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WASHINGTON, February 23, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com/CNSNews.com) – In the first interview since his resignation, former Republican counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Manuel Miranda, told CNSNews.com that the primary motivation behind a Democrat push to disrupt judicial nominations is not because of political ideology, but money.  Special interest groups like abortion lobbyists, trial lawyers, and labour unions are driven by a desire for money more than by a liberal agenda, he said.  “What would be truly shocking to the American people is the profit motive that is involved,” he said.  Miranda resigned under pressure from Democrat senators after reading memos found on a publicly shared computer that detailed the activist groups’ and Democrat’s intentions to derail the nominations.  “It isn’t just about ‘abortion rights,’ the battle is about abortion profits,” Miranda explained. “The axis of profits that undergirds the fight in the Judiciary Committee is the axis between trial lawyers – who want particular types of judges who rule in particular ways on their cases – and, not the ‘abortion rights’ lobby, but the abortion clinics lobby.”“The ‘abortion rights’ lobby is just a front for something much worse,” he continued, “which is the abortion clinics’ lobby, represented by the National Abortion Federation.”  Abortion clinics make $1,000 profit for every abortion they perform, Miranda said. “That’s where the money is,” he said.  The commonly believed idea that there is no “big money” behind the Democrat motivation is a misconception, Miranda claims. “The abortion clinics’ lobby is an industry as large as any industry that lobbies in Washington…the enormity of the money that is behind the Democratic push is astounding and shocking,” he said.  When confronted with the charge that the Association of Trial Lawyers of America was deliberately disrupting the judicial nomination process, Carlton Carl, spokesman for the ATLA, told CNSNews.com that the accusation was “a blatant lie.”  CNSNews.com later learned that, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-profit organization that tracks political contributions, the “ATLA and its members rank fourth on the list of the top 100 political contributors since 1989. Since then, ATLA and its members have given $22,413,466 in political contributions, 85 percent of it to Democrats and 11 percent to Republicans,” the interview stated.