Democrats target homeland bill
Posted on 11/16/2002 5:09:37 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
Democrats target homeland bill
GOP denies measure is filled with special interest provisions
11/16/2002
WASHINGTON - Senate Democrats said Friday that they would try to strip what they called Republican special interest provisions from the homeland security bill, a move Republicans said might kill the measure already passed by the House and pushed relentlessly by the White House.
"If this is a homeland security bill, let's keep it homeland security related and let's take out all this terrible special interest legislation that has nothing to do with homeland security," said Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.
But Republicans denied their provisions were unrelated to homeland security. They also said that if Senate Democrats succeeded in their changes, the GOP-controlled House then would have to vote again - and the House left for the year early Friday morning.
Also, if the homeland security bill fails, it will take longer to get a final vote on a terrorism insurance provision, said Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas.
"I just think it's a risk we shouldn't take," he said.
The homeland security bill would spark the largest federal reorganization in half a century, incorporating about two dozen agencies into one Cabinet-level department with a $38 billion budget and 170,000 employees responsible for safeguarding the nation, including its borders and transportation systems.
The current fight is over an amendment offered by Mr. Daschle and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., that would strip seven provisions from the legislation approved by the House on Wednesday to create a Cabinet-level Homeland Security Department.
"In the dead of night with no one watching, after we thought we'd made the compromise, a few things were snuck into the bill," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
Included is language that would create at least one new university-based homeland security research center at a major university. Democrats say it was intended for Texas A&M University, a favorite of Mr. Gramm and incoming House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land. Republicans say it could go to any number of universities including Texas A&M.
Democrats also say language in the bill would protect pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits over the vaccines they create and their side effects, including wiping out lawsuits already in court.
The provision "provides liability protection for pharmaceutical companies that actually make mercury-based vaccine preservatives that actually have caused autism in children. It wipes out all of the litigation," Mr. Daschle said.
Republicans deny that the provision would wipe out current lawsuits and say future liability protection is needed to ensure that pharmaceutical companies will produce the vaccines needed in case of a bioterrorist strike.
"Why would [companies] stand out totally exposed for making a medicine that is lifesaving but one that, with one lawsuit, can wipe out their whole development process, their whole manufacturing process today?" said Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., the Senate's only doctor.
After the Senate finishes with the homeland security bill Monday, it will move on to the terrorism insurance legislation passed by the House.
Under that bill, the government would cover up to $90 billion annually in insurance claims from terrorist attacks in the next three years. The government would cover up to 90 percent of insured losses from major attacks, with the insurance industry covering up to the first $15 billion in annual claims.
The measure does not cover last year's terrorist attacks.
Mr. Gramm says the bill is an insurance-industry bailout that allows businesses attacked by terrorists to be sued by people injured in those attacks. But he helped craft an agreement under which the Senate will quickly move to vote on the insurance bill if the homeland security bill passes.
"I thought it might get us a vote or two" on homeland security, Mr. Gramm said.
The preservative is no longer used. It supposedly has also been linked to autism, a link which was debunked by the FDA in 1999.
The 12 companies which used to make vaccines has now been reduced to two, due to the law of diminishing returns presented by potential lawsuits, spurred on by the "junk science" of studies you mention. As a result, there is now a shortage of childhood vaccines, since drug companies operate on the evil captitalistic expectation of profit (sarcasm), which has made the U.S. the world leader in pharmaceutical research.
The reason this amendment is included in Homeland Security is to minimize the potential lawsuits that will most assuredly be filed when the statistical probability of deaths occur from the smallpox vaccine.
The measure will not prevent lawsuits, BTW, but mandates that the suit first be referred to a federal arbitration board. It has also received the endorsement of the American Pediatric Association -- not exactly a conservative group, but one that is all too familiar with the litigation-happy liberal lawyers, who will pursue their own profits at any cost, undeterred by the fact that we are at war.
Source, please?
It is what it is.
And exactly what is that? What groups, beside the pharmaceutical companies, have the money or the incentive to perform drug tests and trials? With the exception of after-the-fact independent research done to support class-action suits by trial lawyers, there aren't any.
We have become so risk-averse in this country that we require a 100% guarantee that any medicine or medical procedure will cause no unexpected harm. As a result, we are creating doctor shortages (particularly in fields such as obstectrics, with its sky-high rate of litigation), and we now risk limiting the experimentation necessary to develop new cures in the pharmaceutical field -- all with sweeping indictments of "corruption" and "carelessness," and no allowances for the complicated processes of the human body, and individual free choice.
Instead, we choose to view the very people on whose expertise and research our longevity depends as automatic adversaries, while at the same time trusting to some misplaced notion of infallibility by the medical profession. We fail to use our reason and free choice to make our own decisions about our own bodies, but are quick to blame others in retrospect for both own lack of judgment and the complicated nature of life itself.
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