According to the liberal bloggers at New Year’s Party, a component of any Democratic health-care plan should be tort reform, an issue to “take away from the GOP.” This, of course, assumes that the Democrats are more than a political vehicle for trial lawyers.
The political answer for Democrats?
According to the liberal bloggers at New Year’s Party, a component of any Democratic health-care plan should be tort reform, an issue to “take away from the GOP.” This, of course, assumes that the Democrats are more than a political vehicle for trial lawyers.
3 Comments
I won’t be holding my breath.
“Take away from the GOP”? You mean the GOP has a stance on tort reform? 6 years of GOP legislative+executive control with nothing to show for it argues otherwise.
I’ve mentioned this before here and the response was a lame “Tort reform is hard!” defense of Republicans.
Perhaps if this blog and others interested in tort reform had pressured the Republican to actually do something in the way of tort reform, instead of ignoring their inaction and bashing Dems, reform might have happened.
Oh, well. Maybe in 2016 — after the Clinton/Obama presidency ends — there’ll be another chance.
Of course, the GOP did not have legislative control: legislative control requires a supermajority in the Senate, because 41 Senators can block any legislation.
Still, the GOP did accomplish some things for the good of the legal system: the Class Action Fairness Act, two excellent justices appointed to the Supreme Court, and administrative agency action against the upside-down federalism of trial lawyers. One can wish the GOP had done more (and criticize it for caving on the disastrous Sarbanes-Oxley bill and other expansions of tort law), but, given the ability of ATLA to block reform efforts in the Senate, the GOP did perhaps close to the most that could reasonably be hoped for.