In a piece for which I cannot figure out the reason the Washington Post today goes into the law career of Fred Thompson with the breathless headline, “No Easy Verdict on Thompson The Lawyer” with a subtitle of “Cases Indicate Willingness to Defy GOP Orthodoxy”.

It then goes on to tell us Thompson was opposed to tort reform because he thought that was a state issue.

The article states Thompson advocated clients going before the Grand Jury and exercising their fifth amendment rights. They can’t be accused of perjury that way and it is a right we all have.

When a Marine pilot was killed by a helicopter blade Thompson sued the helicopter maker because he couldn’t sue the Dept. of Defense and he won a settlement for the wife of the Marine.

In the Senate, Thompson routinely voted against legislation aimed at shrinking the size of fees that attorneys could collect and rejected limits on medical malpractice lawsuits, bucking his own party. Most Republicans supported such reforms, arguing that trial lawyers routinely filed frivolous lawsuits or won unnecessarily large awards that drove up the cost of insurance and products.

The American Conservative Union gave Thompson a lifetime score of 86, placing him in the middle of Republicans it rated. The group noted that he voted against two of the four lawsuit changes the group supported.

“When you are taking a look at Thompson as a conservative,” said ACU Chairman David Keene, “the negatives come down to plowing around with John McCain on campaign finance and a general sense that he sided with trial lawyers because of his background.”

Keene said Thompson’s position on tort reform is “something someone who favors another candidate or isn’t very enamored with Thompson might raise more as an excuse than a reason” not to vote for him.

A real conservative does believe the state has a lot of jurisdiction and the federal government should not usurp that authority.

Thompson recently sought to head off attacks, posting a statement on a conservative blog explaining his opposition to federal limits on malpractice lawsuits by saying it is a matter best left to states.

“In the past, those who want to solve this problem have tended to ignore our Federalist tradition,” Thompson wrote last month. “They’ve driven right past their statehouses to their airports and flown to Washington to ask for national legal remedies. Fortunately, now we’re seeing that states can take effective action themselves.”

Thompson cited as a model he could support the 2003 law in Texas that imposed state limits on malpractice lawsuit awards, which Norquist regards as “the gold standard of state-level tort reform.”

Advisers say Thompson has long thought that the federal government ought to be as small and unintrusive as possible, and should leave solutions to local problems to local government except in cases such as terrorism, when a national effort is needed. He has held that view firmly even in the face of politically popular legislation, such as the time Thompson opposed requiring states to adopt federal sentencing guidelines to keep their crime-fighting money.

“State sentencing for state crime is a state matter,” he argued in 1999.

I don’t have a problem with that, but I appreciate the Post doing an article about Thompson so I can weigh what I don’t know about him against what I do know about him.

I don’t find him wanting for this conservative.