CPSC Reform Act--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

CPSC REFORM ACT--MOTION TO PROCEED -- (Senate - March 03, 2008)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, the Consumer Product Safety Commission Reform Act of 2007 represents some of the most sweeping reforms we have seen in consumer product safety laws in 16 years. In fact, the Wall Street Journal called it ``the most significant consumer safety legislation in a generation.''

I am proud to be a member of the Commerce Committee that passed this legislation under the leadership of Chairman Inouye, Senator Stevens, and Consumer Subcommittee Chairman Pryor, and with the help of Senator Bill Nelson and Senator Durbin. I thank all the Senators for their help on this bill.

I am pleased this legislation contains two key bills that I drafted. The first bans lead in children's toys, and the second makes it easier for parents to identify toys once they have been recalled.

This bill is not just a matter of implementing consumer safety laws and regulations, it is a matter of protecting consumers from harmful products. This bill is a matter of saving the lives of children. We have seen children who have died from lead paint or choking on toys. It means saving lives like that of a little boy named Jarnelle from Minnesota, who died after swallowing a charm that was 100 percent lead. That is how I got interested in this bill.

This bill is a matter of helping parents to understand toy recall procedures and making it easier to identify toys that are not safe. It is a matter of keeping consumers informed about whether products are safe and where the products are from. It is getting serious about consumer safety.

This is a good bill, a comprehensive bill, and a necessary bill. With the bipartisan help of our Senate colleagues, we can pass a meaningful consumer safety bill that gives the Consumer Product Safety Commission the tools to do their job and also sets clear and unequivocal standards for consumer products in this country.

It is clear that the current system we have in place is broken. It is broken for the most vulnerable consumers: the children in this country. It needs to be fixed.

In 2007, nearly 29 million toys and pieces of children's jewelry were recalled--29 million. They were recalled because they were found to be dangerous and, in some cases, deadly for children.

As a mother and as a former prosecutor and now as a Senator, I find it totally unacceptable that toxic toys are on our shores and in our stores. When I first got involved in this issue last June, my 12-year-old daughter was not that excited because it involved things such as SpongeBob SquarePants. But when the Barbies started to be recalled, she came into the kitchen and said: Mom, this is getting serious.

As we all know, the Consumer Product Safety Commission's last authorization expired in 1992, and its statutes have not been updated since 1990. Not surprisingly, the marketplace has changed greatly in 16 years, and this summer we saw firsthand how ill-equipped the Commission is to deal with the increased number of imports coming into this country from other countries that clearly do not have the same safety standards as our country.

Today, the Commission is a shadow of its former self, although the number of imports has tripled--tripled--in recent years. As the number of recalls is increasing by the millions, the number of Commission staff and inspectors at the Consumer Product Safety Commission has dropped by more than half. So you see a tripling of the imports while you see the Commission staff being cut in half. At the same time, you see an enormous increase in the number of recalls.

Let's look first at the number of staff. Well, it dropped by more than half, falling from a high in 1980 of 978 to 393 today. At the same time, the number of total recalls in 1980 was 681,300. In 2007, the number of toy recalls alone was over 28 million. So you go from 680,000 to 28 million at the same time you cut your staff in half. In total, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has only about 100 field investigators and compliance personnel nationwide.

This legislation we are proposing today more than doubles the Consumer Product Safety Commission's budget authorization by the year 2015.

We now know that this past year the Commission had only one official toy inspector--pictures of his office have been shown in newspapers around this country--one toy inspector to ensure the safety of $22 billion worth of toys. His name is Bob, and he just retired. This bill provides some needed help to increase the CPSC inspection, research, and regulation staff. It puts 50 more staff at U.S. ports of entry in the next 2 years to inspect toys and products coming into the country.

Not only does the bill give necessary funding and staff to the Safety Commission, but it gives the Commission the ability, by giving them more tools, to enforce the laws. I think it is shocking for most parents when they realize we never had a mandatory ban on lead. We never had a Federal mandatory ban on lead. Instead, we have a voluntary guideline for lead. It is this voluntary guideline that is clearly not being followed as it should which led us to the sad situation we are in now.

To me, the focus is simple: We need to get these toxic toys out of our children's hands--not just voluntarily, not just as a guideline, but with the force of law. As millions of toys are being pulled from store shelves for fear of lead contamination, it is time to make crystal clear that lead has no place in children's products. This bill finally gives the Consumer Product Safety Commission the enforcement mechanisms it needs to do its job.

On top of these critical improvements to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, this bill finally sets standards for lead in children's toys and establishes requirements for recalls and the labeling of toys.

As I mentioned at the outset, this past year we saw a record number of recalls of children's toys, totaling 29 million pieces of children's jewelry, toys that were choking hazards or contained deadly amounts of lead paint. This is about little kids swallowing jewelry, but it is also about teenagers chewing on jewelry while they are sitting in class--teenage girls not realizing the jewelry is full of lead.

For months now, news of recalled toys has dominated our headlines--and for parents, this news has been pretty scary.

In November 2007, more than 4 million children's craft toys called Aqua Dots were recalled because they morphed into a dangerous, dangerous date rape drug. Now, I had cases as a prosecutor involving that date rape drug. It is nothing to fool around with. Just to think that you have 4 million children with products, when these kids accidentally put them in their mouth because they are these little Aqua Dots that suddenly became a date rape drug and put these kids into a coma. At least two children slipped into comas after swallowing this dangerous toy.

Another 9 million toys were recalled last year for containing toxic levels of lead. The lead levels in these toys can lead to developmental delays, brain damage, and even death if swallowed.

As if the appalling number of recalls this past year is not bad enough, these recalls have illuminated other problems with pulling toys from the store shelves, the daycare center floor, or the drawer under a child's bed.

Except for my mother-in-law, I have to say I do not know a lot of mothers and grandmothers who keep the packaging that comes with toys. So what happens is, if you get rid of the packaging and there is a recall, you do not really know if the toy is one that should be recalled. It is very hard to tell one Thomas the Train Set from another, one SpongeBob from another, one Barbie doll from another. That is what parents have been struggling with.

So what this bill does--instead of making parents sort through the red caboose and the green car and the blond Barbie and the brunette Barbie--what it does is it puts a requirement in place that says the date stamp, the recall stamp, has to be on the packaging because sometimes you might be selling the toys on the Internet or it might be in a small mom-and-pop grocery store that will not allow for the computer systems we have in our bigger stores, but it also requires that the date stamp be on the actual toys whenever practical. It is not going to go on a pick-up stick, but it sure can go on a Thomas the Train Set.

This legislation also requires, as I said, that it be on the packaging. Again, it is for small retailers and people selling things on eBay. Big major outlets, such as Target, are able to, once they find out that a batch number is on the toy, close down their register so these toys cannot be sold. However, if you are selling on eBay, you want to have that number on the packaging. So that is why our legislation requires that the batch number be not only on the packaging but also the toy itself.

The other piece of this bill I drafted addresses some of the most deadly discoveries of this past year.

As more and more toys are coming in from other countries such as China with lower safety standards, we are seeing deadly amounts of lead surfacing in children's toys. The people in my State know this well.

Two years ago, a 4-year-old boy named Jarnelle Brown went with his mom to buy a pair of tennis shoes. He got this pair of tennis shoes, and with the tennis shoes came a little charm. She did not buy this charm. She did not ask for this charm. It was given free with a pair of tennis shoes. So they bring the shoes home with the charm, and this little boy is playing with it. He swallowed the charm. He did not die from swallowing the charm. He did not die from choking on the charm. He died as the lead in this charm seeped into his system one day after one day. His airway was not blocked. He just swallowed that lead charm, and it went into his stomach. Over a period of days, the lead in this charm went into his system and it went into his bloodstream. Over a period of days, he died. When they tested him, his lead level was three times the accepted level. When they tested that charm, that charm from China was 99 percent lead--a little free charm given to a mom with a pair of shoes.

This little boy's death is made so much more tragic by the fact that it could have been prevented.

He should have never been given that charm in the first place. It shouldn't take a child's death to alert us to this problem, but now we know it for a fact, and we cannot now sit here and do nothing.

Parents should have the right to expect that toys are tested and that problems are found before they reach their toy box. The legislation I originally introduced to address this problem, the lead ban, is what is included in this bill and we are considering on the floor today. It basically says any lead in any children's products shall be treated as a hazardous substance. It sets a ceiling for trace levels of lead and empowers the Consumer Product Safety Commission to lower the ceiling even further through rulemaking as science and technology evolve.

This was reached after many discussions with toy manufacturers and retailers to get a sense that there sometimes are trace levels of lead. That is why we included this in here, to be practical, but allowing as science develops for the Consumer Product Safety Commission to go below that trace level. We see similar trace levels in some State legislation throughout the country. Some of it is different for jewelry than it is for toys, but we have yet to see a mandatory threshold for trace levels of lead in the Federal Government.

For 30 years we have been aware of the dangers posed to children by lead. The science is clear. It is an undisputed fact that lead poisons children. It shouldn't have taken us this long to take lead out of their hands and out of their mouths. It is the Consumer Product Safety Commission's job to do that. In recent months, it has become all too obvious that this commission needs much reform and that reform is long overdue.

We have seen too many headlines this year to sit around and think this problem is going to solve itself. As a Senator, I feel it is very important to take this step to protect the safety of our children. When I think about that little 4-year-old boy's parents back in Minnesota and I think about all of those other kids who have been hurt by these toys--they have no control over these toys. They don't know where they came from.

At this moment I say that the time has come to get this bill passed. I thank the retailers from Minnesota, including Target as well as Toys 'R Us. Their CEO testified before the Appropriations Committee and was very positive about moving forward and understood the need to beef up the tools the CPSC has, as well as increasing the resources for that agency. We can beef up this agency that has been languishing for years and that is a shadow of its former self. We can put the rules in place that make it easier for them to do their job. We cannot sit around bemoaning the results anymore; we have to act. We have our opportunity. Our opportunity is this bill.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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