Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and attorneys general in 49 states and the District of Columbia are backing two veterans who say the government wrongly denied their college-age children educational benefits, despite a Supreme Court ruling last year that boosted such benefits.
The friend-of-the-court brief, filed Wednesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims in Washington, argues that the ruling in the landmark Rudisill v. McDonough case should apply to all veterans who earned GI Bill benefits under both the Montgomery GI Bill and the Post-9/11 GI Bill, regardless of whether they had one period of service or more.
But the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs’ position is that only veterans who had a break in their service meet the criteria under the Rudisill ruling, which allows them up to 48 months of college benefits under both GI Bills, up from 36 months.
The VA’s narrow interpretation could sharply cut down the pool of veterans eligible for greater benefits under the Rudisill ruling.
James Rudisill is a vet whose Supreme Court victory capped a nine-year court battle for greater college benefits that he said the VA wrongly denied him. His pro bono team of lawyers included Chicago attorney Misha Tseytlin and former Army paratrooper and Virginia-based attorney Tim McHugh.
Lawyers for the two veterans — retired Lt. Col. Paul Yoon of Virginia and retired Col. Toby Doran of Oregon — say the VA’s interpretation absurdly gives fewer benefits to long-serving veterans who stayed until retirement compared with vets who served less time, left and came back.
“The Rudisill case was never meant to focus on the fact that he [Rudisill] had a break in service,” said McHugh, with Troutman Pepper Locke, who is working on the new case.
Yoon served almost 24 years in the Army, including as a chaplain in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kosovo. He planned to transfer 14 months of his remaining GI Bill benefits to his daughter, a Northwestern University alum now attending law school at Harvard University.
Doran served more than 27 years in the Air Force and deployed to Iraq, southwest Asia and the Mediterranean. He had planned for his son to use his remaining GI Bill benefits at Oregon State University.
Because they served with no break in service, the VA only allowed 36 months of benefits, not the 48 granted under the Rudisill ruling, meaning they were shorted out of a year of college.
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