Mark Pryor

Mr. PRYOR

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces of the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 4, 2008, at 2:30 p.m., in open and closed session in order to receive testimony on military space programs in review of the defense authorization request for fiscal year 2009 and the future years defense program.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on March 4, 2008, at 2:30 p.m. in order to hold a closed hearing.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for the Committee on Veterans' Affairs to be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 4, in order to conduct a joint hearing with the House Veterans' Affairs Committee to hear the legislative presentation from the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. The Committee will meet in room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building, at 9:30 a.m.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 4, 2008, at 2:30 p.m. in order to conduct a closed hearing entitled ``NSPD-54/HSPD-23 and the Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative.''

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 4, 2008, at 9:30 a.m. in SD-410, in order to conduct a hearing on Kosovo.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate in order to conduct a hearing on Tuesday, March 4, 2008, at 10:00 a.m., in room SD 366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. At this hearing, the Committee will hear testimony regarding Energy Information Administration's revised Annual Energy Outlook.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 4, 2008, at 2:30 p.m., in room 253 of the Russell Senate Office Building, in order to conduct a hearing. The purpose of this hearing is to evaluate operational incidents associated with oil spills. The Subcommittee will examine non-tank vessel fuel tank design, the Coast Guard's Vessel Traffic System, and the U.S. vessel pilot system.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on March 4, 2008, at 10 a.m., in order to conduct a hearing entitled ``The State of the Banking Industry.''

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 4, 2008, at 9:30 a.m., in open and closed session in order to receive testimony on the United States Central Command and Special Operations Command in review of the Defense authorization request for fiscal year 2009 and the Future Years Defense Program.

Mr. PRYOR

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I move to table the DeMint amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter, dated February 29, 2008, from the National Association of State Fire Marshals. It is addressed to Senator Inouye and Senator Stevens, where they endorse this legislation, this Senate bill.

Mr. PRYOR. I suggest the absence of a quorum and ask unanimous consent that time under the quorum be divided equally.

Mr. PRYOR. I thank the Senator from California for being so gracious. While she was speaking, I talked to some of the Republican staff. I think they need a little more time and maybe even people on our side need a little more time on the amendment. If possible, I ask the Senator from California to set it aside. We will have a vote at 5:30. We have several Senators who we think will come and speak on the DeMint amendment. We will be working with the Senator as this goes along.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I ask that the time come out of the Republican time, because I think the Republicans have 55 minutes, or something like that, and the Democrats only have 28 minutes.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time during the quorum call be equally divided.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I wish to speak about the DeMint amendment. Senator DeMint, by the way, has been very constructive in our meetings and in our discussions. His staff met with my staff last night. The meetings to date have been constructive and positive. We are hoping that they might actually lead to some improvements to the legislation, but we will have to wait and see to know how some of this works out. I think it is very important for colleagues to understand what this amendment does that Senator DeMint is offering first and that we will vote on at 5:30, and that is it would take the work the Senate has done on this legislation so far and throw it out the window and adopt the House-passed measure. Now, there are a lot of differences between the House and the Senate versions. Senator DeMint was correct a few moments ago when he talked about how there are a lot of similarities as well, and that is exactly right. I think I can be fair in my discussion when I say that at least my impression is that when the House started their process last fall, they were doing it--again, from my perspective--more in terms of a reaction to a lot of the news stories everybody was seeing about dangerous toys and children's products that were setting off alarm bells all over the country. I think their bill started as a reaction to that. That is not a bad way to start a bill; I am not critical of the House in any way on it. I am proud of what they did and glad they got it through their committee and actually passed it on the House floor. I believe it was the very last day they were in session last year--if not the last day, it was the last week. So I am proud of what they have done. I would say their bill is a pretty good bill. Part of the reason, though, or the primary reason their bill has a lot of similarity to ours is during that process--and this is just legislation; I am not critical at all, but during that process they eventually looked at our bill that we were working on in committee, and they took about half or so of it--maybe about 60 percent of it--and did some cutting and pasting and just put it in their legislation. Again, I am honored that they did and flattered that they did because we had been working hard in the Commerce Committee to make sure the reform we were talking about was comprehensive and was good. I would say generally, in broad strokes, there are two or three major differences between the House bill and the Senate bill as the Senate bill exists today. One is that we have more enforcement in our legislation. We have more transparency in our legislation. We have more comprehensive reform in our legislation than the House bill does. Again, I am not taking away from the House bill. I appreciate their bipartisan effort over there, so I don't want my words to be interpreted as in any way critical. But I do think our bill is better. Ours is bipartisan--and so is theirs, by the way--with Senator Stevens and Senator Collins. I have spoken with several of my Republican colleagues over the last few days, and I would hope they would consider joining us as cosponsors. I would love for them to consider doing that today. I had some discussions yesterday with a handful of Republicans who said they were interested in at least considering cosponsoring. So we are waiting to hear back from some of those offices today, but we would love to add more Republican cosponsors if at all possible. Let me go through some of the primary differences in what the House bill does and what the Senate bill does. There are many. Again, the bills are largely similar because the House adopted a lot of what we did, or more or less adopted what we did in the committee. A lot of that has not changed at all, or it has changed very little. So let me run through a few points, five or six points. First, I would say the Senate bill is more transparent. When I say that, what I am talking about is, under our bill--again, the bipartisan Senate substitute--what I am talking about is there is more information publicly available to people under the Senate bill. We have seen this happen on many occasions. I was going to tell this story later. We have some charts to this effect I didn't want to bring out right now because we will get into this in more detail later. We are going to talk about several examples of incidents where people were injured and where they had bought and used a product that the CPSC had known about and known about the dangers of it, but the CPSC was in negotiations or in discussions with the manufacturer about doing a recall. In fact, there is one incident we are going to talk about later--and it may be tomorrow at this point, depending on how the rest of the day goes-- there is one product we are going to talk about where a baby crib collapsed, and it caught a young girl's hand in that crib. I think she was roughly about a year old. We will get the facts on this when we go to it. I think she did end up avoiding serious injury, but it was scary. There were some moments there for the parents. So the father called the manufacturer of the crib and the manufacturer played dumb. They say: Gosh, we didn't know. We never heard of this problem before. We didn't know our cribs had this problem. Are you sure you had it set up the right way? Are you sure she wasn't abusing it somehow? All of those kinds of things. The father found out later that by the time he called, that company had 80 complaints about that crib doing exactly the same thing. But because there is no transparency under the current law, there was no way for the father to find out. If our bill passes, we will set up a database that is searchable where you can go and look at a specific product and know if there have been complaints about it before. This will be a huge benefit to parents and grandparents all over the country. We need to do this. The House bill doesn't have that provision. The House bill has a study. It says: Yes, we ought to study this idea of a database, but they don't have a database. In fact, the database we are talking about, we are not inventing this out of whole cloth. We are using another Federal agency's idea which has worked very well, and that is NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. I would encourage--here again, I mentioned this before--all of the staff people who are watching in their offices and who think their boss might be undecided on this legislation or undecided on this one point, I would encourage them right now to go to the NHTSA Web site, and there is a little area you can click on that talks about recalled products. I encourage you to do that and go through that and see first how easy it is to use; secondly, the quality of the information that is on there. Again, we are going to show this later with charts to show all of my Senate colleagues how easy it is, but also how balanced and how fair it is. The industry has had some concerns they will be smeared, that they will be slandered or libeled with all of these complaints. But I think the NHTSA Web site shows it can be done in a very responsible way and done in a way that does help the general public. Another difference I want to talk about, the second difference between the House version and the Senate version is, the Senate bill-- the bill we are on right now--adopts what they call ASTM963-07, which is a standard that is widely accepted by the industries. ASTM stands for the American Society for Testing and Materials, and that has just kind of become a lingo--ASTM has become a lingo in the consumer product world for a set of standards. ASTM963-07 has become a widely recognized, widely utilized standard. What we do is, we codify that standard. If our bill passes, it is not going to be voluntary. It is not going to be--some people may be following it, and some people may not. We are going to codify it. We will make it law. Again, these are standards that the industry has been using and has accepted. This is not a controversial piece of this legislation. However, this ASTM963-07 is not in the House bill. So the House bill keeps the status quo. They say they are going to assess the effectiveness. Well, it has already been assessed. It has been out there for years and years and years. Again, it is basically universally agreed that these are good safety standards that set the standard for industry and should be adopted into Federal law. The third difference with the House bill I wanted to talk about is this idea of punishing companies when they do the wrong thing. The Senate committee passed the bill out of committee with a $100 million civil penalty--$100 million. It went from $1.8 million to $100 million--over 50 times what is in existing law. The House, in the meantime, passed a provision that had a $10 million penalty. Well, the concern I have with the $10 million penalty--civil penalty--is that for a lot of these big companies, $1.8 million can just be the cost of doing business. Again, we have some charts on this that we may show in the next couple of days--it can be the cost of doing business for some of these big companies--$10 million is better. It gets their attention. But what we do is, we set our cap under the Senate bill at $10 million unless there are aggravating circumstances. If there are aggravating circumstances such as maybe you have a repeat offender, maybe you have some particularly egregious behavior, or maybe you have a company that just absolutely does not have any regard for U.S. safety standards. Again, a lot of these products that are defective are coming in from overseas. Maybe they don't have the quality control over there. I don't know. They maybe have a chronic problem or whatever it may be. The Senate bill allows you to take the $10 million max and do an additional $10 million, again, if there are aggravating circumstances. Quite frankly, I hope the CPSC never has to use that, but the fact that they have that ability maybe will put a little fear in some people when they make some of these decisions about cutting corners on lead paint or making defective products, whatever they may be. So, again, the Senate bill has a 10-plus-10 provision, which is $10 million max in lesser aggravating circumstances, and then you can go for an additional $10 million. The House bill just has the flat $10 million. Another difference, and I would call this the fourth difference between the Senate bill and the House bill, is that the Senate bill has a protection for employees who notify the CPSC of violations. Now, this is important. You don't want employees to be punished for doing the right thing. We all know how it works in the real world. It happens where an employee will, over the objections of a company--over the objections of his employer--go and inform the CPSC about some safety violation. It does happen. Again, we have examples. We have charts if anybody wants to see them, or we have memos and background, news articles, et cetera, if people want to see those. But the truth is, you have to keep this in perspective. What we are talking about with our so-called whistleblower provision is a provision where an employee--it is basically only triggered when an employee of a company tells the CPSC about a dangerous product. This is fundamental stuff. This employee is out there letting the public know, basically telling the Government there is a dangerous product that is either in the U.S. market or about to get to the U.S. market. Again, that employee for doing the right thing should not be fired or demoted or whatever the case may be. If we set up a process in our law that is based on existing law where the employee goes through the Department of Labor process, it is well established, we adopt what this Congress has passed in previous years as the standard we would like to see on our whistleblower statute. The House bill has no such protection. We feel as if this is an important improvement in the legislation because we think we will get more information to the CPSC if the employees understand they are protected. Let's talk about misinformation about this one provision. In the Commerce Committee bill, we actually had a bounty for these employees for turning in companies. We had a bounty in the bill. When I talked with Senator Stevens, that was not acceptable to him. He made it very clear that he thought it would cause a lot of heartburn on the Republican side. He was very adamant we take that provision out, and we did. We have also done some other things to build in some safeguards. For example, if an employee files a frivolous claim with the Department of Labor, he can be subject to a $1,000 penalty. I don't have to go through all that today. Our Senate bill, we believe, is balanced, we believe it is fair, we believe it is in the public interest to have this information come forward and the employee not be punished at work for telling the Government about a safety violation. The fifth matter I wish to talk about is lead. I heard someone say this bill is the ``get the lead out'' bill. This bill does, for the first time, in a very historic manner, set a standard for lead in children's products. Most Americans believe there is a standard for lead in children's products. There is not a standard. There is a standard for lead in paint but not for children's products. Every pediatrician with whom I have ever talked and every pediatrician who has testified either on the House side or the Senate side and every scientist will tell you of the dangers of lead. It is basic scientific medical knowledge today that lead is bad for children. What we do in the Senate version of the legislation is we essentially ban lead. We do not completely ban it because we understand that lead is a naturally occurring element. We are going to have trace amounts of ambient lead in the atmosphere. We acknowledge that in our legislation. And our legislation, when it comes to lead, is more aggressive in getting the lead out of children's products. We do it quicker, and I think we do it in a better way than the House bill does. The last point I wish to mention on the seven major differences between the House version and the Senate version is the DeMint amendment--and that is what we are talking about today--to make sure the Consumer Product Safety Commission has the funding it needs to do what we want it to do. The Senate version is a 7-year reauthorization. The DeMint amendment would flat line the funding at a 10-percent level after 2009. Our bill actually has a slower ramp-up or it does have a ramp-up in resources, but we acknowledge there is a lot of work to be done with this Commission. We cannot just give it a year or two of increased appropriations and then flat line it and hope it is going to be OK. What we need to do is continue to invest in this Commission to make sure long term we set it up for success. The Senate version has that major advantage over the DeMint amendment. The current version has a big advantage over the DeMint amendment when it comes to providing the resources to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. On that point, I say this: My colleagues all know, because they have seen my voting record, there have been times when I have been pretty much a deficit hawk around here and times when I have tried to shrink Government and different efforts such as that. I am not a person who believes we ought to throw money at a problem because I think generally when we do that, we do not get a very good result. I have seen that time and time again on the Federal level. But this is an exception. This is one of those times when I think we are being targeted, I think we are being responsible, I think we are slowly ramping up this Commission and not throwing a bunch of resources at it right now, but we are measuring out those resources over time, over a several year period. I think what we will see in 7 years is a much stronger CPSC than we have today. It is not just about the CPSC as a commission being stronger. That may, in and of itself, be OK, but what is good about our legislation, the Senate version, is I believe very strongly we will have a big improvement in safety all across America. We talk about toys, and toys are a very important piece of what the CPSC does, but they do all kinds of things. Part of this legislation is to have a Federal standard on portable gas cans and the caps that are on gas cans. We have seen that problem in many incidents around the country because there is no common standard on gas caps on these gas cans. What we will be able to do with this legislation, with the Senate version, is to make the consumer product safety world much safer. Again, my hope is that when we stand here, say, 5 years from now, we will see a precipitous decrease in litigation, we will see a decrease in recalls, we will see a decrease in injuries, and we will see a decrease in deaths as a result of consumer products and consumer product violations. I say to my fellow Senators, it looks as if we are going to vote on the DeMint amendment at 5:30 p.m. today. I encourage Senators and their staffs to look at the DeMint amendment and look at how it weakens the Senate version of the Consumer Product Safety Reform Act. It does weaken the Senate version. The DeMint amendment is basically--well, it is exactly accepting everything the House has done. We can do better than that. We can be stronger. In fact, I have talked with several House Members who like what we are able to do in the Senate version. The DeMint amendment puts us where the House is, and we need to have the Senate's stamp on this legislation so we can go back home and tell the people what we are doing for them. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time until 5:30 p.m. be used for debate on DeMint amendment No. 4095; that the time be equally divided between Senator DeMint and Senator Pryor or their designees; and that following the use or yielding back of time, the Senate proceed to a vote in relation to the DeMint amendment No. 4095, with no second-degree amendments in order prior to the vote.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. PRYOR

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I ask to return to the regular order.

Mr. PRYOR. Reserving the right to object, as soon as he finishes his 10 minutes on his amendment, we will go back to the pending amendment.

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, we are today, once again, starting the debate on the Consumer Product Safety reform bill. This is a very important piece of legislation, and I am sure Senators from all over the country have heard from their constituents about this because we saw last year a record number of product recalls, especially in the toy area. We saw last year recall after recall after recall, and some of the news stories that made the headlines were about lead in toys, but certainly the recalls last year were not in any way, shape, or form limited to lead. Lead is a very serious problem. We deal with lead in this legislation. In fact, we virtually ban lead in all children's products. That is a very important new safety rule. If the Senate adopts this measure, the new safety rule would be that there is a very tough scientifically based lead standard for toys. When I say ``virtually ban,'' I do think it is important for my colleagues to understand that we can probably never absolutely get rid of lead in any product because there is some lead out in the atmosphere. It is a naturally occurring element. But we virtually ban lead in all children's products. Another thing that we do, which I think is very important, is illustrated by this chart, and that is we recognize the changes in the U.S. economy. The last time the Senate reauthorized this legislation, which was in 1990 or 1992, we have to think about what the U.S. economy looked like. If you think about how many imports we had coming into this country from overseas, one of the things this chart illustrates is the number of imports in dollar figures, starting in 1974 and going up here to the year 2006. The actual numbers and the years aren't as important as the trend line. You can see what is happening with imports coming into this country. We all know we are getting more and more imports, and one of the things I think we need to fight for is our U.S. manufacturing base, but that is not the discussion we are having here today. We are seeing more and more imports coming into this country. However, at the very same time, over the very same years, if you go to this bottom chart, again starting in 1974 and going up to this year, you will see what the Consumer Product Safety Commission's staff has done year by year. Unfortunately, you see it peak in about 1980 or so, and then it starts to drop off dramatically. Here again, the numbers are not as important as the fact that you see this downward trend when it comes to employees at the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The reason that is important--and, by the way, the numbers are 420 full-time employees, and at the height of the agency there were about 900. But those numbers are not as important as the trend. You can see that today we have less than half of the full-time employees at the CPSC as they did 20 years ago. The problem is when you compare these two charts. Again, I totally understand we can work more efficiently today with things such as computers and telecommunications and all that. We can work more efficiently. We can do more with fewer people. I do acknowledge that. But when you look at how the imports have grown and how the Consumer Product Safety Commission staff has shrunk, that explains why you see a record number of recalls. That explains why you see millions and millions of products being pulled from the shelves last year. Because as the Consumer Product Safety Commission has become less capable, less able to deal with the changes in the import economy, what you are seeing is more and more dangerous products coming into this country. I don't think it is an accident. My colleagues need to know that I don't think it is an accident that last year every single toy recall-- and we will talk more about this in a few moments--but every single toy recall from last year was made in China. None of these were U.S. made. In fact, they weren't made in any other country except China. So we need to reexamine the priorities of this agency. We need to restructure the agency in such a way that it meets the needs of the changing U.S. economy. We need to help this agency right here, when it comes to dollar amounts and full-time employees for this agency. Again, it may be another discussion where we try to help the U.S. economy here in the number of imports and try to manufacture more products here--that is another bill and that will come at some point in the future--but right now this is what we are focused on, is trying to make sure that the Consumer Product Safety Commission is equipped to handle the changes in the U.S. economy. Mr. President, I see Senator Klobuchar is here, and she wishes to say a few words. I will be on the floor all day today. I encourage my colleagues to come down and talk to me if they have amendments. Certainly we have seen a growing list of amendments. My hope would be that all the amendments would be germane and that we could maybe get a bipartisan agreement on amendments. I know Senator Stevens has been very good to deal with on this legislation. He and I have not talked about any of the amendments yet. I think our staffs have been talking with each other. But I encourage my colleagues to come to the floor when it is convenient, or send their staff over when it is convenient to talk about whatever amendments they maybe wish to offer. I know we had some meetings last night with various staff people on certain Senators' staffs on the Republican side of the aisle, and certainly we have an open door to try to talk through those. One last thing, again for the staff members watching this on C-SPAN and for the folks all around this country who are watching it on C-SPAN 2. We have made many changes in this legislation since it left the committee, and we have listened and we have worked very hard to try to find common ground on a whole variety of issues. When we started, there were maybe 20 or 30 or 40 controversial parts to this bill. I think we are now down to two or three. I am not sure that anyone has put a number on it, but we have worked very hard to try to come up with a bill that can have bipartisan support and something that people all over this country can be very proud of. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. PRYOR

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I thank the Senator. Mr. President, I yield the floor.