The Baltimore Sun leads its story about House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s town hall meeting in Waldorf last night with the tort reform angle, “Hoyer grilled on health care“:

WALDORF – House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer said Tuesday night that Congress is likely to consider caps on medical lawsuits as part of its health care overhaul deliberations, but stopped short of assuring his Southern Maryland constituents that he would push for changes in malpractice awards.

At a town hall meeting that in its often angry tone and hostile questioning echoed dozens around the country over the past month, the No. 2 Democrat in the House of Representatives was repeatedly pressed about tort reform.

“You kind of glossed over this before,” Dr. Michael Magee, an orthopedist from Edgewater, said after Hoyer told another questioner that he “certainly” expected the issue to be considered.

Hoyer, a leading recipient of campaign contributions from lawyers and law firms, said he is concerned about excessive jury awards in malpractice suits. But he also said that if noneconomic damages are capped, some victims of medical malpractice “may not get anything of substantial value through the years.”

“I intend to look at this very seriously and discuss it with my colleagues,” Hoyer said. “We do want to prevent specious suits. I think we can all agree on that.”

At this point, the Democratic leadership in Congress has to consider it — at the very least — medical liability limits to prove its independence from the litigation industry. Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean described issue starkly last week at Rep. Jim Moran’s Town Hall meeting in Reston: “The reason that tort reform is not in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everybody else they were taking on, and that is the plain and simple truth.”

The National Journal has a thorough report on the issue in “Health Care Push Revives Tort Reform Debate.”

With President Obama in Michigan today, let’s also take a look at editorials in the Detroit newspapers:

Detroit News, “Obama’s stimulus plan is not working“:

Instead of more spending, Obama and Congress should turn to the only proven stimulus strategy: cutting taxes. Corporate and individual tax rates should be cut substantially, at all income levels, and the administration should signal that there will be no new taxes for anyone. Taxpayers allowed to keep more of their own money would spread it around the economy and trigger a broad and sustainable rebound.

The president should signal that his No. 1 priority is reviving the economy and set aside those pieces of his agenda — carbon cap-and-trade and health care reform specifically — that carry the serious risk of killing jobs and raising the costs of goods and services.

Detroit Free Press, “Above all, Mr. President, Michigan needs promise of jobs“:

So President Barack Obama makes his first return to Michigan since the 2008 election and plans to put on a big push for community colleges and the kind of training they offer.

Not a bad idea on its face. But Michigan has emphasized job retraining for months, if not years now — and yet people keep losing their jobs, even in supposedly hot fields such as health care.

Seems that Obama might do better to focus on encouraging folks here about how his policies — the stimulus package, in particular — are going to actually put people back to work.

This skepticism from Michigan provides political context, too, helping to explain the low-key, no-news reception the White House gave the union leaders yesterday. (See “Card Check: What a Disappointing Meeting for Labor.”) Perhaps President realized that a exuberant, arms-raised photo-op with the heads of the SEIU or the AFL-CIO would signal to the public that creating jobs was not an Administration priority — satisfying a political constituency was. So the union bosses were kept out of the public eye.

It looks like the White House asked for some back-up too. House Majority Leader Hoyer’s office just released a statement, “Economic Recovery on Track”:

Even before passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, President Obama cautioned Americans that economic recovery would take time. Since passage of the Recovery Act, the pace of job loss has eased substantially and the economy is no longer in a freefall. While there is still significant work to be done to restore our economy and bring relief to American families, economic experts agree that the recovery is working as designed and on track to meet its goals. Nearly a quarter of the recovery funds have been obligated in under a quarter of the days allotted.

On track…

(Hat tip for the Detroit editorials: Glenn Reynolds)

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the Republican whip, posed a series of questions to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) yesterday at the close of House business, asking about the Democratic majority’s legislative plans. Amid all the protocol-shaped questioning, Cantor was criticizing the House for failing to focus on jobs, a point Hoyer strenuously disputed.

Toward the end of the discussion, the talk turned to the Employee Free Choice Act. Since it represented actual floor debate on the principles motivating the legislation, the discussion seems worth highlighting.

We note that the Majority Leader maintains that the legislation will not destroy the secret ballot  in the workplace. To which we ask again: If the Employee Free Choice Act passes, under what realistic circumstances do you think a union would seek a federally supervised, secret-ballot election instead of using the card check process? Seriously. Do you really believe a union would ever choose an election instead of card check? (And remember, that means going to an election with signature cards from 30 to 50 percent of the employees. Once organizers cross the 50 percent threshold, there is no election permitted — The union is recognized.)

From The Congressional Record, March 12, 2008, Page H3378:

Mr. CANTOR. I thank the gentleman. Mr. Speaker, I know that the gentleman is aware, as all of us are, about the tremendous job losses that we have experienced in America of late, 650,000 plus jobs just last month.

There is an announcement yesterday that we all read about, that the card check bill was introduced. Along with that introduction, there was a new nonpartisan study that was published that predicts that passage of card check legislation will result in the immediate loss of 600,000 jobs.

So I would ask the gentleman, number one, when he expects to bring that card check bill to the floor, and if, in the interim, if he is considering that if the Senate is to act, and we are to act in these economic times, why would we be doing that if we know, through nonpartisan studies issued, that it’s a job killer? Why would we be bringing that to the floor?

I yield further to the gentleman.

Mr. HOYER. I thank the gentleman for yielding. First of all, let me respond. We don’t know that. Somebody reported that. We don’t know that at all and, very frankly, we don’t accept that figure. We don’t accept the figure that we will, in fact, lose jobs.

(continue reading…)

A post from Point of Law, the legal blog run by Walter Olson of the Manhattan Institute:

Critics of EFCA have concentrated most of their fire on the bill’s abolition of the right to a secret ballot before installing a union. But Michael Maslanka at Texas Lawyer suggests that union and Democratic strategists may be willing to trade off card check and instead accept some less radical alteration to current election procedures, such as snap elections in which employers would have relatively little time to make their case. That would furnish cover for pushing through EFCA’s other main provision, the one that hasn’t gotten so much attention, which would direct the imposition of an arbitrator-written union contract if the parties failed to reach one after the initial vote. “The unions will put up a fight on the secret ballot but won’t really care. …The gem of EFCA for unions is that they always, always, always get a contract. Sweet.”

Our suspicions are the same. Card check’s attack against the secret ballot is so egregious, running so contrary to the customs of American democracy, that we opponents have highlighted it. The public readily understands the argument, “They want to eliminate the secret ballot and replace it with a process that will allow union organizers to threaten you into joining…or else.”

Still, in the last half year or so, we’ve tried to talk more about the binding arbitration provisions, which are awful and anti-democratic in their own right. If an initial contract is not reached after 120 days, a government arbitrator comes in and simply imposes a contract on the  company and union for two years. If you run company in a hotly competitive industry and the arbitrator gets it wrong? Well, your company dies.

Compromise. Yeah, compromise.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer provided an indication that’s where the majority might be headed when he circumlocuted on the issue on Fox News Sunday.

We’re going to look at that. We’re going to see if there are modifications to it that can be effective. We’ll bring compromise. But we think, absolutely, American workers have the right to organize and be recognized.

Hoyer made similar comments at his November 18 news conference at the National Press Club.

(continue reading…)

This week on the video highlights of “America’s Business with Mike Hambrick,” we’re pleased to have House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer talking about House passage of the ADA Amendments Act, H.R. 3195. The business community and advocates for the disabled worked together in support of the Hoyer-sponsored legislation, which passed the House in June.

Rep. Hoyer’s late wife Judith had epilepsy, so the issue is personal for the Majority Leader, but as he explains:

It was something that I cared personally about but also something that I came to care about very deeply from a policy standpoint as I worked more and more with members of the disability community –all kinds of disabilities, whether it was sight, hearing, mobility, mental acuity. Whatever it was, to see the extraordinary discrimination that was being visited on people with disabilities I became convinced that it was absolutely essential for us to pass the legislation.
 

For more from Rep. Hoyer and the rest of the America’s Business program for the week, please visit www.americasbusiness.org.

A huge margin of victory on H.R. 6304, the FISA Amendments Act. We’ll post the roll call when it becomes available.

UPDATE: Here’s the roll call.

Majority Leader Hoyer’s floor statement.

Republican Leader Boehner’s statement.

UPDATE (4:24 p.m.): Sen. Barack Obama endorses the legislation. The angry left is disappointed. Or angry.

The House intends to vote on H.R. 6304, the FISA Amendments Act, by 2 p.m. today, the Majority Leader’s office reports.

The Washington Post has entirely sensible editorial on the issue, “A Better Surveillance Law,” which details the changes in the House bill from the Senate version, S. 2248, demonstrating that, contrary to screams from the activist left, the new legislation is an actual compromise. As for the telecom immunity issue, the Post writes:

The bill also provides appropriate protections from civil lawsuits for telecommunications companies and gives these companies access to the FISA court to challenge requests they deem improper.

Striking the balance between liberties and security is never easy, and the new FISA bill is not perfect. But it is a vast improvement over the original law and over the earlier, rushed attempts to revise that law. It also provides some welcome evidence that congressional leaders remain capable of achieving delicate compromise in the national interest.

The Post’s page one story is the typical quasi-analysis that jumps immediately to the partisan political implications and questions about President Bush’s relevance. Meanwhile, in the blogosphere, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is the chief target of bile, with capitulation and cave-in being popular accusations.

The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, is editorially of a mixed mind about the compromise. Much was sacrificed, the editors write in “The Intelligence Deal,” as the courts have been thrust into the middle of the war-making powers of the executive. Still, a positive:

On the bright side, the deal gives crucial immunity to the telecom companies that in good faith assisted this surveillance after 9/11. A reality of this Internet era is that the feds need these private companies to monitor terrorists; our spies can’t merely bug the phones of Russian spies like they could during the Cold War. The left understands this and has hit the companies with some 40 lawsuits in an attempt to shut down the surveillance by the backdoor, without a political debate that voters might understand.

The telecom (and other) companies have thus made it clear that they can’t afford to cooperate any longer without immunity. And so the deal will let the companies escape the lawsuits, for past and future cooperation, if they present to a federal judge a certification from the Attorney General that they are helping at federal request. The eavesdropping orders that expire in August can thus be renewed, so our security services won’t have to “go dark” over the global antiterror battlefield.