Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) held an important hearing yesterday exposing yet again the efforts by the Bush administration to write into its proposed auto safety roof-crush rules a provision asserting that compliance with the rule preempted all consumer state common law claims for harm. Incredibly, in his not-so-comprehensive, not-so-encyclopedic all-of-3-pages-long written testimony, the NHTSA bureaucrat James Ports didn't even discuss this critical matter. For that discussion, you'll need to go to pages 18-20 of Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook's encyclopedic testimony with exhibits. Claybrook ran NHTSA under President Carter. Both her testimony and that of Jacquie Gillan, vice-president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, rip NHTSA's halfway effort on its technical merits as well. Of course, Congress never gave NHTSA -- or for that matter, FDA or CPSC -- the authority to claim that compliance with federal standards, no matter how weak, creates immunity from state consumer laws. But they've been claiming that power anyway. In fact, many of these statutes affirmatively preserve state law claims (previous blogs here and here).