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In the Republican race for U.S. Senate, no one has been more aggressive in criticizing Mel Martinez as a trial lawyer than rival Bill McCollum.
McCollum even threw a video onto his Web site tying Martinez to former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards: "Mel Martinez and John Edwards. Two liberal trial lawyers. Both wrong. So wrong, so often."
But as McCollum casts himself as the Republican Senate candidate most eager to clamp down on lawsuits, he could have explaining of his own to do.
As a congressman from the Orlando area, McCollum raised tens of thousands of dollars from big law firms and their political action committees. The Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA), which overwhelmingly supports Democrats, gave McCollum the maximum $5,000 PAC contributions three times.
Gretchen Schaefer of the American Tort Reform Association wondered how McCollum can paint Mel Martinez as a captive of trial lawyers when he took money from them.
McCollum suggested the trial lawyers gave him money because he was on the House Judiciary Committee, though he said no donation ever influenced his votes in 20 years in Washington.
"My record speaks for itself," McCollum said in a phone interview. "I have a long record of supporting liability reform ... Mel Martinez is consistently on opposite sides of this issue."
The Martinez campaign fired back. "ATLA wouldn't have maxed out to a Republican if it wasn't getting something," said Martinez campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Coxe.
Martinez, the former U.S. Housing and Urban Development secretary and elected executive of Orange County, has no voting record on civil lawsuit reform, though he was president of the Florida Academy of Trial Lawyers in the late 1980s. He gave $20,000 to a group that worked to defeat a 1988 initiative to cap jury awards in medical malpractice cases in Florida.
But McCollum's record includes some votes favorable to trial lawyers, including voting in 1985 and 1998 to allow active-duty members of the armed services to sue the government for medical malpractice. In 1995, as Republicans pushed lawsuit restrictions as part of the Contract With America, McCollum cast several votes that bucked the party leadership.
In a widely watched effort to impose a $250,000 cap on punitive damages in product liability lawsuits, for instance, McCollum was among five Republicans to back an unsuccessful effort to sideline the legislation and raise the caps to $1-million.
McCollum said he couldn't recall why he voted that way or details of several other pro-trial lawyer votes the St. Petersburg Times pointed out to him. It must have amounted to "a technical difference of opinion," he said, because he would never have wanted to kill such a measure. In the end, he voted for the bill and to override President Clinton's veto.
"My views on tort reform have been known and never changed since I first came to the United States House in 1980," McCollum said.
But the Martinez campaign, having been steadily criticized by McCollum as weak on liability reform, has two decades of congressional votes and McCollum fundraising reports to strike back at McCollum.
"His record clearly shows he broke ranks with Republicans and voted against a key part of the Contract With America," said Coxe of the Martinez campaign.
Clamping down on medical malpractice lawsuits has become a rallying cry for Republican leaders, and McCollum has seized on Martinez's trial lawyer background for advantage in the Republican primary.
He is courting the influential Florida Medical Association, a big rival to trial lawyers, for its endorsement. Also, an independent and largely anonymous political group connected to Florida doctors recently started airing radio ads accusing Martinez of not supporting President Bush's effort to restrict medical lawsuits.
On Thursday, the McCollum campaign sent out an e-mail noting that Martinez had attended a fundraiser hosted by South Florida trial lawyer Stuart Grossman, who told the Miami Herald: "Mel is absolutely with us 100 percent."
- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report. Adam C. Smith can be reached at 727893-8241 or adam@sptimes.com