Do Personal Injury Lawyers Wield Too Much Influence On Capitol Hill?
July 27, 2005
MTBE, Asbestos And Teflon Cases Demonstrate Personal Injury Lawyers Are Kings Of The Hill
The plaintiff’s bar demonstrated its disproportionate clout on Capitol Hill a few days ago when it persuaded energy bill conferees to jettison a rule protecting producers of an EPA-sanctioned fuel additive against frivolous lawsuits.
A handful of wealthy personal injury lawyers wants to sue large oil companies with deep pockets because trace amounts of the mileage-enhancing additive MTBE had leaked from storage tanks into water supplies around the country—primarily in New York and California.
Although MTBE is not considered carcinogenic in humans and no illnesses have been reported from the leaks, the tort lawyers saw the additive as a new revenue stream worth billions of dollars—a la the asbestos and tobacco bonanza of recent decades.
The EPA hailed MTBE, an oxygenate which makes gasoline burn cleaner, when it was seeking an antidote for smog-shrouded urban areas like Los Angeles and New York City in the early 1990s. The Sierra Club joined the chorus, praising MTBE as one of its top ten environmentally friendly products.
Bear in mind, that MTBE is a safe and effective product in your car’s gas tank; it only becomes a headache when it’s placed in old, porous storage tanks at local service stations and distributors.
While the leaks are a nuisance, they are neither life-threatening nor widespread—EPA estimates that just 16 of nearly 4,000 public water systems are a problem and some 95 percent already are cleaned up or in the process of being decontaminated. And Robert Hirsch of the U.S. Geological Survey notes that MTBE leaks primarily are a problem of taste and odor and “almost always below levels of concern from a public health standpoint.”
So why did the House-Senate energy conferees decide to scrap the liability waiver—especially when it only applied to “product defect” lawsuits and still left defendants liable for the larger MTBE spills that oozed into water systems?
The answer can be found in Federal Election Commission files that show personal injury lawyers mail tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to federal candidates each election cycle—most of them incumbent senators.
When Congress has to choose between companies obeying government orders and fat-cat trial lawyers with dollar signs hanging in their eyes, the winners are obvious.
Congress, for much the same reasons, also has repeatedly failed to rein in the lawyers’ asbestos scam. Dozens of companies have been bankrupted, many of which never used asbestos. More than 60 percent of a federally created asbestos trust fund has gone to personal injury lawyers and their “expert” witnesses. Much of the rest went to workers who weren’t actually suffering from asbestos exposure—in effect, short-changing workers with genuine asbestos-related illnesses.
Tort lawyers specialize in attacking companies that make desirable products in good faith. Teflon is one of their latest targets. After decades of successful use in a multitude of products, the plaintiffs’ lawyers are now fanning fears that Teflon is hazardous even though tests show that Teflon-enhanced products, including coated frying pans and Gore-tex clothing are perfectly safe.
The British, from whom we got our tort law model, have built a low-cost safeguard into their legal system that reins in such speculative and rapacious lawyers—without jeopardizing the rights of people who have actually suffered wrongs. In Britain, a plaintiff who sues and loses generally is ordered to pay the defendant’s court costs.
Similar reforms to our out-of-control civil justice system would unclog our courts and stimulate full-throttle job creation, but as long as personal injury lawyers hold sway on Capitol Hill the chances of passage appear to be stuck on absolute zilch.
Posted in Commentary |