The Consumer Product Safety Commission Reform Act--Continued

Floor Speech

THE CONSUMER PRODUCT SAFETY COMMISSION REFORM ACT--Continued -- (Senate - March 04, 2008)

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AMENDMENTS NOS. 4095 AND 4096

Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, I would like to take a few minutes to speak on two amendments I called up this morning. I appreciate the opportunity to speak. These amendments certainly relate to the consumer product safety bill my colleague from Arkansas has done such a great job ushering through committee and onto the floor. It is clearly a very important issue for us as a nation.

Last year, we were reminded a number of times of the problems when the safety of our products is not ensured. We saw some products coming in from other countries that gave us cause for concern, as well as from within our own country. In the food and drug area, we have certainly seen problems there. So we need as a Congress to make sure we do everything we can to ensure the products that are sold in this country, particularly for our children, are safe.

This was an issue the House of Representatives took very seriously. They have worked for a number of weeks, if not months, on a consumer product safety bill. Speaker Pelosi was very involved with the bill, as well as Chairman Dingell and Ranking Member Barton. They produced a bill that had been vetted by a number of people. It had support from consumer product groups, as well as from a number of manufacturers, which is key, that we cannot ignore in the Senate. We need to make the products safe, but we also need to make sure we do not put such a burden on American businesses that they cannot create the jobs and grow the opportunities in the future. That is a delicate balancing act which I believe the House achieved.

In a remarkable vote, the House voted unanimously to support the consumer product safety bill they had on the floor. That bill does a number of things we talk about here.

Let me first read a quote from Chairman Dingell, who is the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. It was his committee that worked so hard on this bill. He said, in a New York Times editorial:

Let's hope that the Senate acts expeditiously and with the same bipartisan commitment as the House.

It is a quote I very much appreciate. We were here in the Senate disturbed, a few weeks ago, when we worked real hard to pass a bipartisan Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that we hoped the House would act on in the same bipartisan fashion. Unfortunately, the House decided they needed to include some provisions, some special interest provisions that allow plaintiffs' lawyers to sue the telecommunications companies that are helping us intercept messages from suspected terrorists.

I am afraid we are doing the same thing now on the Senate side that our House colleagues did. We have a very important issue in front of us, which is consumer product safety. The House has sent us a bipartisan bill with clear support from all our constituencies. Yet we have decided on the Senate side to add some special interest provisions, specifically for plaintiffs' attorneys and union bosses.

The House bill does a lot of the things I believe in and I think most of my Senate colleagues believe need to be done.

First of all, it requires there be third-party testing of children's products for lead and other hazards to ensure that unsafe toys never make it to the shelves.

It also requires, as my colleague from Arkansas was mentioning earlier today, that manufacturers place distinguishing marks on products and packaging of children's products to aid in the recall of those products. It can be years later that a product is found to be defective and recalled, and we need to have a way to identify those defective products and recall them and to notify consumers of safety problems.

The bill the House passed unanimously also replaces the Consumer Product Safety Commission's aging testing lab with a modern, state-of-the-art lab that will allow them to find which toys are safe and which ones are not.

It improves the public notice about recalls so we have a better system of letting the public know when we find a safety problem.

It preserves a strong relationship between industry and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to ensure that industry continues to share information we can use to determine the safety of products.

It also restores the full panel of five Commissioners to the Commission.

This bill is a bill we should pass in the Senate. We know if we go through the process this week of adding amendments and changing the bill, even if we ultimately pass a bill, we are looking at weeks if not months in conference with the House to come out with a final bill.

We have an opportunity. If we pass this amendment, which is a substitute to the underlying bill, passing the House bill, we can send a new bill, a consumer product safety bill, to the President that can be implemented right away.

Again, this is a bill that passed 407 to nothing in the House, with the Democratic leadership taking the initiative on this bill and Republicans agreeing. What we are doing here in the Senate is adding a number of provisions that are not for consumer product safety but designed to create loopholes for special interests.

One is the whistleblower protection provision, which I have a separate amendment to strike. There are ways we can fix this provision. We have a Federal standard we apply to our own agencies that does not create an open-ended litigation process but focuses more on protecting those who make us aware of a problem that an employee tells us about. We need to do that in industry.

I am certainly willing to work with the majority on this issue. I believe Senator Cornyn has an amendment that applies that Federal standard, which would improve this legislation, provide whistleblower protection, but at the same time not create a playground for plaintiffs' attorneys as well as create an opening, as this bill does, for disgruntled employees to wreak havoc inside an organization.

The way the bill is set up, any employee--who may be aware he is getting ready to lose his job for incompetence or something else--can complain about a safety issue, which may or may not be real, and that employee is basically guaranteed a job for life because this bill does not allow a company to fire someone who complained about a safety problem. Even if there was not a safety problem, all the employee has to do is say they had a reasonable belief there was a safety problem.

Folks, it is hard enough to do business in this country today. It seems everything we do in this Congress makes it more expensive and more difficult for our companies to compete in a global economy. Countries throughout Europe lowered their corporate tax rate to 25 percent. China has lowered its corporate tax rate. We continue to keep ours at a level that makes it very difficult for our companies to compete. We need to realize, as we seek consumer product safety, particularly safety for children, we do not need to put unnecessary burdens on our companies and make it more difficult for them to operate in this country.

The whistleblower provision in this bill does not improve consumer product safety, but it does create a potential for increased problems with folks who are manufacturing in this country. We need to realize foreign-based companies are not faced with this same provision. It is only those that are American owned, operating here, that have to follow this whistleblower law the Senate is attempting to add in the consumer product safety legislation. So what we have are American companies at a disadvantage to companies in other parts of the world that do not have to comply. My amendment would strike this provision. Perhaps we can reach a compromise and protect the whistleblower without damaging our competitiveness as a nation.

Mr. President, these are two amendments, and I have a number of others that get at some of the problems in the bill. But, again, I commend the chairman for his work and the commitment by this body to improve consumer safety in this country. I hope we can work together in a bipartisan fashion to create a bill that is focused on safety and not so much on doing favors for our different constituencies.

With that, Mr. President, I yield back and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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AMENDMENT NO. 4095

Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, I would like to speak for a few minutes on my amendment that I believe we will be voting on at 5:30 today. This amendment brings up the House-passed consumer product safety bill. This was a bill that had extraordinary bipartisan support. It was led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chairman Dingell and Ranking Member Barton. They worked together for a number of weeks to create a bill that did a lot of the things we had hoped to do in the Senate, and Chairman Dingell has encouraged us to take up the House bill and pass it today.

I see Senator Stevens has come to the floor, and I know he wants to speak on this bill. I would be glad to yield my time or part of my time and then follow Senator Stevens, if he would like me to. I think we have the balance of the time until 5:30 together, and I understand the Senator from Alaska needs 5 minutes. I yield 5 minutes to Senator Stevens.

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Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, I agree with a number of points the Senator from Alaska just said, particularly the importance of working in a bipartisan fashion on a bill as important as consumer product safety. That is exactly what I am proposing with this amendment because this is something that not only had bipartisan support in the House, it had unanimous support in the House.

The Senator from Alaska also mentioned the importance of moving quickly. He suggested that my amendment might actually slow this bill down. In fact, the opposite is true. If we were to adopt this amendment, the consumer product safety bill could go to the President tonight. This is a bill that has been thoroughly vetted and includes a lot of good provisions about which I would like to speak. But even my colleagues who would like to vote for the final Senate bill--I don't know whether my amendment will be adopted or not tonight--can still vote for the Senate bill even if they vote for the House bill.

Voting for this amendment is voting for a good, clean, bipartisan consumer product safety bill that we might not have at the end of this process. As all of us know, the longer this debate goes on, the more nongermane amendments will be added to the bill, and the possibility of this bill being passed and going to conference and actually coming out with a bill we can all support--we don't know what the odds of that are. But we do know if we pass the House version of the bill tonight, we will have a new consumer product safety bill that does a number of the things all of us want. I will mention a few of those.

One of the items we talked about is not just to count on companies to test their own product safety but to have a third-party testing, particularly of children's products, for lead and other hazards. The House bill sets that up.

We also require manufacturers to put distinguishing marks on their products so that in the event of a recall, we would know how to identify the products that are out in the marketplace that need to come back. Consumers would know which ones are safe and which ones are not.

It also replaces the aging testing labs the Commission uses now and installs a state-of-the-art testing system that will help us determine more quickly which products are safe and those that are not.

We create a new system of advising the public when we have found a safety problem through using the Internet, radio, and television, and we preserve the strong relationship between industry and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, so we get the information from them on a constant basis if there are any safety problems or even improvements in safety in different product categories. And we restore the full panel of Commissioners to the Commission, which is not in place right now.

The House bill had support from a total range of Members. From the most conservative Republican to the most liberal Democrat, they agreed to come together without further delay and pass a bill that we need.

The groups from the outside that look at these issues, particularly the manufacturer groups, such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce, that represent millions of jobs across this country--and that is really what we are talking about here. The Senate bill would actually put an additional burden on American-based manufacturers that our foreign competitors do not have. If there is one thing we do not need to do as a Congress, it is to make it even more difficult to do business in this country, to put our workers at a further disadvantage to workers from overseas by adding an unnecessary burden to this consumer product safety bill, provisions that do not necessarily improve safety but do make it increasingly difficult to be competitive as an American manufacturer. We need not do that.

The Senate bill has some problems, and we have a number of amendments we can add. Right now, my amendment has the support of the National Association of Manufacturers, chamber groups; business journals, such as the Wall Street Journal, are supportive of this amendment, and they are not supportive of the Senate version, frankly.

So we have a better alternative tonight. I encourage my colleagues to set aside partisanship, to set aside maybe particular special interests we may want to do some favors for in the Senate bill. The House set that aside, and they did the right thing. That is really what I am encouraging my colleagues to do tonight: Do the right thing.

This is not a bill I created. This is a bill which is supported by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chairman Dingell, as well as the Republicans on the House side. We probably will not have another opportunity this year as a Senate to vote for a bill that has unanimous support in the House. Yet we have it on the floor tonight. I encourage my colleagues: Do the right thing. Let's practice what we preach for once and be bipartisan and support an amendment that will get a consumer product safety bill to the President right away so we can start the implementation process.

Mr. President, I appreciate the time. I know my colleague, the chairman, wishes to speak before the vote. I yield the remainder of my time. He can have the rest of that time. I yield back my time.

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