WASHINGTON (Map, News) - More than $2.4 million in political-action committee contributions were distributed by leaders of the American Association for Justice during the 2006 congressional campaign, with 96 percent of the donations going to Democrats and only 4 percent to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

But the checks written to the candidates’ campaign treasuries weren’t the only ways in which the liability lawyers flexed their muscles. The AAJ PAC spent another $3.9 million on campaign advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts, according to CRP data.

Yet not even the millions of PAC dollars given during the campaign begins to capture the magnitude of political muscle exercised by AAJ. During the past decade, AAJ has spent more than $30 million lobbying Congress and federal executive branch officials, National Journal reports.

 Since 2005, AAJ has tripled the size of its communications staffs at the national and state levels, created a Clinton-esque “war room” to coordinate public-relations campaigns and brought in some heavy hitters from the top ranks of Democratic campaign professionals.

Among those joining the AAJ campaign were John Haber, a widely respected Democratic campaign veteran who took over as day-to-day operations manager; Democratic pollster Geoff Garin; and campaign strategists David Axelrod and Chris Lehane.

Lehane is a well-traveled campaign expert who has specialized in opposition research. The New York Times said Lehane “is such a shrewd practitioner of what one admiring strategist called ‘the political black arts’ that lately, when a negative story appears, rivals point to him.”

Among AAJ’s top campaign recipients in 2006 were House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, who received $11,000, according to CRP, as well as Ben Cardin, D-Md., Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Jon Tester, D-Mont., who were elected to the Senate.

A key issue on which liability lawyers are seeking help from their friends in Congress is “pre-emption” — whether federal policy supersedes certain state legal claims. The issue pits 10th Amendment states’ rights versus the federal commerce clause.

Liability lawyers want the law changed to encourage suits against drug companies for prescription warnings deemed insufficient, even though the warnings were printed in accordance with federal law and Food and Drug Administration regulations. A multiplicity of federal or state standards for warnings would benefit the lawyers by creating competing interpretations of what law requires.

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich. — who received $30,000 from AAJ between 2000 and 2006 — has introduced legislation to establish a nonprofit that does the work of the FDA and requires the naming of an individual to oversee “post-approval” scientific drug studies.

Likewise, Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., introduced a bill to water down the FDA’s authority while pushing for stronger scrutiny of drugs. Hinchey’s biggest contributor in 2006 was AAJ, for $10,000.

Other issues on which AAJ expects to see action on in Congress include fighting proposals to weaken the landmark Sarbanes-Oxley legislation that tightened corporate accounting standards in the wake of the Enron scandal.

"Lawyers Gone Wild" is a series of special reports by The Examiner looking at the cost and consequences of class action lawsuit abuse in the United States. Read the latest articles in the series.