First, it was destroying the nationally-recognized program to prevent children from smoking. Now the governor wants to let big companies sell harmful products to our children.
Governor Barbour vetoed House Bill 1240 yesterday because he felt it went against our great tort reform laws.
The bill would allow families with children injured or poisoned by toys to file claims under the Mississippi Consumer Protection Act instead of the products liability statues.
The lame Republican excuse of tort reform for most everything dealing with lawsuits is getting very old, very fast. If children are injured or poisoned by toys, especially when the manufacturer knowingly and willfully allowed these products to be on the market, then the families are due some compensation.
All Barbour cares about is big business - not the people (or children) of Mississippi.
Click here to read the article in The Sun Herald.
It is difficult to know what motivates a person to make the decisions one does. Does Gov. Barbour really care more about big business than children? Perhaps. The article in the paper however, suggests there is conflictual legislation between two mechanisms established in the state. The law Barbour vetoed would have expanded that conflict. It does not fix the problem. His action does not even address that the problem exists.
ReplyDeleteBut given that there is a conflict between two pieces of legislation means the possibility exists, from my point of view, that Barbour might have been motivated from a different place. The question that arises for me with this veto is whether or not Barbour or the legislature will seek to fix the legal conflicts so that our families have the recourse needed against products that have proved to be dangerous to children. I am not an optimist that Mississippi will even consider this type of overhaul of our system. But at least there seems to be some realization of not to make it worse.
However, I think it is erroneous to define the actions of another into such narrow terms as this vs that. There usually is more complexity driving our decisions. Blessings, Rev. Fred L Hammond
Barbour's reasoning is quite erroneous. This bill would strengthen the existing law to give more protection to families from the companies that make these toys. There is nothing complicated or conflicting about the law.
ReplyDeleteThis was one of the bills the Attorney General was pushing, and the governor has known about it for months. Suddenly, he has a problem with it- and it's tort reform. The mantra of the Republican party. Barbour makes his decisions quite simplistic when you look at his record. It's very this vs. that for Barbour.
I would go so far as to challenge the people who read this blog to find one thing that Barbour has done for the state of Mississippi that has not been self-serving to his political career or profiting to his friends and donors.
I understand that it is the nature of the political beast for such things, but even in the wake of the hurricane, there are still too many red flags that popped up to make me believe he is working for the working people, much less the poor people, of this state.
Not to defend Barbour, but this was classic poison pill legislation.
ReplyDeleteLegislators knew it posed a challenge to previous tort reform legislation; they could have written the bill so that it wouldn't; they did not. Consequently, Barbour vetoes it and ends up looking like a jerk. Nothing wrong with that--he plays his share of politics, too--but it's not as if this bill was written to be signed into law. If it had been, the offending clause would have been worded differently.
Personally, I have mixed feelings. I want to see a Democratic legislative majority continue, even expand, and I think the Democratic approach to Medicaid this session is the right one. On the other, this old game of "hey, let's write this into the bill so the executive will veto it and look like a jerk" irritates me, whether it's happening on a state level or a national level (and it happened quite often during the Clinton vs. Gingrich years). I'd much rather have seen the offending clause changed and the bill signed.
Oh my goodness! Once again some people just cannot be fair.
ReplyDelete1. First of all, as student who saw many Reject All Tobacco presentations, they were ridiculous and no one paid any attention to them. It was a waste of money. There are much more effective methods of preventing smoking than having huge assemblies with a show choir and a giant rat. All anyone viewed it as was an excuse to get out of class.
2. I agree that parents of children who are injured or poisoned by toys do have the right to sue for reparations. However, they already have that right. Governor Barbour did not take that right away from them. All he did was prevent it from becoming frivilous and ridiculous.
Liz,
ReplyDelete1. Our program was one of the most effective in the country. Presentations at schools were a small part of the overall program and were apparently reaching some folks.
2. Tort reform makes it so that in big cases it is more expensive for an attorney to bring a case to court than he/she can make off it in the case of a win. This effectively stifles those lawsuits that are valid and needed.