process work?

Bill Maurer: Well, sometimes there were people who tried to fight back. But for instance, we did a town hall in Pagedale and invited people to come there and tell their stories about how they had been treated by Pagedale’s ticketing process. And one of the city council members showed up. And you know, the other people there were extremely uncomfortable talking about how the city was abusing them with a representative of the city standing right there. We asked her to leave, and as she was leaving, she was saying things like, “Hey, I know you. I know where you live,” and pointing at people and, you know, making sure that she was kind of cataloging who was at the meeting and who was complaining about stuff. And if you’re being abused by the government, the government has the ability to abuse you even more. And so I think there was a lot of fear and concern about fighting back against the system because of potential retaliation.

Legal Tools: Excessive Fines and Due Process [14:46]

Bob Zadek: Now, if the city—so the city, through the democratic (air quotes) process, enacted these abusive fines. Well, since a city has the—and this is going to be a question—has the right to do so, what’s in the IJ toolbox? When you say you attack them, I could understand if you ran a political campaign and attacked them that way, but that’s not what you do. You’re a law firm. So what are the tools in your toolbox that you use to level the playing field a bit and give the citizens some power to fight?

Bill Maurer: Well, you mentioned one of the big ones earlier, which is the Excessive Fines Clause of the US Constitution. The Excessive Fines Clause basically is based on a restriction in English law that dates back to Henry I in the year 1000, or 1100. And the idea with the Excessive Fines Clause is that the government’s not supposed to use fines to drive somebody absolutely into the ground. The problem in England was that the king was using fines to basically strip people of everything they owned. And it’s in Magna Carta, it came into the English Bill of Rights, and when the American founders started writing our Constitution, state and federal constitutions, they also put in a restriction against this kind of excessive or cruel fining.

Another tool that we use is another portion of the Constitution, the Due Process Clause. Because if you have a system where the police, the prosecutor, the judge, all have a financial interest in the outcome of your case, that’s a tainted system. And whether you’re guilty or not, you have not received due process. You’ve received something that looks like process, but it’s not real process because the outcome is foreordained. And that’s another very significant tool that we use.

Another one outside of the courtroom is the media. No city council member wants to see their name in the New York Times or the Washington Post talking about how they’re abusing their citizens. And so we bring cases in court and we litigate them in court and in the court of public opinion, and by doing so, we try to educate people as to the fact that this can happen to you and that there are ways to fight back.

Timbs v. Indiana and Incorporation [17:59]

Bob Zadek: So now, you mentioned the Excessive Fines Clause. I believe that is the 8th Amendment. But say more about that. How do the cases—how are the cases adjudicated? What are the standards? What’s the dynamic? What do you look for to win, and what makes a case stronger than another case?

Bill Maurer: Well, like I said, the standards that existed were kind of vague. And so one of the most important things, or a key goal in our litigation involving the establishment of standards, is that we want to make clear that the judge has to take into account the individual circumstances of the defendant. So if you have someone who gets fined $1,000 for sleeping outside, which is a proposal right now in a city near where I live, basically aimed at criminalizing homelessness—there’s not going to be homeless people who are going to be able to pay a $1,000 fine. Now, Bill Gates, if you fine him for sleeping outside, he has $1,000 in his couch cushions. And so we want the courts to look at: is this fine that’s being imposed right now excessive with regard to this particular individual?

And that had not been established prior to 2019 except in a couple of states. And now we’re trying to get state supreme courts across the country to recognize that. And it’s consistent with the standard that had actually been in place dating back to the English common law, which is: a fine is not supposed to destroy somebody. It’s supposed to punish them, but it’s not supposed to deprive them or turn them into absolutely poverty-stricken individuals.

And so that’s a very important standard. Another one that we’ve been looking at is a lot of municipal and state governments simply split up the fines. So instead of getting one fine of $500, you get five fines of $100, each of which may not be excessive on their own, but they’re oftentimes brought together so that you have somebody who does not have the ability to pay $500 having to pay $500, but because they’re all separate charges, the fines are viewed individually. And that can’t be right. You can’t have a constitutional standard that permits the government to engage in a death of a thousand cuts.

Means Testing and Individual Circumstances [24:05]

Bob Zadek: So is the perfect world of excessive fines one where every single fine is means-tested?

Bill Maurer: Pretty much. I mean, I think that’s what the clause demands. And you know, there’s going to be a broad range of fines that are going to be applicable to a broad range of people. You know, 95% of Americans are probably going to be able to pay a fine as long as it’s not absurd. But you know, there’s 5% of Americans that probably can’t pay any fine. And to fine those people even a small amount would be constitutionally excessive in my view.

Case Study: Brookside, Alabama [24:48]

Bill Maurer: So, Brittany Coleman is one of our defendants in a lawsuit against the city of Brookside, Alabama. Brookside, Alabama is a town of about 1,500 people. It’s just outside of Birmingham. And in about 2018, the city decided to do what Pagedale had done, which was to start getting a large amount of revenue from ticketing its citizens. And Brookside went—it just had an explosion of ticketing that did not coincide with any explosion of actual criminal activity. In fact, Brookside is a remarkably safe town. From 2011 to 2018, for instance, it had only recorded 55 serious crimes, and no rape and no murder. And in 2017 to 2018, it didn’t have any serious crimes at all. But they decided that they were going to supplement their budget starting in 2018 with the hiring of a new police chief and start handing out tickets as much as they possibly could, to the point where the number of tickets that they issued and the revenue that they issued went up by 640%.

And one of those people that they ticketed was a woman named Brittany Coleman. And Brittany is a young mom. She was on the way to a birthday party with her boyfriend. She was following behind her boyfriend’s car. She was pulled over for following too closely, and they towed—she was issued a ticket, they towed her car, and she was left standing on the side of the road waiting to actually have somebody pick her up and try to find some way to get back to their town. So it’s, you know, this sort of policing for profit is—it’s not just unconstitutional, it’s oftentimes extraordinarily cruel. And this was just that situation exactly.

Civil Asset Forfeiture [27:29]

Bob Zadek: When cars are confiscated and towed, that is usually by operation of another tool other than excessive fines. That would be the tool of civil asset forfeiture, which of course you have done—you being IJ as well as you, Bill—have done an enormous amount of good work. There was a time you were the only ones fighting the battle against civil asset forfeiture. Now many other groups have joined, and civil asset forfeiture is now, I think, on the run as a practice as legislatures are embarrassed into—perhaps they just seek to do well—they are managing, repealing, or controlling civil asset forfeiture. Tell us about what civil asset forfeiture is and why that got the attention of IJ.

Bill Maurer: Sure. And let me just make one quick correction to what I was just saying. Brittany actually was not with her child when she was pulled over; that was a different one of our plaintiffs. There are so many people who were abused in this manner, I sometimes have a difficult time remembering exactly who is who because the number of people who were pulled over and abused in this manner is almost innumerable.

But civil asset forfeiture is a means by which the government will seize somebody’s property, oftentimes under the guise that it’s an instrumentality of criminal activity, and then proceed against the—basically bring a lawsuit against the property itself. And it’s a civil lawsuit, so the standards for criminal procedure don’t apply. There doesn’t have to be guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, or guilt at all. And there’s no jury. And it’s up to the citizen to actually fight back against the government and try to get their property back from the government. So even if the government doesn’t end up in the end with the property, the citizen has to spend an enormous amount of money and time trying to—basically engaged in a civil lawsuit to get back what they own. And when they don’t get it back, the government can either sell it or keep it, and they can use it for government revenue.

And so you had municipalities doing things like using civil asset forfeiture to buy margarita machines, to go on expensive training sessions at resort towns. And it’s a—it’s basically a scam. You can tell it’s a scam because a lot of the cases involving civil asset forfeiture are things like State of Arizona v. A 1978 Pontiac Fiero. They’re proceedings against the property themselves. It dates back to attempts of piracy when it was difficult to figure out exactly who had stolen property and how it came to be in a particular pirate ship. And somehow it got transferred over into the American system, and it’s a significant source for revenue for police departments across the country and it’s an enormously abusive system, one that the courts have until recently been very disinterested in preventing.

Equitable Sharing and Federal Involvement [31:49]

Bob Zadek: And even though it sounds local in nature, it has an ugly history. The federal government has its hands as dirty as dirty can be through a doctrine called equitable sharing. This, I think, goes back to the Nixon administration, maybe to Reagan, when the federal government sought help to enforce federal drug laws. And of course we have, in theory, no federal police force. Now we do; we have TSA and Homeland Security, so we do have a federal police force, but in theory we don’t. So the feds had a problem: how to enforce drug laws which require a police force which they don’t have. So what they did was they commandeered—even though commandeering is unconstitutional—they bought local police departments by inducing them to confiscate through civil asset forfeiture property which was either the fruits of illegal drug activity or was used in the commission of a drug crime. And to induce local law enforcement to do that, they told law enforcement: anything you seize through in enforcement of federal drug laws, you get to keep half or a third, whatever the number was. So in effect, the federal government hired local law enforcement to enforce federal drug laws, and they did so by giving them an incentive to abuse the practice. That, I think, is at least part of the history of civil asset forfeiture. The feds were a cheerleader. To some degree, that practice has scaled back, has gotten a lot of unpleasant attention, but it may still be going on.

Bill Maurer: There have been efforts at the states to rein in civil asset forfeiture, and there has been efforts at the federal level to try to rein in civil asset forfeiture. Unfortunately, the federal efforts have not been successful. But you know, this is an enormous cash cow for a lot of people. And in fact, the state of Michigan just actually made it easier for police forces to seize cash at airports in Michigan. A lot of people don’t like to use banks; a lot of people prefer to use cash. But cash to the government’s view, or at least to the view of a lot of people in the government, cash means you’re a drug dealer. And so anytime you’re traveling with a great deal of cash, if you get stopped, it can very easily be seized by the government and either kept or you have to spend a lot of time fighting back for it. And Michigan’s response to that was, “Hey, that’s a great idea. Let’s make it even easier to do that.” So there’s going to be—governments like revenue, and they like trying to find sources of revenue. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of people in government who do not care about due process or constitutional rights if it means that they’re going to be deprived of a dollar that they think they should have.

Impact on Law Enforcement and Community Relations [35:49]

Bob Zadek: Law enforcement obviously enjoys the practice of forfeiture as well as perhaps to some degree excessive fines, but excessive fines implicates law enforcement a little bit less. But on the subject of civil asset forfeiture, law enforcement defends the practice by saying it is an effective crime-stopping or crime-mitigating tool. Any merit to that?

Bill Maurer: You know, the criminal asset forfeiture is an effective crime-fighting tool. If you’re able to not just prosecute someone who’s committed a crime but deprive them of the assets that they were able to obtain because of that crime, that’s an effective deterrent and it’s also an effective punishment. But taking money away from people who haven’t done anything wrong is not a deterrent because these people were already not doing anything wrong. It’s hard to get someone to stop not doing anything wrong if they’re not doing anything wrong.

On the flip side, though, I have noticed that police departments at least have some—are at least somewhat uncomfortable with excessive fines and fees. And the reason is that a lot of people went into policing not because they wanted to act as an occupying force, but because they wanted to protect and help people. And if you are a police officer and you’re having to spend time not protecting people but instead trying to raise revenue by ticketing folks or trying to collect for money that people owe, that increases the number of extremely negative interactions that you have with the people that you’re ostensibly protecting. And it creates an enormous amount of tension between the police and the communities they serve.

And you can see the results of that, for instance, in the Ferguson case. Michael Brown was stopped by the police officer in Ferguson for the crime of “manner of walking.” That was an actual ordinance, that was an actual violation in the Ferguson codebook that the police could stop you and ticket you for, quote, “manner of walking.” And that’s what Michael Brown was stopped for. And that ended up going completely south, and the city was racked with civil unrest. And so when we went to the Missouri legislature to try to fix this explosion in policing for profit that was occurring in the state of Missouri, to their props to them, one of the groups that was very active in pushing for meaningful reform was the sheriffs’ departments, because they’re tired of being placed in situations where they have to decide: is this collecting this money or issuing this ticket sufficiently important for me risking shooting somebody or having somebody shoot me? And so it places police officers in an enormously difficult position, and one I don’t think a lot of them want to be in.

How IJ Selects and Litigates Cases [39:54]

Bill Maurer: Well, the process is oftentimes we’ll hear about an abuse coming out of a particular city, either through the people that live there or through the media. And we go in there and, rather than talk to the city and hear their excuses for why they’re doing this, we talk to the people on the ground. We talk to the citizens who are getting the tickets and who are being abused and hear their stories. And then we do research on the city itself. We use public records act requests or Freedom of Information Act requests, as they’re called, any online resources, any reports to the state the city might have to make. And you know, we try to determine: is this municipality using its police force and its code enforcement force as a means to raise revenue? If it is, that violates the Constitution, and we identify clients and we bring a lawsuit.

And the idea behind the lawsuit is not to sort of pick off each city and get them to individually stop, but to establish in each federal district or in each federal circuit principles that municipalities will have to live under in the future. Basically create precedent that will prevent Brooksides and Pagedales and the city of Chicago and its enormously abusive ticketing process from doing that in the future, and from other cities doing that in the future as well.

Chicago’s Impound System [41:43]

Bob Zadek: I’m sorry, you caught my attention when you had made reference a few minutes ago to the city of Chicago, because I recall reading, probably in something IJ had published, that Chicago reduced forfeiture, particularly with respect to automobiles, to an art form. And there it was really not a small town, but it was big business. It was virtually organized crime meets municipal government. So tell us if you can about what Chicago was doing—intentional use of the past tense because I think with your help or encouragement the practice is not as pervasive, maybe it doesn’t exist at all. So if you can, tell us about Chicago and automobiles.

Bill Maurer: Well, Chicago has a—and it still does, you know, perhaps there’s been some marginal reduction, but it still has an addiction to using impounds as a means of raising revenue. And you know, there are times when you have to impound a car. If the police pull somebody over and they’re arrested, the car’s got to be impounded; it can’t be sitting there in the middle of the street. Or if there’s situations where a driver is incapacitated or hurt, the car’s got to be taken away. But Chicago was doing things like impounding cars that had been stolen, or that somebody had borrowed and generated tickets—speeding tickets or parking tickets—and it all fell back onto the owner of the car to have to either fight the ticket or pay the impound fees. And Chicago, like you said, had turned it into an art form to the point where it was getting millions and millions of dollars every year from impounding cars, oftentimes from people who, again, had done nothing wrong. There was no reason for them to have their cars taken away, but Chicago wanted the revenue. And they were forced to go into Chicago’s impound system, which we are suing about right now in court in Chicago.

Bob Zadek: And when you’re suing them, is it the standards you have explained to us earlier? Your cause of action is excessive fines? Is that the hook on which your litigation is brought?

Bill Maurer: That’s oftentimes the hook. The other hook is the Due Process Clause because, as I mentioned before, it is a system where there is a taint of financial interest from the very first moment you’re ticketed until you’re convicted and sentenced. When there is a financial interest involved in that process, that taints the entire system. And it doesn’t really matter whether you’re guilty of whatever it is that the city says you did. You’re entitled to a fair process regardless of whether you’re guilty—perhaps even more so if you’re guilty. But the idea is that you’re supposed to—would you have gotten a ticket if the city wasn’t trying to collect revenue? Would you have been prosecuted if the city wasn’t trying to collect revenue? And would you have been convicted if the city wasn’t trying to collect revenue? If any of those answers are no, then you have a system that’s not protecting the public but rather interfering with people’s liberty and property in order to generate money.

Conclusion and How to Support IJ [45:55]

Bob Zadek: What our friends out there have heard during our time together this morning is: here you have a system that would infuriate anybody who learns about it. And until it got your attention—you being IJ—it was a system that there was no attack on it. This nationwide corrupt—not necessarily corrupt in terms of taking bribes, but abusive and the powerful against the powerless—taking property, and not only taking property, but taking property where the entity taking the property was government acting in the name of its citizens. And that entire—it’s even painful to talk about—system would have continued because there was no one else that I’m aware of which was challenging the system until you set about fixing it. In fact, there was no way to fix the system; the ballot box, as you have explained, would have been a total failure for the reasons you have explained. But but for this public interest litigation that you brought with no gain to IJ, just to protect those rights and those freedoms we all value, that the system is changed.

And have you ever—I don’t know if you can use the word “won” or “lost” directly, but it seems to me you have had almost an unbroken streak of success attacking municipalities for this abusive behavior. Were there any setbacks along the way, and if so, what went wrong?

Bill Maurer: Well, there was, for instance, we had a case against a city in Georgia called Doraville that was doing things very similar to Pagedale. And you know, they were basically using their ability to ticket and fine as a means to supplement their tax revenue. And we actually were rather optimistic given the federal judge’s rulings early on in the case that we were going to be successful, but ultimately we lost that case and right now it’s up at the 11th Circuit for consideration.

But we have had a lot of successes. We were able to get a groundbreaking consent decree against the city of Pagedale that radically changed the way that the city issued tickets, how it issued tickets, and changed its municipal court, and also gave a lot of forgiveness to the people who had been involved in this system.

Bob Zadek: How can our listeners—how can they follow what you are doing? How can they help you along the way in your pro bono efforts to keep us free and prevent these encroachments on the rights we all hold dear and we individually would have a very difficult time protecting? How can our friends out there help you and follow you?

Bill Maurer: Well, the easiest way, Bob, would be to just go to our website, which is www.ij.org. That’s ij.org. And on there, you’ll be able to sign up for our newsletter, Liberty & Law, but also you’ll be able to read about our stories. There’s the ability to actually submit a potential case if you’re a person who is subject to this kind of abuse. And there’s also the ability to contribute to IJ. We’re supported by individuals and foundations. We get no money from the government except in the form of attorneys’ fees when we beat them in court. And we take very little corporate money, mostly in the form of matches from contributions from individuals. So we are really dependent on people from across the country who care, individuals who care about individual liberty and preserving our constitutional freedoms.

Bob Zadek: We have been speaking with Bill Maurer. Bill is the managing attorney for the Washington State office of IJ, the Institute for Justice. They litigate on your behalf, on my behalf, on all of our behalves. They carry on a task that no—there are some other organizations that do similar work, but they are few in number. And but for organizations like IJ, we would be poorer and less free than we are today. So from the bottom of my heart, Bill, thank you so much for the work that IJ does. You’re truly doing God’s work.

And one warning to our friends: you invited them to subscribe to your publications. I am a subscriber, and to me, those publications should come with a warning label: you cannot read them, not get up from the table or from the couch, go over to your laptop, and send IJ money. You will find their stories compelling. They are truly doing God’s work, doing our work. Thank you so much, Bill, and thank you to your colleagues at IJ. And of course, thanks to those folks who have chosen to give us an hour of their time and listen to what we offer to them. Thank you so much, Bill. Thank you, IJ. And thank you to my friends.

Bill Maurer: Oh, thank you for the opportunity to talk with you, Bob. It’s always great.