April 14, 2004

http://www.thehill.com/news/041404/asbestos.aspx

Asbestos bill will fail, says author Hatch

The chief sponsor of a compromise bill that would compensate victims of asbestos poisoning has conceded that it is not likely to attract enough bipartisan support to win Senate approval this year.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said the latest effort to pass asbestos litigation reform, which he introduced last week and is scheduled for consideration when the Senate returns from Easter recess, "probably" won’t receive enough Democratic votes to succeed. He added that sometimes you "have to lose to win."

Last year, Hatch’s committee narrowly approved his bill to create a trust fund to compensate victims of asbestos poisoning. But the full Senate never voted on the measure because of disagreements over several provisions, including the size of the fund.

Hatch’s new bill includes compromises worked out by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who has held weekly meetings on asbestos with congressional aides, organized labor, insurers, industry and the trial lawyers.

However, it does not address the main concerns of the unions and Democrats, namely the award values, the amount of money to be put in the compensation trust fund and how compensation will be handled if the trust fund runs out of money.

Opposition to the bill has come from both sides; trial lawyers and organized labor say it does not do enough to help people who were made sick by asbestos exposure, while some industry groups say it punishes companies too much and would force many more businesses to close.

For several years, industry groups have been lobbying for Congress to take asbestos-

related lawsuits out of the courtroom. Dozens of companies have been forced into bankruptcy because of their use of the fire-proofing material, which has been shown to cause severe respiratory problems.

The Asbestos Alliance, a coalition of businesses pushing for legislation, endorsed the latest version of Hatch’s bill and promised to lobby on its behalf.

"After more than 25 years of trying, we simply cannot let this historic opportunity pass without enactment of fair and meaningful asbestos litigation reform," said Michael Baroody, executive vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, a leading member of the alliance.

Organized labor is opposed to the new bill. AFL-CIO Legislative Director Bill Samuel said the lack of funding alone is a "nonstarter."

But Hatch believes those issues are merely smoke screens and that the Democrats’ opposition is grounded on presidential politics.

He asserted that anticipated campaign donations from trial lawyers and the AFL-CIO’s opposition to the bill are the factors driving the Democrats’ resistance to passing it and not the substance of the legislation.

Hatch said Democrats are afraid that presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) will miss out on $50 million in campaign funds from the trial lawyers, adding it would be "pretty pathetic that they would let these hundreds of thousands of people go down the drain without just compensation, which we have in this bill, because of politics."

Hatch said on the Senate floor that trial lawyers stand to gain at least $60 billion from asbestos litigation if the current system is not reformed.

Some of the opposition to the bill, though, has come from the right as well as the left.

In a letter to Hatch last week, Dirk Van Dongen, president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, said, "Many wholesaler-distributors and others face larger out-of-pocket asbestos-related costs under [Hatch’s proposal] than they do under the tort system now in place."

He also called the trust-fund approach "fundamentally flawed, incapable of providing a fair and balanced solution to this problem."

Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vt.), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said he would oppose the new bill, which he called "partisan legislation." He added that some of the changes of the latest bill, such as increasing some compensation levels, move "in the right direction" but "not far enough."

Leahy also complained that he did not see the bill until after it was introduced.

The latest bill stripped a provision from the previous compromise that would have reverted to the current system if the fund would run out of money. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), the author of that language, said he will oppose a bill without the provision and expressed hope that Democrats have "the votes to stop it."

Republicans want federal courts to decide the remaining cases if the fund runs out of money, arguing this would help to reduce excessive awards. Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) said last week he would support this approach over the one introduced by Biden.

But Carper still has other problems with the bill and said it should not be taken up next week because rushing the bill to the floor might raise "further the sense of distrust that permeates this body."

Instead, Carper suggested, there should first be a four-week period of intensive negotiations to iron out the major differences

*** POSTED APRIL 15, 2004 ***