The Washington DC Examiner Newspaper
2008-04-24 07:00:00.0
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WASHINGTON -

So powerful is the plaintiffs lawyers lobby in Congress that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is forsaking a bill passed unanimously in the House for a more lawsuit-friendly version of the proposal that was approved with anything but unanimity by the Senate.

In the name of reforming the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the Senate version would create bureaucratic red tape galore, while enabling the sort of class-action jackpot justice that enriches plaintiffs lawyers at the expense of consumers and shareholders. We’ve written on this legislation before, noting that the Senate version would invite all 50 state attorneys general to interpret, at their own discretion, any CPSC regulation. State AGs would then be free to sue in federal courts to enforce their interpretations (all the while contracting out the litigation to politically influential plaintiffs lawyers who in turn make generous political contributions). That provision alone makes Pelosi’s preferred Senate bill a trial lawyer’s dream.

Many other Senate provisions also are gifts to lawyers that impose burdensome new regulations sure to drive up consumer prices in myriad ways. The Senate bill would increase total civil penalties as much as tenfold, but without the House language requiring specification of the “nature, circumstances, extent and gravity” of offenses.

It allows disciplined workers to claim to be “whistleblowers” and sue for damages, while making the employer satisfy an incredibly high burden of proof to win its cases. It would also require posting on a public Web site reports of injury allegedly caused by product defects even before such claims have been checked out. (Recall the false hysteria about “Alar” on apples, then multiply it by hundreds of products and you get the picture.) In short, Pelosi’s favored Senate bill would be a disaster for consumers and businesses.

Usually, each chamber of Congress fights hard for its own version of a bill, especially when a bill passes one chamber unanimously, as did the House version. Instead, Pelosi has delayed appointing members of the “conference committee” that will work out differences between the two chambers’ versions of the bill, while battling (against House Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell) to stack the committee in the Senate’s favor.

This is the same Pelosi, the recipient of many tens of thousands of dollars in trial lawyer political donations, who earlier this year put an essential foreign intelligence surveillance bill on hold at the behest of the plaintiffs bar.

Now she is doing its bidding again, with the result that neither consumers’ wallets nor companies that make products they need will be safe.