U.S. PIRG Consumer Blog: Another big step today for CPSC reform

Today, the U.S. Senate took another big step toward enacting comprehensive CPSC reform. On a 51-45 vote, the Senate rejected (tabled, pro-consumer vote is YEA) the Cornyn (R-TX) amendment to limit the authority of state attorneys general to enforce the federal law. Here is our letter in opposition. Also today, Senator Kyl (R-AZ) came on the floor to apparently announce the withdrawal of Senator DeMint's (R-SC) amendment to weaken the product safety whistleblower provisions in the bill.

I've discussed the big differences between the narrow House and comprehensive Senate CPSC reform proposals in previous blogs. Three of the differences that the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) crowd seem to complain about most are Attorney General enforcement, whistleblower protection and the new product safety database. We'll see if they have further attorney general or whistleblower amendments tomorrow-- it looks as if Senator Vitter may have another anti-attorney general amendment to offer.

I read the public database provision of the bill, S. 2663, the CPSC Reform Act, as a carefully-crafted bi-partisan compromise that protects corporate secrets and corporate good names and also requires prompt removal of incorrect information. I read the NAM opposing view and I think they're basing their opinion on some other proposal. They've had a cozy secret relationship with the CPSC for many years and they like it. But if we had such a database of of information about complaints, maybe more would have been done about the Simplicity crib recall debacle featured in the USA Today board's viewpoint. And, yesterday, Shelby Esses, mother of 20-month- old Jack Esses, who went into a date-rape drug-induced coma for 5 hours after swallowing the toy called Aqua-Dots, spoke at a news conference with Senator Pryor, chief sponsor of S. 2663, at the U.S. Capitol about how she could find nothing on the CPSC website about the problem and any previous complaints.

As she said at a previous news event:

"If there had been a database we could have turned to that (and) had information about the product, it would have made treating it a lot easier and really put our minds at ease," she said.

Although there remain a lot of positive and negative amendments in the hopper, yet unconsidered, it appears that we're close to the finish line. Staff will work all night on negotiable amendments, and there will be some votes tomorrow on amendments where there was no consensus. Probably, there will be some amendment on weakening the public right-to-know database. It is likely that final passage will occur tomorrow (Thursday) night. But just to be sure, the Majority Leader, Harry Reid, filed a petition today to hold a cloture motion to limit debate on Friday morning.