The Consumer Product Safety Commission late Friday announced a one-year stay of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act’s enforcement of requirements for testing of products that will be used by children. (News release.) The action, coming in the wake of a full-scale revolt by small manufacturers of toys, garments and other children’s products, provides very little relief.

CPSC Acting Chairman Nancy issued a statement in conjunction with the stay. This excerpt make it clear that everyone’s still on the hook:

The action we are taking today puts in place a limited “time-out” so that the Commission and the Congress can address the issues with the law that have become so painfully apparent. The stay will give the CPSC time to develop and issue rules defining responsibilities of manufacturers, importers, retailers, and testing labs. It will give the Commission time to rule on exemptions andexclusions from the lead provisions and develop and put in place appropriate testing protocols. It will give staff time to develop an approach to component parts testing, given the ambiguity of the statute on this point.

It is important to clearly understand what the stay does and does not do. The stay of enforcement of the testing and certification provisions will give some temporary and limited relief to small manufacturers, home-based businesses and crafters who cannot comply with the law without incurring substantial testing costs. However, the stay does not relieve them of complying with the underlying requirements enacted by Congress and which go into effect on February 10, 2009, dealing with lead, phthalates and a number of other toy standards. Any changes to these requirements will need to be addressed by Congress.

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement act also empowered state attorneys general to enforce the CPSIA’s provisions, so an ambitious AG could still wreak havoc by targeting manufacturers of children’s products, or products used by children, or products that may come in contact with children. To which the CPSC says, “The Commission trusts that State Attorneys General will respect the Commission’s judgment that it is necessary to stay certain testing and certification requirements and will focus their own enforcement efforts on other provisions of the law, e.g. the sale of recalled products.”

That’s placing a lot of trust in the restraint of politicians.

Bottom line, the CPSC’s action provides no legal protection for manufacturers of products requiring testing and really just confuses the issue.

Let’s get moving, Congress.

For more, see Walter Olson’s post at Overlawyered.com. He comments:

This is, in general, very good news, but two problems need to be pointed out. One is that the action may be vulnerable to legal challenge as violating the CPSC’s legal obligations to regulate, and in particular to enforce CPSIA’s terms faithfully. As if to confirm that danger, prominent “consumer” groups — that is, the same groups that pushed CPSIA through to enactment and have vocally defended the law ever since — issued a letter this afternoon digging into their position that there’s nothing wrong with the law and that Congress should not revisit it. (Consumers Union, Public Citizen — the latter, it will be recalled, being the group whose David Arkush wrote last month “I haven’t heard a single legitimate concern yet” about the law.)

In other developments, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) announced he will introduce a bill to fix the CPSIA’s excesses. His news release is here.

In a post below we note Public Citizen’s mendacious attack against a new nuclear power plant in Maryland. Of course, nuclear energy is not the only source of electricity the group rejects.

From the Energy Information Adminstration, a pie chart of electricity generation in 2006.

Public Citizen opposes nuclear power, so that’s 19.4 percent gone.

The group absolutely hates coal, so that’s 49 percent eliminated.

The oil companies are anathema, which means another 1.6 percent gone.

So in Public Citizen’s America, 60 percent of current electricity generation is unacceptable.

That’s a very cold, very dark, very poor America. 

From today’s Washington Post, “Coalition Challenges Proposed 3rd Reactor“:

A coalition of environmental organizations filed legal challenges this week against the proposed third nuclear reactor at Calvert Cliffs.

The group told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the problems with UniStar Nuclear Energy’s application to build a reactor at the Lusby site include the concurrent review of the reactor design and the license application; the storage and disposal of radioactive waste; and foreign partnerships involved in the project.

“We are basically trying to point out the inadequacy of the application itself. The issues we are raising will demonstrate that this is both an economically and environmentally bad deal for Maryland,” said Allison Fisher, energy organizer for Public Citizen‘s Energy Program.

So, no concurrent review of reactor and license application because government cannot do two things simultaneously? The efficiency apparently poses a threat; a 10-year approval process is much easier to derail than a five or four-year process.

No local, on-site storage of nuclear waste, either. And since Public Citizen opposes the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository for long-term, offsite storage, that effectively rules out any nuclear power.

And foreign partnerships are objectionable because…lousy French. They use nuclear power.

You can read Public Citizen’s news release here, which includes a warning about the Chesapeake Bay being unable to bear even more nuclear discharge. Well, yes, in reality nuclear plants don’t discharge radioactive waste, but…

You see a lot of alarmism and misstatement come from the environmentalist, anti-growth activists, but this one is a remarkably consistent piece of work.

Judging by the flurry of committee action, looks like there will be a congressional vote this year on at least one anti-arbitration bill. The Senate Judiciary Committee today is marking up S.2838, Fairness in Nursing Home Arbitration Act, which would vitiate arbitration provisions in nursing home contracts.

On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law reported out three anti-arbitration bills, including the House version of the nursing home legislation, H.R. 6126. The Naderific group, Public Citizen, issued a news release praising the action as an “important step toward protecting American consumers from companies that would take away their access to the courts.”

The bill attacking arbitration in nursing home contracts is the wedge legislation that the plaintiffs’ bar wants to employ to overturn arbitration in all sorts of contracts. They want to bring back the good old days of always going to court, no matter whether the client’s interest is being served.

You remember those good old days? Here’s a reminder from Kelley Rice-Schild, testifying in June on behalf of the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living. Rice-Schild is executive director of the Floridean Nursing & Rehabilitation Center:

In the late 1990’s, the long term care profession was subject to excessive liability costs, which were exacerbated by an increasingly litigious environment. As a result, operators of nursing facilities and assisted living residences were forced into making difficult decisions including potential closure or divestiture of facilities, and corporate restructuring. In addition to pursuing state and national tort reform legislative initiatives to enable facilities to continue to operate and provide essential long term care services in a difficult environment, the profession sought alternatives to traditional litigation including arbitration. This trend was especially true in states such as Arkansas, Texas, and my home state of Florida, where state laws fostered an exponential growth in the number of claims filed against long term care providers – even those with a history of providing the highest quality care.

As a result, there was an explosion in the cost of obtaining insurance to protect operators from the risks associated with a tort environment that often encouraged unsubstantiated claims against long term care providers. This trend included significant advertising – including highway billboards – to encourage consumers to sue their long term care provider. Even following the passage of tort reform legislation in Florida in 2001, insurance is not widely available and for most operators unaffordable, which forced several companies to no longer provide care and services to the frail elderly in my home-state.

Ah, the good old days — except for residents of long-term care facilities or their families.

A catchy slogan like “use it or lose it” is nice and all, but it represents a purely political, non-substantive approach toward U.S. energy needs. H.R. 6251, which would “prohibit the Secretary of the Interior from issuing new Federal oil and gas leases to holders of existing leases who do not diligently develop the lands subject to such existing leases or relinquish such leases,” is expected on the House floor today, CQ reports.

The knowledgeable dismiss it:

An informal caucus of House Democrats from oil-producing states met this week with petroleum geologists from the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service. The meeting convinced them that the bill would do little to compel new drilling on existing leases, said the group’s leader, Texas Democrat Gene Green.

“I think there’s a lot of opposition from Energy Democrats to use it or lose it,” Green said. “You can’t produce on every acre or even every 100 acres. I think those numbers come from people who don’t understand this business.” …[snip]

“I understand what they’re doing, but it’s a little simplistic,” said Tyson Slocum, an energy analyst for the advocacy group Public Citizen. “It looks like a middle-ground, slightly muddled message. Some of these leases are not super-productive. People are upset and desperate with high prices. Democrats are scared of the new polling, and instead of saying, ‘It’s not true, we can’t fix the problem by drilling,’ they’re coming up with their own half-baked drilling plan.”

Indeed, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists is also skeptical, taking for the association an unusual step of getting directly involved in a political/legislative fight. From the Oil and Gas Journal:

US consumers are burdened by high crude oil prices. Conservation and efficiency improvements are necessary responses, but equally important is increasing long-term supply from stable parts of the world, such as our very own federal lands and Outer Continental Shelf,” said American Association of Petroleum Geologists head Willard R. (Will) Green.

“As Congress considers measures to deal with high crude oil prices, I urge caution. Policies that increase exploration costs, decrease the available time to properly evaluate leases, and restrict access to federal lands and the Outer Continental Shelf do not provide the American people with short-term relief from high prices and undermine the goal of increasing stable long-term supplies,” he said in a June 23 letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), and Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio).

A good explanation of the realities of leasing and drilling follows.