- Thank you, Sens. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee, for getting Obama’s claim of warrantless domestic killing authority onto the media front burner — finally — through Sen. Paul’s filibuster last night. (More: Nick Gillespie, Conor Friedersdorf and background, Andrew Sullivan, Josh Blackman; Mediaite (Eric Holder sends letter, Rand Paul declares victory).
- Pending SCOTUS case of “Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl” is not the first Indian Child Welfare Act fiasco [Ann Althouse] More on ICWA [NYT Room for Debate]
- Has ABA now enlisted in the crusade against Stand Your Ground self-defense laws? [ABA Journal] Reminder #371 that the Martin-Zimmerman case is not likely to hinge on Florida’s SYG law [Jacob Sullum; Jeralyn Merritt with more detail on latest developments]
- “Transparency in Government: Finding Out How Much the Government’s Mistakes Are Costing Us” [Hans von Spakovsky, Heritage]
- “New York, to Stem Civil-Rights Suits, Is Now Reluctant to Settle” [NY Times]
- CPSC adopts sweeping CPSIA testing and certification rule [Nancy Nord] Should the CPSC be structured as a multi-member commission? [Commissioner Nord at Cato's Regulation magazine, PDF, and "Conversations with Consumers"]
- Illinois: “Small Town to Lose Its Only Sledding Hill” [Free-Range Kids]
- “Word of the day: Mendicant” [New York Times education blog; I'm quoted in]
Posts tagged as:
CPSIA
- L.A. County assessor, though in jail, will keep drawing $197K salary plus raise [LAT]
- IRS lowers the regulatory boom on tax preparers [Institute for Justice video, auto-plays]
- On Wal-Mart Mexico bribery, NYT has a bit of a blind eye of its own [Stoll; earlier here, here, etc.]
- Another painful CPSIA regulation: CPSC on testing “representative samples” [Nancy Nord]
- “Popcorn lung” couple “won a $20 million judgment. Now, they’re broke.” [ABC]
- From Todd Zywicki: Libertarianism, Law and Economics, and the Common Law [SSRN via Bainbridge]
- If the courts disapprove of throttling internet speeds, what do they think of throttling class action claims redemption rates? [Ted Frank]
- Ninth Circuit: Holland America cruise line not responsible for customer’s swimming mishap at Mexican beach [Metropolitan News-Enterprise]
- “President Perry would mean high noon for trial lawyers” [Kurt Schlichter, Washington Examiner; Politico; Prof. Bainbridge ("If the trial lawyers hate Rick Perry, maybe I should reconsider him")] Christie praises Perry’s “laudable” record on liability reform [PolitickerNJ] “Perry’s ‘loser pays’ is an economic winner” [Patrick Gleason and Jason Russell, Washington Times; Mass Tort Prof; background] Missing the point on the Texas med-mal experience [Coyote, earlier here, here, etc.] A bad sign: Gov. Perry reaches out to Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio [NRO, background] Another: courting social conservative vote, he pledges interference in state marriage law Houston Chronicle.
- Alan Lange and Tom Dawson discuss their Dickie Scruggs book [Above the Law, background]
- Hospital pays $25M to settle lawsuit charging lack of Katrina preparedness [White Coat]
- Democratic majority on CPSC plans to ram through burdensome CPSIA testing and certification rule next month [Commissioner Nancy Nord, more]
- For matching willing buyers with sellers through Canadian pharmacy ads, Google agrees to pay fine of $500 million, a forfeiture geared to the revenue the pharmacies (not it) took in from the ads [Atlantic Wire, Chris Fountain]
- “Woman Won’t Have to Pay for Her Own Cavity Search” [Lowering the Bar]
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By a 3-2 party line vote, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has voted to lower already infinitesimal thresholds of lead permitted in children’s products to 100 parts per million. The main impact will not be on surface paints or other flakable/chewable hazards to the youngest users, but on “substrate” elements such as metal alloys employed in such objects as bicycle parts, school binders, and ballpoint pens, an even wider swath of which will be hard to sell or resell without breaking the law. [Bloomberg; commissioners Nord, Northup; Woldenberg, more and yet more]
PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGE from Walter Crane, The Baby’s Opera (1876), courtesy BabylonBaroque.
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Around the country today, CPSC regulations are forcing retailers to throw out new, unused baby cribs — estimates of the number range higher than 100,000 — that the federal government itself considers safe enough to be used in day cares. I explain the latest Nanny State snafu in a new post at Cato at Liberty.
More: Quin Hillyer, CFIF; Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason. And CPSC commissioner Anne Northup corrects a misimpression in some parts of the press:
The new standards ban drop-side cribs. But the standards also prohibit the sale, new or used, of all cribs – both drop-side and fixed-side – that are not tested to the new standards by a private laboratory. Because very few cribs that were not originally manufactured to the new standards will ever be tested, the new standards essentially ban all such cribs – drop-side and fixed side. As reported in today’s press, millions of drop-side cribs have been recalled. On the other hand, tens of millions of fixed side cribs manufactured to previous standards have never been recalled, never been found to be unsafe, and now also cannot be sold new or resold used.
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- Prospects dicey at best for CPSIA reform as Waxman, Dems toe consumer-group line [Woldenberg, more, Nord, Northup] If AAP is going to posit 49,000 poisonings from lead in recalled jewelry, shouldn’t it try to document a couple of them? [Woldenberg] Credit at least to House Commerce Committee majority for trying to tackle mess with this law [Mangu-Ward, ShopFloor, AtC]
- “Lawsuit claims Jay-Z’s ‘Big Pimpin’ violates Egyptian ‘moral rights’” [DBR]
- My Cato Institute colleague Gene Healy reviews new Eric Posner/Adrian Vermeule book on executive power [AmCon]
- Subpoena filed by class-action lawyer Stephen Tillery demands contributor list of Chicago-based think tank critical of litigation [Madison County Record] Judge quashes subpoena as chilling of First Amendment liberties [same]
- Suits filed by its own officers, often those accused of misconduct, have cost LAPD $18 million since 2005 [L.A. Times via Dave Krueger, Agitator]
- “Do Menthol Cigarettes Taste Too Good to Be Legal?” [Sullum, earlier]
- “Motion Claims Buxom Woman with Opposing Counsel Is Intended as Jury Distraction” [ABA Journal] More: Ken at Popehat, Lowering The Bar, Above the Law.
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Reform efforts are finally afoot in the House of Representatives, at least two years after they should have started, but a three-member majority of the CPSC (two Obama appointees and a holdover) is defending the law on many though not all of its worst points. [Bloomberg, HuffPo] “This is by far the best bill we’ve seen to date,” declares the Handmade Toy Alliance. Tireless CPSIA critic Rick Woldenberg testified with other witnesses at a House Commerce hearing and contributes an op-ed to The Hill about the law’s irrationality. More coverage: Carter Wood/ShopFloor, Sean Wajert. And a memo by committee staff discussing some of the key issues is here (PDF).
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And one of the reasons for the title’s closure after 35 years might be surprising, at least to non-readers of this site. [Handmade Toy Alliance]
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A thrift store owner explains why. [Rick Woldenberg] More: Timothy Carney, Examiner.
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The New York Times editorial page continues to dismiss criticism of the testing burdens of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 on small manufacturers and retailers as “part of a standard antiregulation litany.” But on October 30, 2009 the paper itself ran a sadly belated but otherwise decently executed article 
by reporter Leslie Wayne from which a fair-minded reader would conclude that the small makers’ complaints about the law are only too well-grounded (“Burden of Safety Law Imperils Small Toymakers.”)
If one were to take a charitable view, one might commend the Times editorialists for at last deigning to concede that the law might usefully be “tweaked,” at least within a very narrow latitude. They finally acknowledge that there “might be a way to exempt products from testing if they very clearly do not pose a lead-related hazard,” without acknowledging that the great majority of products swept under the law’s coverage fall into exactly such a category. But they continue to insist that even older kids be denied access to products that could not pass 
CPSIA’s lead testing, including whole categories of products like kids’ bicycles and ballpoint pens whose designs still cannot dispense with the (entirely harmless) use of brass and suchlike alloys. Only the repeated staying or postponed enforcement of many of the law’s requirements has spared the country a long list of similar absurdities — while the legal absurdities that the CPSC has not stayed or postponed have already wiped out makers and vendors of harmless products from coast to coast.
Even under the best of circumstances, the Times’s editorialists would find it hard to live down their cruel, ideologically blinkered track record on the CPSIA issue. But couldn’t they at least pretend to be following the coverage in their own paper? More: Handmade Toy Alliance. And Rick Woldenberg offers a critique of the the Times’s new, and anything but improved, news-side reporting.
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It’s endangered by CPSIA, since organizers have no easy way to know whether a recyclable pair of kids’ jeans might have lead-containing brass in its buttons or zipper and thus be unlawful to sell (though not in fact dangerous). [Nancy Nord]
P.S.: Demise of print publication of Mothering Magazine after 35 years attributed in part to CPSIA and other CPSC regulations that devastated many advertisers [Handmade Toy Alliance]
Speaker line-up via Rick Woldenberg; opening statements by Reps. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) and Fred Upton (R-Mich.); ABC News coverage; Republicans reportedly preparing legislation that would amend, but not repeal, the ill-conceived statute; a move to strip funding for the controversial product database.
A separate piece of legislation may address the law’s devastating effects on the sale of youth motorcycles, snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles:
“The original legislation Congress passed was meant to keep kids safe from lead content in toys,” said Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT), who comes from a state where smaller recreational vehicles are popular. “Ironically, the overreaching enforcement wound up putting kids at risk by forcing them to use larger more dangerous machines that are intended only for adults.”
Rehberg’s “Kids Just Want to Ride” Act, which he introduced last month, has 41 co-sponsors, including seven Democrats. A similar bill in the last Congress garnered 70 co-sponsors, including 24 Democrats.
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Alas, it’s just another a temporary one: the Consumer Product Safety Commission has once again stayed implementation of CPSIA’s impractical testing rules, this time till December 31. [Commissioner Nancy Nord, more, earlier here, here, etc.]
More/related: Virginia Postrel considers why small foodmakers and farmers were able to get a better legislative deal from Big Government than makers of small children’s items [WSJ] The Handmade Toy Alliance hopes President Obama’s announced change of course on regulation will help. Rick Woldenberg notes that if you’re a small producer and the CPSC itself doesn’t get you, retailers like Costco will as they turn the screws to ensure CPSIA-compliant supply chains. And CPSC Commissioner Anne Northup points out that the federal regulatory agency is interpreting the overlap between “general” and “child-related” safety standards in a maximally burdensome way.
Already postponed in their effect more than once, the testing rules required by the 2008 law are still impractical enough to threaten widespread business disruptions and closures. While the Consumer Product Safety 
Commission has come to agree that the law does not require endlessly reduplicative testing of the same components, “the hoped-for market for ‘CPSIA tested and certified’ components has not yet developed.” CPSC needs to extend the deadline while awaiting a more workable regulatory fix or better yet Congressional reconsideration. Carter Wood explains.
More: on the brighter side, the newly constituted House Energy and Commerce committee was quick out of the gate with a public meeting on CPSIA reform [Rick Woldenberg, statement, reminder of unhelpful role of "consumer" groups] And Wacky Hermit offers a CPSIA Primer.
PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGE from Elise Bake, Der Ball Der Tiere (“The Animals’ Ball”, German, 1891), courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org.
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The Consumer Product Safety Commission has repeatedly delayed the implementation of the testing and certification rules required by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, the economics of which is likely to capsize many smaller producers. Now time may be running out for further extensions after the Feb. 10 deadline. [Rick Woldenberg, AmendTheCPSIA.com] Comments from affected parties are here.
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Jill Chuckas of the Handmade Toy Alliance testifies before the Senate about the Law That Stole Christmas.
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A 3-2 vote at the Consumer Product Safety Commission last week ensures that the federal government will put its imprimatur behind allegations about supposed hazards in consumer products — whether true or not. I explain in a new post at Cato at Liberty.
P.S. Kelly Young comments: “I wonder if they’d be willing to maintain a public database of complaints against federal employees?” More: Coyote (comparing relative sophistication of Amazon, TripAdvisor consumer ratings systems with primitive nature of CPSC’s); letter from Rep. Joe Barton, PDF; Washington Post; ACSH.
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