CPSC Reform Act

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, let me start our conversation this afternoon about the consumer product safety bill with a chart. I will come back to it in a few minutes, but as the camera focuses on this chart, these are the toys that were recalled in the last year. You can see it starts in March of 2007 and goes to February of 2008. Represented on this calendar are the record number of recalls that we saw last year. I am sure members of the public recall over the summer months--May, June, July, August, and even into September--there were a series of newspaper articles, news magazine stories, television, radio, in addition to Internet stories about the excessive number of recalls.

Really, this matter came to the public's attention through the toy recall issue. Now, of course the Consumer Product Safety Commission deals with a lot more than just toys. Toys are very important, and it is a big piece of what they do, but the CPSC does a lot more than toys. But this chart shows the toys, to give a sense of how many recalls we are looking at every year. And what we have done is, we have picked one item that would represent that recall every month. You can see that most months it is four or five recalls in that given month.

So the CPSC has been very busy. Unfortunately, that is part of the problem. They are overwhelmed with the marketplace today, and it has been very difficult for the CPSC to keep up with the tremendous number of imports.

By the way, every single toy on this calendar is from China--every single toy. I didn't come here to pick on China today, but facts are facts. Last year, in 2007, every toy recall was from China.

One of the things we are trying to accomplish in this legislation is to make sure imported toys meet our safety standards. This is a very basic function of Government; that is, to provide for the health and safety and the general welfare of the people. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is on the front line of doing that.

Now, I want to talk about this again in a few moments, so I will leave it up and allow people to look at it if they want. But before I do, I want to talk about another provision in the legislation that some have found to be controversial. To be honest with you, some of this controversy is because people have looked at the previous version of the bill.

In the previous version of the bill, we had an attorney general enforcement provision that was very aggressive and somewhat open, and people were very concerned that the attorneys general might go wild, so to speak, and start to initiate litigation and bring lawsuits that the CPSC was reluctant to bring.

Regardless of how the committee bill was drafted, that has changed in this legislation. I want to be very clear for my colleagues and, again, for staff members who are watching in their offices on Capitol Hill, that has changed dramatically. I want to go through those changes, if I may, very quickly.

First, when we talk about adding State attorneys general to this enforcement mechanism for the CPSC, we are talking about putting more cops on the beat or, as someone said the other day, ``more feet on the street.'' You can call it what you want, but the idea is that we have a choice to make. If we want to enforce CPSC decisions, we can do it one of two ways: We can hire more people at CPSC and maybe the Justice Department and pay another $5 million, $10 million, $20 million, $50 million, or whatever it may be for enforcement personnel, who are Federal employees, or we can turn this responsibility over to the States and allow the States a piece of this so if there are problems in their home States, they can go after their problems with no Federal taxpayer expense. And that is the route we have chosen in S. 2663.

I know there are some, especially in the business community, who fear the attorney general. When I say that, I mean the State attorney general. They have seen what happened in the tobacco case several years ago. They have seen what has happened in a few other cases since then, and they fear what the attorney general can do, and will do, given the opportunity. Well, let me say a couple of things about that.

First, I was the attorney general of my State, and I know how that office works and I know how attorneys general think and the approach they take to problem solving. I would say that most attorneys general have resource issues like everybody else. They are strained in terms of how much time and attention they can devote to certain matters. Most AGs--not all but most AGs--have the consumer protection ability in their State offices right now. There are very few who don't.

The other thing that is very important about the attorney general is, in the States, the attorney general position is a very respected position. If you take a poll around the country and ask various people in their States, they have a high degree of respect for the attorney general because, by and large, these men and women have done a great public service for their States. In fact, we have to remember, as Members of the Senate, these attorneys general are elected by the very same people we are. I think it is 44 States--I can't remember the exact number--where the attorney general is popularly elected. There are a few that are not. I think Tennessee has the State supreme court appoint the attorney general. But, regardless, most State AGs are elected by the people, and the people trust them.

The other thing I wanted to say about attorneys general is, in general, the reason the State attorneys general act is because Congress fails to act. We saw that in the tobacco case. Several years ago-- again, this has been about 10 years ago now or a little more--there was a bill in Congress to regulate tobacco and to fundamentally change Federal tobacco law and the national tobacco policy. Again, I don't remember exactly what year this was--it was sometime in the mid-1990s, I don't remember exactly, but that bill got bogged down. That bill did not make it out of the Congress, and it never became law.

That was the triggering mechanism for the States' tobacco litigation to rev up. I think it had existed before that, but once the Congress failed to act,

once people here in Washington couldn't address and couldn't resolve one of the Nation's great problems, the States acted. And that is the nature of it.

So one thing I encourage my colleagues to think about is to think about our acting and our taking care of the Consumer Product Safety Commission so we don't see that patchwork out in the many States, where State legislators come in with these great ideas about consumer product safety legislation, where State AGs don't try to get creative and come up with some sort of master plan for litigation. Let's avoid that. Let's pass this S. 2663, the CPSC Reform Act. Let's pass this and allow the State AGs some enforcement responsibility but also keep this in the Federal purview.

Let me talk briefly about that. S. 2663 would authorize the State attorneys general to bring a civil action to seek--and this is very important--injunctive relief only for clear violations of the statute or clear violations of orders by the CPSC. So I need to be very clear.

What we are talking about is enforcement only. We are talking about injunctive relief only. That means no money damages. That is what we are talking about. We are talking about the States watching the CPSC, maybe the best example, maybe doing a recall somewhere in the State. They find that product is still on the shelves; it should not be. Maybe it is showing up in Dollar Stores, maybe some retailers like small guys or whatever ignoring it. The State attorney general can step in and get those products off the shelf.

You all know as well as I do the way that is going to work in the real world is the minute the attorney general shows up at that store, they are going to get those products off the shelves. That is the way it works.

It is like a friend of mine told me--one time I called him up and I was the attorney general. He said: Oh, man, my worst nightmare is to have the attorney general call me at my office because you never know what the AG is going to do. It is like having ``60 Minutes'' show up in your front lobby or something.

But, nonetheless, that is the way it is going to work. The mere fact that the States have this authority gives a local hammer to the CPSC that they do not have right now. Right now, what we have to do is rely on the Justice Department or we have to rely on CPSC employees to turn around and try to enforce those out in the various States; try to track down all of these products wherever they may be.

It is hurting enforcement. The States and the State attorneys general are naturally in a better position to know what is going on in their State, and they are in a better position to enforce the CSPC orders in their State. That is the way it is.

Let me say a few more things. I want to get back to this chart. The Consumer Product Safety Commission bill we are talking about now not only limits the attorneys general in the two ways I have mentioned, they have to follow the CPSC, and it has to be for injunctive relief only, but also this requires that the State would serve written notice on the Commission 60 days prior to them filing. So they have to actually notify the Commission.

The fourth thing, the fourth out of five safeguards that are built into this legislation, is that the Commission, if they so choose for whatever reason, can intervene in that litigation.

The last thing is that if the Commission has a pending action going, the States cannot get in that action. Here again, we want to make sure that the CPSC remains in the driver's seat. One of the myths about this legislation that I have heard--and, quite frankly, it has been mostly on this side of the aisle and this is in the business community--is if we pass my bill, what is going to happen is there are going to be 51 different standards out there, there is going to be litigation coming everywhere. That is not the case. Again, because of Senator Stevens' work that he did to make this bill a bipartisan bill, what we are left with is these very tight controls on the attorneys general. Nonetheless, I think there is value, good value in the States having that enforcement mechanism on a State level.

The other thing I wanted to say before I turn to this chart is this is not a new approach. This is not a new approach. In fact, for over a decade State attorneys general have been able to seek injunctive relief under the Federal Hazardous Substance Act, a statute enforced by the CPSC. This authority has not resulted in varying interpretations of law that have been a concern--if we give the States some authority, we are going to have all of these 51 jurisdictions out there doing all of these different things. That is not the case. We have a 10-year track record with the Hazardous Substances Act and the States have not abused it. They have not abused it. So we know the States can play a very important role with the CPSC and with the Federal Government.

And, by the way, there are lots of other examples--I do not have to get into all of those right now, but lots of other examples where there is a Federal component and a State component to something where the States are allowed to do some enforcement or play a State role, an important State role. I think that is what this has as well.

Let me go to this ``toxic toy'' calendar again. Here again you see these toys that look very familiar, like Thomas up here. Here is the ``Evil Eye'' up here in June of 2007. If I am not mistaken, this is one where they actually had kerosene in the eyeballs. Can you imagine that? They sell these little rubbery or plastic eyeballs that actually had kerosene in those. And this was a children's toy. It is hard to believe.

But you see tops, you see Sesame Street characters, you see little things such as building blocks, you see little scooters, dart boards, a wagon, you see all kinds of things. Some of these might have had lead paint, some of these may present choking hazards. But you can see how busy the Consumer Product Safety Commission is.

Again, part of our legislation is to give them the resources they need in order to do these recalls. But you can imagine with all these recalls and how busy they are--you know, they are over here in September of 2007. They do these toy recalls. Well, suddenly it is October, and they are working on five more. They do not have time to go back to the State of Arkansas or the State of Delaware or Wyoming or wherever it may be in order to go back and enforce what they had been doing in the previous month. They do not have time for that or have the resources for that.

Again, I think the way we have this structured is very positive. Let me give a few examples of what we are talking about here. Let's start with this first month, March of 2007. See this airplane right here? The batteries can overheat in this airplane and cause a fire. This animal farm, this little farm right here, these little pieces can fall off and they become a choking hazard. This keyboard can catch fire. This easel has lead in it.

Then we go over here to April. We see on the infant bouncer, which is right here, this little infant chair, a falling hazard out of the seat. There may have been something in the design or construction that made children susceptible to falling out of this.

This puzzle has a choking hazard. Again, maybe these knobs come off or something will break off, I am not quite sure, but a choking hazard; this activities chart, a choking hazard; the bracelets that you see here, lead poisoning. Again, you can go down this list. This infant swing right here is an entrapment hazard. I am going to tell you, these entrapment hazards are terrible stories. I have talked to those families before. We had a case in Arkansas a few years ago. It was not with an item here, but it was with a crib type playpen. I am going to tell you, it collapsed on the child and choked the child. It was terrible. Unfortunately, we see that all over the country.

This ``Evil Eye'' eyeball, they are ``evil eyes'' because they are full of kerosene. It is hard to believe. Seriously. Think about that. It is hard to believe that any company with any sense at all--I mean, unbelievable--would actually put kerosene in the little toys. Think about it. I do not know why in the world they would ever do that. But that is exactly what they did.

Again, we can go down a long list of what can go wrong with these toys. But this is why the marketplace needs some supervision. The marketplace needs something such as the CPSC and someone on a State level, such as the

State attorneys general, to make sure these toys are not present in the stream of commerce in the various States.

Again, the attorneys general provision of this proposed bill has been a little bit controversial, but it should not be anymore because we have built in the safeguards. We have tried to find the consumer protections. We have tried to make the right policy but at the same time make sure that the attorneys general have the right parameters on them and also keep the CPSC in the driver's seat and to make sure that the State AGs can only seek injunctive relief.

That is a very important point, that injunctive relief, because what that means is there are no money damages with an injunction. They are going out there to force someone to do something such as pull something off the shelf or stop selling something or whatever the case may be. That is a very positive development.

I have heard from a few groups in the last several days on this concern about contingencies: We should not have any contingent fees. Well, realistically, as a practical matter, I do not think you are going to see any contingent fees with injunctive cases. It is very rare to find injunctive cases with a contingency fee. I guess it can happen. I have seen one example where some lawyers tried to do that.

The other thing about the State AGs, given the nature of these claims, I do not think you are going to see very many States use outside counsel. Usually the States bring in outside counsel when there is something very complicated, where there are a lot of costs, or it is a long-term piece of litigation that is going to take years and maybe millions of dollars to repair, very complicated. Again, this is not one of those types of cases. This type of case is you see a CPSC finding, for example, they say the evil eyeballs, kerosene-filled eyeballs cannot be sold in the United States. Some AG is out, they look around, they see it being sold in a Dollar Store, they see it being sold in some discount store somewhere, and they can go after that store and make them get them off the shelves.

Again, I think what you will see here is probably very little litigation. I think once that attorney general tells them, we are about to come after you, in my experience as attorney general, most people will respond to that and respond to that very quickly. They do not want the publicity, they do not want the hassle of selling something such as that.

The last thing I was going to say on the contingent fees is contingent fees, of course, are used in lots of different types of litigation. But if you think about it with injunctive relief cases, there is no money to base a contingent fee on. So if you are going to pull a bunch of ``Evil Eye'' eyeballs off the shelf, how does the contingent fee work? I think more often than not, much more often than not, you will not see any contingent fee cases. I do not think they apply.

The last thing I was going to say on the outside counsel, most States have a process you have to go through to get outside counsel. In fact, when I was attorney general of Arkansas, we never went through the process. We knew about the process; we never went through it. But you actually had to get approval of the State legislature and have the Governor sign off on it. They did that before I became AG. I do not think they ever did that when I was there. I do not think they have done it since. Everyone has a different process, but usually the States will have to go through an RFP type process that can take months. Again, we already have a provision in here where they have to send notice to the CPSC for 60 days. So I would be surprised if you see the States want to stretch out this timeframe, because usually what they have done is they have found a dangerous product in their State, and they are trying to get rid of it.

We have worked very hard to listen to everyone's concerns about the State AGs. We have tried to meet these concerns. We have tried to make sure the concerns are valid. We have tried to meet those and tried to make sure we can keep this bill bipartisan, and hopefully get the 50 votes on this bill as it is written right now.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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. President, I thank the Senator from South Carolina for his gracious allotment of time and tell him how much I appreciate his spirit of cooperation and trying to come together and find as much common ground as we can on not just his amendment that is pending but other amendments and other matters. He has been a true gentleman in how he has conducted himself, and I appreciate that.

I wish to say a few words about the DeMint amendment. Really, all the DeMint amendment does is it cedes us to the House version of the bill. It is significantly different. As I said before, the House, during their process, basically took about half, maybe a little more of the Senate committee bill and basically cut and pasted it into their legislation. So we have a little bit of, I guess you can say pride of authorship in the House version. There are a lot of good provisions in the bill.

The House version is different in several material ways. I went through some of those before, but let me touch on about 8 or 10 more items right now. And I can do this very quickly.

First, the Senate bill gives a financial responsibility in the sense that it requires, under certain circumstances, manufacturers to put funds in escrow or to get insurance in the event of a recall. It is not automatic, but it allows the CPSC to do that under cases that might warrant that action. The DeMint amendment takes that away.

The Senate bill has a specific provision on portable gasoline containers and makes it clear that there will be a national standard. Again, the DeMint amendment takes that away.

The Senate bill has several provisions on all-terrain vehicle safety. It sets a national standard. It sets all kinds of benchmarks that need to be met, and it makes the Federal law very clear about ATV safety standards in this country. Unfortunately, the DeMint amendment takes that away.

The Senate bill also contains a garage door opener standard. We all know how dangerous garage door openers can be. They do not have to be. There is technology available. We set a national standard which is a good belt-and-suspenders type of standard. Again, we are talking about garage doors that have a track record of causing injury, in some cases death, not just to children but mostly to children. The DeMint amendment takes that standard away.

The Senate bill also contains a provision on carbon monoxide poisoning, specifically with generators. Again, this has been a problem, not just with Katrina and Rita and other situations such as those but just generally for people who use these generators in various contexts. There has been a carbon monoxide poisoning problem. The Senate bill takes care of that problem. Unfortunately, the DeMint amendment takes that away.

The completion of a cigarette lighter rulemaking is something that has been pending with the CPSC for quite some time. We clarify that there will be a national standard. We set that standard. We pretty much tell the CPSC what needs to happen with this issue. Unfortunately, the DeMint amendment takes that away.

The last point I want to make--there are several other points I could make, but the last one I want to mention is under certain circumstances, the Senate bill provides for the destruction of imported products that violate our safety standards. This is important because if we do not destroy those products, somehow, some way, oftentimes they end up in the U.S. market even though they are not supposed to, but also we see the dumping of these products in Third World countries. If we do not take a principled stand on this issue, we are just going to be dumping our problems on other countries. Unfortunately, the DeMint amendment takes that away.

I am certainly not critical of Senator DeMint or critical of the House. The House came together in a bipartisan way. The bottom line is, we just have a stronger bill in the Senate. It is a bill of which we can be proud. It is a bill people in our home States would love to see us pass. I tell you, most people in Arkansas, most people around the country in the other 49 States probably could not tell you what CPSC stands for, but they could tell you they want stronger and tougher protections when it comes to imported products. They want to make sure someone is watching to make sure the toys they buy for their children and grandchildren are safe. They want to make sure that someone in the Federal Government is watching to make sure products, such as lighters, are safe and products as simple as gasoline cans are safe and that when you use a portable generator, you do not get carbon monoxide poisoning. People in our country expect those kinds of standards, and that is exactly what the Senate bill does. It is good not just for the CPSC, but it is good for this country.

As I have said before, we have several specific differences I have just articulated, differences between the House version and the DeMint amendment, which is basically the House version. The bottom line is, the Senate bill has more transparency, more enforcement, and more comprehensive reform. This bill is something of which we can all be proud. Not that we go home and brag to people in our home States about getting something right up here, but this will give every Senator in this Chamber an opportunity to go to their home State and talk about something good the Senate is doing for this country, something that is nonpolitical, something that is bipartisan, something that is good public policy, and that is the Senate bill.

Again, the House bill is good. It is OK. It is an improvement over current law. I do not have any criticism of our House colleagues for doing what they did, I really do not, especially considering that about half of that bill is really the Senate committee bill. Regardless of that, I do not have any criticism of them, and I do not want anything I have said to be interpreted as criticism. But the Senate bill is stronger, it is better, it is more comprehensive, it is better for the American people, and I think it will, over time, lessen the amount of litigation, and I think over time you will see fewer recalls and you will see consumer confidence in products they buy go up.

Overall, this is a very good bill for the people of this country. I encourage my colleagues to vote no on the DeMint amendment, and on final passage of the Senate bill, whenever that happens--tomorrow or the next day--I

encourage all my colleagues to vote yes.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote and move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Change of Vote

Mr. President, this is a historic day for the Senate because we have the opportunity, starting today, to consider the Consumer Product Safety Commission Reauthorization Act.

What I would like to do, if I may, is, when Senator Stevens of Alaska comes--apparently he has an urgent, pressing need, and he cannot stay for what would have normally been his allotted time. I would like to allow him to use his time--I think it is about 10 minutes or so--to speak, and we will cross that bridge when he walks in.

For most Americans, when they hear the term ``CPSC,'' they think of some sort of alphabet-soup Federal agency. They do not really understand what it does, why it exists, or why it is important.

In fact, I had that same reaction back when I was the attorney general of my State. I was out playing in my front yard with my kids, and my kids had some toys, and they were called Star Wars Lightsabers. They are like flashlights, but they look like a lightsaber. They were out there playing around, and one of my neighbors came up and said: Wait a minute, I think those have been recalled. Well, I did not know whether they had been recalled. She did not know for sure. I asked her, and she said: Well, I think I saw something on television about that, but I am not sure.

Well, one thing led to another. It was very hard for me to figure out whether my children's toys had been recalled. So through a process at the State Attorney General's Office in Arkansas, we established a Web site called childproductsafety.com, which had the goal of making it easier for parents like me and grandparents to go to one Web site and find all the recalled children's products that are out there. All we really did was link to the CPSC Web site. But that gave me my first experience with working with the CPSC, and it was through that process that I began to understand how important they are and why we need a very strong and capable Consumer Product Safety Commission.

To reinforce this, last year I became the chair of the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs as part of the Commerce Committee. When I looked at all of the various consumer issues--and there are many we can focus on--I decided that the subcommittee's top priority should be to reauthorize the CPSC. The reason I did that is because in 2006 we had seen a record number of recalls. We began working on this, and we realized that because of the changes in the marketplace, because the U.S. marketplace had changed a lot because of imports--and a lot of other changes going on in the marketplace--we realized the Consumer Product Safety Commission had not kept up with the times. So we made a concerted effort to get the Consumer Product Safety Commission reauthorized.

We started that about a year ago, had a few hearings, and then, over the summer of last year, we began to see the toy recalls. I may have it wrong, but I think it was the Chicago Tribune which had the first story. But after that, a series of national news stories came out-- television, radio, newspaper, and other media like the Internet and news magazines--to talk about the record number of toy recalls from last year.

In fact, if you look at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, every year they think there are about 28,200 deaths and about 33.6 million injuries from the products the CPSC overseas. They oversee 15,000 types of products. So when you see big numbers such as this, you have to understand that these numbers cover almost every product in the American marketplace, with a few exceptions. There are a few things in the automotive world and a few other things that it does not cover, but by and large, consumer products are covered by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

We saw this again last year. We saw a record number of recalls. We thought 2006 was a bad year, but 2007 was even worse. What we are seeing now is we are seeing an escalating effect. We are seeing more and more products being recalled all the time.

So let me give a very quick background, again, for a lot of the staffers watching in their offices and for the Senators who have not yet made up their mind on how they are going to approach this Consumer Product Safety Commission legislation and maybe some amendments. Let me give a few minutes of background to talk about why we are here today and what role the CPSC plays and why it is so important to Americans all over this great country.

First, let me say that the CPSC was established in the 1970s. They have done a good job. In fact, I wish to praise the employees at CPSC, because what you have seen in the last few years is a dwindling budget. It has either been flatlined or they have had cuts. You have seen the staff there shrink over time.

Let me give you the CPSC overview that they have on their Web site. It says:

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is charged with

protecting the public from unreasonable risks of serious

injury or death from more than 15,000 types of consumer

products under the agency's jurisdiction. Deaths, injuries,

and property damage from consumer product incidents cost the

Nation more than $800 billion annually.

Let me read that again for those folks who are watching in their offices here.

Deaths, injuries, and property damage from consumer product

incidents cost the Nation more than $800 billion annually.

The CPSC is committed to protecting consumers and families

from products that pose fire, electrical, chemical, or

mechanical hazard or could injure children. The CPSC's work

to ensure the safety of consumer products, such as toys,

cribs, power tools, cigarette lighters, and household

chemicals. . . .

Et cetera, et cetera.

The CPSC is a very important agency, and it is one that, unfortunately, Congress and the White House over the last several years have neglected. It is very important that we reauthorize the Consumer Product Safety Commission. It is long overdue and has not been done since 1990 in a major way. There was a little reauthorization in 1992, but

this is 18 years in the making. And we have seen a lot of changes in the American marketplace in the last 18 years.

Another thing I would like to mention is the personnel at the CPSC. When the CPSC was in its early days in 1977, they had 900 employees, full-time employees, at the CPSC. Today, they have 420. So this agency is less than half the size it used to be. That is a problem. Again, especially considering the changes in the marketplace, that is a serious problem. But the approach taken in our legislation, S. 2663, is not just to throw money or to throw people at a problem but actually to restructure the agency and retool the agency so it can be smarter and more effective from top to bottom.

One of the problems, one of the challenges we have with the CPSC right now is the matter of a quorum. Back in the old days, back in the 1970s when the CPSC was set up, there were five Commissioners. Somewhere along the line, that got changed to three Commissioners. Today, there are only two Commissioners at the CPSC--only two Commissioners--and they have a statute that says that after a certain time, they cannot function with two Commissioners. So last year, we had to get a provision added to the law to allow them to function with just two Commissioners. This bill contains that same provision, but also I think this bill makes a very important change; that is, it returns the CPSC to the five-member Commission it used to be.

Why is that important? Think about the number of products this Commission oversees. In some ways, I think it is a little bit like the Federal Trade Commission or the Federal Communications Commission or some of these other Commissions that have a lot of jurisdiction. What it is, when you have five members, they are able to generally specialize in various areas. When you talk to Commissioners on those other Commissions, they think that is very important. And when I have talked to former CPSC Commissioners, they think it is doing a great disservice to the country to only have three Commissioners. When you only have three, everyone has to be a generalist and you do not have enough manpower to specialize in everything.

One of the things this bill does is fix that problem. It fixes the immediate quorum problem until the full five Commissioners of the CPSC can be reappointed, but it also fixes the long-term problem of having three Commissioners versus five Commissioners.

The next thing I wanted to mention is there is, in our bill, in section 10, a very important provision that is a major innovation and a major improvement over existing law, and that is third-party certification for children's products. In other words, if this law passes, we are going to set up the situation where children's products will have to be certified by a third party. This is something which has worked in other contexts--that is, generally speaking, most industries. I am not saying every single company, but most like this innovation.

The goal here is to keep these dangerous products off our shores if they are made overseas and certainly keep them off our shelves by preventing any need for recall in the first place. If you have third- party certification, you would hope you would see fewer and fewer recalls over time.

I see my colleague from Alaska has walked in, and as I understand it, he has some constraints on his schedule today. So I will be glad to sit down and hear from him.

Mr. President, again, I want to give a special thanks to Senator Stevens because he really has helped make this bill bipartisan and make it possible that we could actually pass this bill, hopefully, this week. So, I say to Senator Stevens, thank you for all that you have done to make this legislation better.

Let me get back, if I may, to the bill itself. What I am trying to do, a lot of it is for the staff, or folks who are watching in their offices, and people around the country so they can understand what we are trying to accomplish. I want to run through the provisions of this bill. It is rather lengthy, but I will try to give an abbreviated, highlighted reel of what is in this bill.

A few moments ago we talked about third party verification for toys. This toy, the Thomas and Friends Railway Toys, in some ways became almost a poster child for the problem. It had lead. These are toys designed specifically for young children, little toddlers, and little kids. You know how children do. They put things in their mouths or scratch on them or crawl all over them. No telling where they end up. The fact that you see lead in so many toys today is a great concern.

We are trying to fix that. I mentioned one of the major innovations of this legislation is the third party certification. The other thing we want to do is put tracking label information on the toys. We have all been there. As parents we have had dolls or whatever the case may be. We like the doll; the doll is passed down from one child to another, maybe from a grandparent, a neighbor, who knows what it may be. But there is really no identifying information on that doll. So this bill makes sure that as practical as it can be, we are going to put that identifying information on it.

I mentioned the Star Wars lightsabers a few moments ago. You

can go on the Internet right now or to a toy store, and there are probably 10 or 20 different varieties of those lightsabers. So if they did a recall, it is important that there is something on there, some batch number or some ID number that parents and grandparents can know and, in fact, daycare can know when those toys should be taken away from their children.

Another major improvement is the corrective action plans. Some people might call these voluntary recalls. Sometimes they do end up in voluntary recalls--not always. But the importance of the corrective action plan is that as it stands today, basically under current law--I believe it is fair to say--it is up to the manufacturer to come up with a plan. Under this bill, if this bill were to pass and become law, that shifts, and it means the Consumer Product Safety Commission lays out the parameters of that action plan. That is a very important shift in responsibility.

Believe it or not, with a lot of these products that come onto our shores today, we have no idea who makes them. Right now it is not clear whether the CPSC even has the authority to ask the question about who actually makes the product, in many cases a toy. This bill fixes that. We also go through a long list of prohibitive acts. Some of those are just clarifications. Sometimes we make it clear in the law that it is unlawful to sell or distribute a product that has been recalled. Right now there is no law on the books that says it is unlawful to do that. It clarifies that. We go through a long list of things that you can't do. For example, you can't take a recall product and dump it on Third World markets. You can't take a recall product and send it over to Dollar Stores. You can't just willy-nilly go out and sell it on the Internet.

We have a list of prohibited acts. These are commonsense acts. These are acts that will save lives if this law is implemented.

We also enhance the penalties over what they are today. Again, the penalty section is a little complicated. Under current law, our fix therefore is a little bit complicated. I don't want to spend a lot of time on it today. But the committee bill actually had a $100 million civil penalty. We have chopped that down now with a bipartisan compromise to $10 million, plus an additional $10 million if there are aggravated circumstances. We doubt that will be triggered very often, but we think it is important for the CPSC to have that added ability to enhance that penalty, to go after the really egregious behavior, maybe repeat offenders, maybe people who are just absolutely thumbing their nose at U.S. law.

Sharing information with Federal, State, local, and foreign governments is very important. Again, we believe the information sharing is good. We have talked about stove piping when it comes to intelligence, when it comes to homeland security, when it comes to DOD. We have talked about the stove piping and how unhelpful that can be. We feel the same way about this type of information. We need to share this information and make it available to State governments, local governments, foreign governments, et cetera.

We also have a financial responsibility provision in this law. Again, this is a big improvement over current law. What we do with financial responsibility is under certain circumstances a company may have to have an escrow where they put certain dollars in or they have proof of insurance or they provide some sort of security. Again, I don't think the CPSC will require that all the time, but we give them that authority because right now they don't have it.

We also are asking the GAO to do a study and get back to Congress about injuries to minority children. There is anecdotal evidence that these defective and unsafe products disproportionately harm minority children. We don't have the facts to know that for sure, but there is some anecdotal evidence to that effect. We want to make sure GAO takes a good look at that and lets us know.

There are a lot of other miscellaneous provisions in here. I will not spend too much time on these, but there is a provision about child resistant portable gasoline containers. We have seen this problem all over the country for a long time. There is not a national standard. Most people are surprised to know that. We want to have one standard that is a good standard, and this bill takes care of that. We want a toy safety standard. There is not even a toy safety standard on the books. There is one in the private sector that industry has agreed to. We want to codify it. We want to make sure we have a strong toy safety standard.

All-terrain vehicles, Senator Stevens mentioned something he has been working on a long time, and so have I, as part of the Commerce Committee. There is a garage door standard. Right now almost all garage doors--it is not required in most States--have two mechanisms for safety. One is like a laser beam mechanism, and the other is a motor; that if it feels too much pressure, it will stop or go back up. That is not required. We want to make sure on the Federal level all the new garage doors have those two safety mechanisms because we believe that will save lives.

I can go through a lot of other issues with regard to this legislation. Let me cover three of the issues that have been somewhat controversial. I want everybody to hear what I am saying about these controversial issues because we have found common ground. We have found the commonsense solution to some issues that had been very controversial and very negatively received as this bill came out of committee, but we have made major changes to these three areas.

First is the database. The goal is to have more transparency in the system. I will talk about this in the upcoming days. But we are trying to fix a real-life problem that has caused a lot of injuries. That is, there are many examples of when a product is dangerous, and that product is being sold in stores, people are buying it, people are using it, but the CPSC is in negotiations or discussions with the company, that product has been identified as dangerous, but the public doesn't know about it. We are trying to provide the transparency. The public has a right to know. So we have been working on this for a year. We have come up with this database idea. We have put a lot of parameters around it. If it is not true information or not accurate, it can be pulled off, and the companies are able to list an explanation. We don't identify the people, so you would not be able to use this, for example, where trial lawyers could go out and troll around and find new plaintiffs. We have tried to build in safeguards around this to take the objections away. But at the end of the day, if someone has a better idea on how to increase this transparency, we would love to hear about it. So far the best thing we have been able to come up with is this database.

The second controversial provision--and it was very controversial when it came out of committee--is this State attorneys general provision. I am a former State attorney general, so the AG provision is not going to cause me as much heartburn because I have lived through that for 4 years. I know how the State AGs work, and I know how diligent and careful they are. They have to manage their resources as well. But we have done two major things to the provision that came out of the committee.

First, we make sure--and we write it into the statute. We make sure the State attorneys general have to follow what the CPSC does. They can't get out in front of the CPSC. We are not going to have 51 different standards out there. They follow what the CPSC does. We made that very clear in the statute. The second thing is, we limited the State AGs to injunctive relief only.

So the situation that would be the most common would be that the CPSC does a recall, 6 months later in a State, whatever State it may be, they notice these recall products start to end up in the Dollar Store. Well, the CPSC has moved on. They are working on other things now. They don't have the resources or the time to deal with that. But the State might. If it is important enough for a State AG, he can get an injunction and make sure those products come off the shelf. These are products already identified as dangerous. We are not letting the States get out in front of the CPSC on this issue. They are following the CPSC. It is limited only to injunctive relief. We believe we have found the balance there.

The last thing I want to talk about in terms of the controversial parts of this legislation that have changed substantially since we have come out of committee is the whistleblower provision. The goal is to make sure people are not punished for doing the right thing. If an employee finds something his company is doing and he actually tells the CPSC about it and he later gets fired, we want to make sure he has some whistleblower protections such as in other areas of Federal law. We took this provision from a transportation act, the STAA, that the Senate passed not too long ago. So it is based on existing law. We have some statistics on how it should really work. So I want to encourage my colleagues to look at that.

Mr. President, how am I doing on time?

OK. Mr. President, let me speak just for another couple minutes. I see a couple colleagues coming in the Chamber to talk.

There has been a little bit of discussion about the House bill. Again, I want to thank our House colleagues for working hard down the hall here in getting a bipartisan bill. We have a bipartisan bill. But I think there are three fundamental differences between their bill and our bill.

One, our bill has more transparency. I think that is good. I think that is something we, the Senate, should insist on.

Second, our bill has more enforcement. We are able to get these products off shelves quicker and able to make sure they stay off shelves more so than the House bill.

Third, our bill is more comprehensive reform. I have gone through a long list of items on how our bill has a lot of comprehensive reform in it.

I think our bill should stand. I understand there are some people who might be interested in looking at the House bill and some of those provisions, but I think when you lay them down side by side you will see the Senate bill is stronger because it is more transparent, there is more enforcement, and it is more comprehensive.

Mr. President, I will be glad to yield.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I have no objection to that.

Reserving the right to object, would the time run on the Republican side?

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of the quorum and ask that it be equally divided.

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

Madam President, we are going to vote in a couple of minutes on the motion to proceed to the CPSC--the Consumer Product Safety Act--and I want to urge my colleagues to vote for this motion and to move to this legislation so that we can consider it over the next couple of days in the Senate.

I think the American public saw the record number of product recalls last year, especially in the toy sector but in all sectors of our economy. The people back home understand how important it is for the Senate to act on this and act in a way that is responsible and balanced and act in a way that is very meaningful.

Again, our legislation as compared to the House bill is more transparent, there is more enforcement, and it is more comprehensive reform. I thank my House colleagues for doing what they have done and also thank my Senate colleagues, especially Senator Ted Stevens and Senator Collins. We have several on our side who have all come together to make this a bipartisan bill, and I appreciate the Senate's consideration.

Cloture Motion

I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I wish to notify our colleagues that I think we are making great progress on this legislation. Senator Cornyn is here to talk about one of his amendments. We know there are a few other amendments that are being discussed right now, maybe in the cloakrooms or in Senators' offices. That is very encouraging. The feedback we have received has been very positive. It looks as if there are some amendments that will require votes.

I encourage all Senators who would like to come and speak to make plans to do that at some point today. I encourage anyone who has any amendments that they would like to have

considered to run those down to the floor as quickly as possible, if they have not already. We are really making good progress. I was encouraged yesterday by the vote we had at 5:30.

Here, again, we find that the Consumer Product Safety Commission is an agency that needs our reform. They need us to come in and to not just give them more resources--it is not a matter of just throwing money at the problem. They need more tools in their tool box and more resources and a little bit of restructuring. It has, again, been the goal of this legislation to make sure the American marketplace is safe, make sure that when people go to a store and buy a product, they can rely on the fact that there are safety standards, that it doesn't have materials in it that are dangerous or harmful. Really, this is an effort for us to accomplish something great in this Congress, in this election year, for the people of this country. So I thank all my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for their diligence in trying to get this done.

I ask any colleagues who would like to speak or anyone who has an amendment, please let us know because I am starting to get this sense that there are many who would like to wrap this bill up as quickly as we can.

With that, I yield the floor.

Reserving the right to object, once the Senator finishes his presentation, we will go back to the pending amendment.

Madam President, before the Senator from Texas leaves, I wish to thank him publicly. He has been very constructive in this process. He has offered a couple of amendments that he feels very strongly about, and we met with him and his staff on them. So I have talked to him about them. He is being very constructive in the process. I thank my colleague from Texas.

The other thing I noticed, Madam President, is that Senator Collins of Maine just walked on the floor. This bill has been called the Pryor- Stevens bill, but I could not exaggerate the amount of contribution Senator Collins has made to this effort as well. I have found her, in the last 5 years, to be a wonderful colleague to work with. She has made this bill better in some very fundamental ways--maybe not very exciting ways, but she really focused on one of the major problems we have with the CPSC today, and that is that the CPSC, with all due respect to the people who work there, has been almost incapable of dealing with imports in the way they should.

Senator Collins, I believe, had four amendments. We accepted all four. We have worked with her office and with her personally to make sure the language is right, to make sure the policy is right, to make sure it is smart law, which I think it is, and also to make sure it is a big improvement over the present situation; I don't think anybody can look at her sections of the bill and ever say she is not greatly improving our ability to protect our shores from dangerous and unsafe products. I am certainly glad she is here this morning to help manage this legislation.

The other point I wish to add is, Senator Collins has a lot of respect on both sides of the aisle. The fact that people know she worked on the legislation gives a comfort level on both sides of the aisle, but certainly on the Republican side, because they have seen how she has conducted her business since she has been in the Senate, but also the fact that she has had hearings in her committee on CPSC and some import problems. She has been a key player, a key architect in this legislation. I thank her.

I know we are going to have a lot of amendments today and a lot going on in this Chamber. We are going to try to clear a lot of amendments. Again, I encourage colleagues to come to the floor if they do have amendments or wish to speak. We are going to try to be in that process today of clearing amendments, putting a managers' package together, and having votes.

Before the day got crazy and confusing, I wanted to thank Senator Collins for her leadership.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I would like to talk about a provision in the Consumer Product Safety Commission Reform Act that deals with a database to make sure information about dangerous products is available to the public.

Here again, this has changed through the process. We have tried to build in safeguards. I want to talk about those. We have tried to find something that is balanced, that provides information, but also has some filtering so we make sure erroneous information is not disseminated. But the goal of this provision is that the public has the right to know when products are dangerous.

We have many examples--and I will go through some of these right now. But I promise you, for every one example I am going to give, there are probably 100 others I could talk about--we have many examples of dangerous products that are being sold and used while the company and the CPSC know of the risks of the product. But because of the inability for CPSC to get a mandatory recall or the inability of them to work out the terms with the manufacturer in many cases, the public does

not know about these dangerous products. So what happens is that the product continues to be sold and continues to be used when the Government and the manufacturer know it is a dangerous product.

Let me start with this one statement. This is from OMB Watch. It says: ``CPSC estimates the number of toy-related injuries''--just toy- related injuries--``jumped from about 130,000 in 1996 to about 220,000 in 2006--more than 600 injuries every day.''

Now, this is over a 10-year period: to go from 130,000 injuries--we are not talking about incidents; we are talking about injuries--130,000 in 1996 to 220,000 in 2006. We are not talking about isolated incidents where there might be the occasional toy or the occasional product that might cause a problem. We are talking about 600 injuries every day--600 injuries, not incidents--to children. This is just in toys. This statistic is just for toys. So, again, we are not talking about things that are in isolation that do not matter in the real world. This bill matters in the real world.

The next chart I wanted to show you is the recall process. This is a flow chart about recalls. My colleagues can see how complicated and how long and how many steps there are in the recall process. Listen, it is not that important about what each and every step is. But this is how it works. You can see, for a product to be recalled, there are a lot of hoops that have to be jumped through. Those hoops take time.

There again, as I mentioned just a moment ago, we know of many instances. I will give you one right here. There was a product called Stand & Seal, which was a product that, apparently, you spray on tile to seal the tile. That product was dangerous, was actually killing people, and definitely injuring people. The company knew about it, the CPSC knew about it, but the public did not know about it.

What happened was, in the one incident I am most familiar with-- again, there are many others--in the one incident I am most familiar with, Home Depot continued to sell this product not knowing that it was a dangerous product, not knowing it was injuring people, not knowing it violated U.S. safety standards. They were selling it to the public.

Well, at the end of the process, guess what happens. Home Depot gets sued. They get sued for selling a product for which they had no knowledge of the problem. The CPSC knew, the Government agency knew about the problem, but the general public did not. The retailer did not know. So part of the reason we get into that situation is because of this long recall process.

Now, we are going to address a lot of this in the legislation. We are going to give the CPSC the ability to move through this process much quicker. We are going to give them the leverage they need to make decisions. Right now, the manufacturers, unfortunately, in many instances, have the leverage, not the CPSC. So we are going to try to address some of this.

But that is not even what I am talking about because I want to talk about the database. The database provision that is in the legislation, we believe, is a very important provision. It is very balanced. We have tried to find that right balance.

Let me, if I can, talk about one specific toy which has actually received a lot of attention nationally because of some of the egregious injuries and the serious problems. This is a toy made by Rose Art, which is a company that makes a lot of toys and crayons and art supplies and lots of other things--a lot of craft kinds of stuff. Rose Art makes a toy called Magnetix. This is the ``Xtreme Combo Flashing Lights Castle.'' Well, you can understand why this would have a lot of appeal to parents and children. Just look at the box. It looks like something that would be fun to play with.

If you can notice on this picture, there are these little silver dots, these little silver balls. Those are magnets. That is how you put this together. You can see right here in the picture, in someone's hand, that little dot. I hope it shows up on television for the folks watching around the country. That is one of those little dots.

The problem with these little magnets is they fall off. They can come loose. In 2007, over 1,500 incidents were reported before the 4 million units of Magnetix were recalled. So we have 1,500 examples of these either falling off or, in some cases, children swallowing pieces with the magnet still attached. The reported incidents included 28 injuries and 1 death.

I do not want to go into the details of this on the Senate floor, but the medical issues that children have to go through when they ingest one of these is not pretty. Again, I do not want to go through that on the Senate floor and turn this debate into a gory example. But, nonetheless, trust me when I say these toys, this Magnetix set--there are many varieties--has caused a lot of hardships for parents and children.

But what do kids like to do? They like to put things in their mouths. They eat things. They suck on things. We know how it is. But this is why we need a database so that people can know what is going on out there. We have 4 million units of this toy that were eventually recalled, but there were over 1,500 incidents reported before the recall. That is 1,500 incidents where parents and grandparents, et cetera--day care centers--had no way of knowing this was a dangerous product. So the database solves that problem.

Again, this is just a chart to run through the timetable. We do not have to spend a lot of time on the details. But in 2003, Rose Art introduced these building sets. They were very popular. By the way, they were on lists for a couple of holiday seasons about the best toy for kids, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The retailers loved them because they just flew off the shelves.

We could go through this long process, but you can see the first attempted recall was in March of 2006. That is almost 3 years later. They later had to do another recall, a more comprehensive, clearer recall. They did that in mid-2007. So these were on the shelves for a long time. But I am telling you right now, the parents have no way of knowing these are dangerous until the CPSC does their recall.

One of the things I want my colleagues to understand is that, again, this is not an isolated incident. We mentioned Magnetix. We are not trying to pick on Rose Art. We are just reporting the facts as they exist. But here is Magnetix shown on the chart. There were 1,500 incidents before it was recalled, before the public knew of the problem.

Again, we are not going to go through this, but you can see this next particular product had 679 incidents, this one had 400, this one 278, and on down the line.

My fellow Senators, we could print 10 or 20 or 30 of these charts and go down the numbers. You can see the different types of hazards we are talking about. I am telling you, the evidence is overwhelming that in the legislation we need to fix the CPSC.

So what is the best way for the public to know? Well, I would say the best way for the public to know is to inform the public, give the public some information, let them look at it. I must be candid right now to say we have had a few people--not all. I want to be fair. Not all, but a few people--a few companies in the business community, a few associations that have been opposed to this database idea. They think it will create a hardship. They think it will smear companies. They are concerned about the uncontrolled nature of that.

Well, we keep pointing them to the NHTSA Web site. What we are proposing is not novel. It is not new. It is tested. We have seen it in action for years, and that is the NHTSA Web site, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration Web site. It looks like safercar.gov might be at least one of the ways to get there. But this is actually a copy of the NHTSA Web site.

When you go to safercar.gov or nhtsa.gov, I guess, you can come up with this page. You can see, it has ``Defects & Recalls.'' You can click on this and find out about the defects and recalls.

Let me walk the Senate through this, if I may, for just 1 minute. Here again, you click on something; you go to this page, you click on ``Search Complaints.'' Here again, we are talking about complaints from consumers and from third parties such as hospitals, day care centers, et cetera, who can put their information on a Web site. You put your information on the Web

site. If you are a parent or grandparent or day care center operator, and you are searching on a Web site, you would come to a place like this one or two or three screens later--and it is probably a little bit hard to tell on television, but right here it says ``To use the `Drill Down' search method'':

What they do is walk you through these tabs--1, 2, 3, 4, 5 steps--and you put in information about the product that you are curious about. What happens is, you go through these steps. I did it yesterday in my office. I am going to tell you, you can look up a product in about 1 minute. It just takes that long. It is easy to use. It is very user friendly.

NHTSA has been doing this for years and years. This is the kind of thing, we would hope, when this legislation passes, that the CPSC would set up. It could be very useful for people all over this country. But you go through the tabs, and you set up what you want to set up. You search the items you want to search. You finally come to this page. This is the page that is the page that most Americans would love to see the Consumer Product Safety Commission offer. They would love to see this type of information.

This is a ``Complaints'' page. This information was filed by a consumer. In many cases, it is done online. It does not have to be, but in many cases it is done online. It is real easy, very inexpensive to do--not a lot of manhours for most of this. It has a ``Report Date,'' which in this case is March of 2008. That is when we ran this. It has the ``Search Type,'' and you see we typed in: ``child safety seat.'' We typed in the name: ``Fisher-Price.'' And for the ``Model,'' we just put the generic child safety seat model. This is all on little pop-up menus and little scroll-down-type menus. It is very easy to use. So we looked at Fisher Price. Crash: No. Fire: No. Number of injuries: One.

We come down here to this child seat: Tether, or strap.

Here is the summary, and this is pretty much what the consumer wrote, right here. It says: The consumer states that the harness strap of the child seat snapped from the back, causing the child to fall out of the seat, and there were some minor injuries.

You will see it has an ID number so they can track each record.

Here again--this is important. Part of the compromise we reached with Senator Stevens and Senator Collins on this issue is that we don't provide information about the complainant. In other words, some in the business community--again, not all, but some--were concerned if we provided information about who is filling these out, then they get a letter from a trial lawyer and all of a sudden you have a lawsuit. We are putting the safeguard in to make sure that doesn't happen. The CPSC under our bill cannot provide that type of information.

Another thing we require of the CPSC is to remove any incorrect information that may be offered by the consumer, by the complaining person. We also allow manufacturers the opportunity to comment on information in the database. For example, they may offer a comment which said: Be sure you follow the instructions because if you don't get it buckled in right, you may have a problem, or whatever; I don't know what their comment may be. But these comments can actually be very useful to people who are searching this. So we built in these safeguards to make sure this NHTSA-type database will work with the CPSC. This is the goal we are trying to get to. We are trying to get to providing that information. While the CPSC is going through this long recall process or working through whatever they have to work through, at least the public has the right to know.

I know I have at least one colleague here who wishes to speak, so let me wrap up on this one final point.

There is a girl who was 14 months old. Her name is Abigail Hartung. She is from New Jersey. When Abigail was 14 months old, she was trapped by a crib. The crib collapsed and her hand was trapped in it. She was 14 months old. It turned out she didn't have a very serious injury, but certainly it was upsetting to the parents and to the child. When the father, Mr. Hartung, called the manufacturer to ask them about this and to tell them about it, the manufacturer told him on the phone: Well, this is amazing. We have never heard of this before. Are you sure you had it set up right? Are you sure the child wasn't somehow abusing the crib, Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Come to find out, the company told him they had never heard of this happening before. Come to find out, the company had already received 80 complaints about this happening--80.

This database will build in the accountability for some of these companies that are going to do that. Some of these companies--again, not all; I don't want to paint with a broad brush here, because many of these companies are very responsive. They take these consumer complaints very seriously. They are trying to do the right thing; others, not so much. So for those who are not going to respect the safety and the welfare of their customers, this database will help level the playing field. It will provide information to families and consumers of all sorts to know that there is another place they can go and check and find out if this product has a problem, so companies won't treat others as the Hartungs were treated.

Mr. President, I see I have a wonderful colleague who wants to say a few words, so I will yield the floor.

Reserving the right to object, to make sure, we will go back on the pending amendment as soon as he completes his presentation.

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

Mr. President, it looks as if we have a couple Senators who are preparing to speak. I wish to follow up on the comments, very briefly, that the distinguished chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee made about the attorneys general.

This idea of allowing State attorneys general to assist Federal agencies with enforcement of Federal decisions is not new in this bill. This has been around for a long time. I have nine examples I want to mention very quickly.

In the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Telephone Disclosure and Dispute Resolution Act, the Children's Online Privacy Protect Act, the Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act, the Credit Repair Organizations Act, the Controlling the Assault of Nonsolicited Pornography and Marketing Act, and one section of the Truth in Lending Act all provide for State attorneys general to have a role in enforcement.

My last point--and this is the ninth one I want to mention--a few years ago, the FTC's telemarketing sales rule went into effect. They said at one point:

The commission believes that the joint Federal-State

enforcement model under the Telemarketing Act provides a

practical framework for coordinating our efforts with those

of States and results in an efficient and effective law

enforcement program.

We are utilizing a model that other Federal agencies that had this model before recognize is an effective and efficient use of resources.

My last point on adding the attorneys general to the enforcement of the CPSC rules, regulations, and decisions is that it is a very efficient way to do it. If we wanted to, the Congress could add another $5 million, $10 million, $20 million, $50 million--whatever it may be-- in appropriations to this Federal agency to put people out there around the various States to do the very same work the State attorneys general offices can do without any Federal taxpayers' dollars involved.

I thank the distinguished chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee for his comments.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I am proud to be a member of the Commerce Committee that passed this legislation through the committee under the leadership of Chairman Inouye, Senator Stevens, and the Consumer Subcommittee Chairman Pryor. I am also glad this legislation includes the bill I introduced that finally put a mandatory ban on lead in children's toys.

This legislation has been called by the Wall Street Journal as ``the most significant consumer-safety legislation in a generation.'' That comes from the Wall Street Journal. But what this is about is not all the details of all the toys, which I am going to talk about in a minute, and the 29 million toys that have been recalled and what this has meant to our economy, but what this is about are these little children.

Senator Pryor and I just left an event where two children, their families, their mothers, were there to talk about what had happened to them. The first was this little boy named Jacob. His family is from Arkansas. The mom painted this picture for us. Look at this little boy. She painted this picture that I will never forget, of her standing in the kitchen one day and all of a sudden they see their little boy and he is practically limp. Just like that he went from being a happy little boy playing.

What happened is he had swallowed one of these Aqua Dots toys, one of these toys you put in water and it expands to an animal or whatever it is. He had swallowed it. So he is getting more and more limp, and finally the ambulance comes and they end up in the hospital. Within an hour, he is completely unconscious. They have no idea what is wrong. Unconscious. They thought maybe he had swallowed a little toy, maybe something that you would think would be in his stomach creating some indigestion or something such as that, but the hospital tries everything they can think of. They thought maybe he had accidentally gotten into their medicine cabinet and they didn't know it and took some medicine and something happened. So they gave him drugs to try to reverse it, but he wouldn't wake up. It was a complete puzzle because they didn't know how this could have happened. Nothing they tried worked.

Finally, 6 hours later--and the doctor said if he hadn't been there, he wouldn't have believed it--with all these tubes connected and everyone thinking they are going to lose him, he wakes up and he is fine. And they think: How could this happen? What is wrong? And they simply don't know.

So they call the company that manufactures these Aqua Dots and they try to write them. The mom gets home the next day and gets on the Internet with bloggers trying to figure out what could be wrong. She writes letters to the company, trying to get information.

Well, finally, they tested him some more and they tested these Aqua Dots some more. And what did they find? They found that the Aqua Dots contained a chemical that was really the date rape drug.

The date rape drug, as a prosecutor, I can tell you that we handled those cases where women have been slipped one of those drugs in their drink; they are suddenly completely out of it and do not know what happens. You know the crimes that have occurred as a result there.

But here is this little boy swallowing a dot, a dot that had the date rape drug in it manufactured in China. And that mother stood here with Senator Pryor and me and told this moving story and said: This cannot happen to other parents.

She said: The Senators in this body, why do they not think if this happened to their kid or their grandkid where they suddenly swallow a little toy and are out like that. It is like swallowing a gumball, out like that for 6 hours thinking they are going to die.

Then there was another mother who came from Oregon. She told the story of her son, whom we see now years later, Colton. When he was very little, he swallowed a charm they had gotten from some one of those little vending machines that you put your money into.

He swallowed it. And all of a sudden she said he started acting completely lethargic, not at all like the little toddler he was. And they brought him into the hospital and they found out that charm was 39 percent lead, 39 percent lead.

Now, their story, unlike the story of little Jacob, did not end there, because he has that lead permanently in his system. And today, years and years later when they go to the doctor, he is still tested for elevated lead levels. And, in fact, even a few days after he got home, after they had gotten the charm out of his stomach, he bit his cheek and his cheek swelled up to the size of a golf ball because of the lead that was in his system.

That is what we are talking about--moms getting little charms that their kids swallow, which used to be maybe if you swallowed a penny, having this kind of health effect.

We all know what lead can mean. I certainly know in Minnesota where we had a little boy whose mom was not with us today. The mom was not there because her heart is broken. Her little 4-year-old boy died when he swallowed a charm that turned out to be 99 percent lead. And he did not die from choking, he did not die because it blocked his airway, he died because that lead seeped into his system day after day. And when he died, he was tested at three times the normal lead level.

In 2007, nearly 29 million toys and pieces of children's jewelry were recalled because they were found to be dangerous and, in some cases, deadly for children. As a mom and a former prosecutor and now as a Senator, I find it totally unacceptable that these toxic toys are in our stores and on our shores. As my 12-year-old daughter said when she found out that the Barbies were being recalled, she said: This is getting serious.

The provision of the Consumer Product Safety Commission Reform Act that I authored addresses some of the most serious discoveries of this past year. And that is the lead that has been surfacing in these toys. The toy that little Jarnell Brown swallowed that led to his death was made in China. It was 99 percent lead.

The toy that little Colton swallowed that nearly led to his death and has led to elevated lead levels in his bloodstream for many years was 39 percent lead.

These deaths, these injuries have been made so much more tragic by the fact that they could have been prevented. These little boys should never have been given these toys in the first place. It should not take a child's death or severe injury or a child swallowing an Aqua Dot with a date rape drug to alert us that there is a problem in this country.

Parents should have the right to expect that these toys are tested and that these problems are found before these toys get to the toy box. For 30 years, we have been aware of the dangers poised by lead. We all know about it from the lead paint standard.

But what is ironic to me is we have a Federal standard for lead paint, we have a standard, but we have never had a standard for lead in toys or jewelry; never had a standard for those little pieces of jewelry that will end up in kids' stomachs, or how about teenage girls who are sitting in class and chewing on a charm that they may have around their neck--never had a standard; it has all been voluntary.

It is not just these cheap trinkets that are being discovered to contain hazardous levels of lead. Last summer the CPSC recalled 1.5 million Thomas & Friends trains, including the Thomas the Train caboose, the Thomas the Train rail car, the box car, after they were discovered to be coated with poisonous lead paint.

A lot of those parents had bought these toys because they were wood, they thought they would be better for their children. Many of these products reaching retail for between $10 and $20 apiece were on the market for almost 3 years before they were discovered to be defective, putting hundreds and thousands of toddlers at serious risk for lead ingestion and brain damage.

What is even worse is what happened after the initial recall. This shows you how out of hand things have been because there have been no set standards and no good regulations coming from the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

After more than 3 months passed, RC2, which is the company that makes Thomas the Train sets, realized that their first recall was incomplete. They had asked for a recall and then they found hundreds of thousands of additional products, many of which had been sold in the same packaging with trains that had already been recalled, were coated with lead paint and also needed to be recalled.

Clearly, the RC2 Corporation that manufactured Thomas & Friends trains was embarrassed by its safety record. It apologized to its customers, saying it would make every effort to ensure that this would not happen again. To help encourage customer loyalty, which you can understand in a competitive market, and to get them to return those recalled toys, RC2 said: Okay, parents, we are so sorry this happened. We are going to give a bonus gift for your trouble.

Well, the bonus gift backfired in a big way because it was discovered that 2,000 of these bonus gift trains that they had given to parents for them sending back the recalled products contained lead levels four times higher than legally allowed, leaving parents of toddlers across the Nation to deal with a double recall. All of these toys are manufactured in China.

The burden should not fall on parents or kids to tell if a toy train is coated with lead paint or if a toy has been assembled so shoddily that it will come apart in a toddler's mouth. How would a parent ever think an Aqua Dot would contain the date rape drug?

I think it is shocking for most parents when they realize we never have had a mandatory ban on lead in children's products, all we have had is this voluntary guideline. It is shocking that until this legislation is passed, the Consumer Product Safety Commission cannot actually enforce a lead ban in children's toys.

In response to a series of letters I wrote to Chairwoman Nord in August about the danger of lead in children's products, the chairwoman responded on September 11. In that letter, Chairwoman Nord acknowledged that:

The CPSC does not have the authority to ban lead in all

children's products without considering exposures and risk on

a product by product basis.

Now, that is really going to help the family of Colton to find that out, that our powerful Federal agency, with which we thought we had solved all these consumer product issues back in the 1970s, that this a safe country, does not have that authority.

Chairwoman Nord went on to say that: Were the CPSC to attempt banning lead in all children's products, it would likely take several years and millions of dollars in staff and other resources.

This response makes it clear that Congress cannot wait for the CPSC to act to ban lead from all children's products. We have been waiting for years. These parents have been waiting for years and years. This mother who spoke with us today wrote all these letters. She has been trying to lobby by herself on behalf of her son to make sure this did not happen again.

And what she told me this morning was her heart broke 2 years after her son had this horrible experience when she heard about the case of Jarnell Brown who had died. She felt her efforts were in vain.

Well, this Congress has a duty to make sure they were not in vain. Parents should not have to wait years for the CPSC to take action we already know is appropriate. The medical evidence is clear and overwhelming, lead poisons kids and there must be a Federal ban.

To talk a little bit more about the specifics, this legislation effectively bans lead in all children's products by classifying lead as a banned hazardous substance under the Federal Hazardous Substance Act. The bill sets a ceiling for a trace level of allowable lead at .03 percent of the total weight of a part of a children's product or 300 parts per million.

To put that in some perspective, California has standards right now of .04 for children's toys and .02 for jewelry. The voluntary ban that is not even mandatory right now that the Consumer Product Safety Commission uses is at .06. We have worked with pediatricians, we have worked with consumer experts. We set this at a very smart standard of .03 percent of trace levels. That ceiling would take effect in 1 year, allowing retailers and manufacturers to comply; 2 years later the legislation would then further drop the amount of allowable lead in children's products to .01 percent of the total weight of a part or 100 parts per million.

Now, if the CPSC finds you can actually go below the threshold, which a lot of pediatricians have argued we can do in this country, that we can even get down to zero lead, that would be great.

What this law says is you do not have to be stuck up there at .01, which is of course a small amount of trace lead. You can, in fact, do a rulemaking and go lower for certain products or for all products.

This legislation gives the CPSC the power to lower levels even further as science and technology allow.

The legislation before us today also sets an even lower threshold for paint. Under this bill, the allowable lead level for paint would drop immediately to 90 parts per million. This lowered threshold is critical because science has shown that as children put products in their mouths, it is the painted coatings which are most easily accessible to kids. Every parent of a toddler knows that to be true. They can see, if any parent looks in their toy box, all the little teeth marks, and they know they put them in their mouth.

Under current law, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has adopted this voluntary guideline of .06 percent. It is voluntary. That is part of the reason it takes so long, that is part of the reason we have had this huge delay. This puts in a mandatory guideline at .03 going down to .01.

This legislation changes what is a bad system, a broken system, and gives the CPSC the tools it needs immediately to go after the bad actors who used lead or lead-based paint in their products.

To me the focus is simple: We need to get these toxic toys out of our kids' hands, not just voluntarily, not just as a guideline but with the force of law.

Millions of toys were being pulled from these shelves, 29 million last year. Right in the middle of Halloween, they were pulling the little funny teeth that you put in your mouth, Aqua Dots, Thomas the Train, Sponge Bob Square Pants, Barbie dolls, you name it. It gives the force of law to pull these toys from the shelves.

As if the appalling number of recalls this year is not bad enough, these recalls illuminated other problems with pulling toys from the store shelves, the daycare center floor or the drawer under the kid's bed.

This I actually heard from my friends. Because once these recalls happen, every parent runs to the kid's room and says: Okay, I have got to find the toy that has been recalled. Now, how are you going to tell the difference between the brunette Barbie doll, the blonde one, the one that had this outfit on. This is practical when you are a mother. How are you going to tell the difference between this caboose or this box car? So they are looking at these toys trying to figure it out, putting them up to the Web site. Because, guess what, there is no batch number on these toys.

I have to tell you, most parents, when they get their kid a toy, do not keep the packaging. My mother-in-law may be an exception to that, but most parents do not keep the packaging. So what this legislation does is it says:

The batch number will be on the toys whenever practical. They are not going to go on a pick-up stick, but whenever practical, the batch number will be on the toys so when there is a recall, the parent is going to be able to figure out which toy it is, and also the batch number is going to be on the packaging.

Why do we need this? Because we do know that large retailers such as Toys ``R'' Us and Target, the minute there is a recall, they have been very good about stopping all sales; they do it through their computer system.

Well, some of the smaller mom-and-pop retailers do not have that capability, not to mention eBay and those kinds of things. So we want to make sure the batch number, in this legislation, requires it not only be on a toy but also on the packaging.

This legislation, though, does a lot more than ban lead in children's toys and to help parents identify recalled toys. It brings consumers the protection that has been lacking for almost two decades. As we all know, the CPSC's last authorization expired in 1992, and its statutes have not been updated since 1990.

Not surprisingly, the marketplace for consumer practices has changed significantly in the last 16 years. And we have seen through recall after recall how ill-equipped the Consumer Product Safety Commission is to protect consumers. Today, the Commission is a shadow of its former self, although the number of imports has tripled, tripled in recent years.

So what you have seen is a tripling of imports, products coming in, and then what have you seen with the staff? Well, have you seen quite a drop in the staff. The CPSC staff has dropped by almost half, falling from a high in 1980 of 978 people who worked there. Okay. Well here we go, 978 people. And what do we see in 2007? Well, we have 393 today. You wonder how are these date drugs getting into our system, getting on to our shores. You don't have the staff adequate to monitor these toys. So while you have seen a tripling of imports coming from China and other places, you have seen an enormous decrease in the staff that regulates them. In fact, much has been made of a guy named Bob who is the only official toy inspector at the CPSC. He is retired. He was out in a back room testing toys by dropping them to the ground. He had all these toys on his desk. That is what we are dealing with, while we have seen a tripling of imports and toys and jewelry that have tested to be 99 percent lead.

What have we seen now with the recalls? We have actually seen a huge increase in the number of recalls. As you know, part of it is because finally you have had the businesses, once this hit the streets and was all over newspaper headlines, saying: We finally better start testing these products more frequently, which was a good thing. But we have seen in 1980, 681,300 recalls. In 2007, we have seen 28,773,640 recalls, all toys that either were in parents' homes or were sitting there on the toy shelf ready to be bought.

Let's look at a comparison so you can see why. It doesn't take a rocket scientist. Probably my 12-year-old daughter would see what is going on. When you look at this comparison, in 1980, you had only 681,000 toys recalled. Then you go up to 2007, where you had 28 million recalled. Look at the staff comparisons. When you have 681,000 toys recalled, the staff is up here at 1,000. When you have 28 million toys being recalled, you have a staff that is half of what it used to be. So there is a graphic depiction of what we are dealing with.

What does this legislation do? It puts 50 more staff at U.S. ports of entry in the next 2 years to inspect toys and products coming into the country. Not only does this bill give the CPSC the necessary funding and staff, it also gives the commission the ability to enforce violations of consumer product safety bills. We have seen too many headlines this year to sit around and think about this problem and say: It is just going to solve itself. The market will take over.

The market has been broken. The CPSC has been broken. This is the time that Government comes in, which is reasonable, and works with business, as we have done. I am proud of the work Toys R Us has done with us, as well as Target, which has always been helpful in working with us. They know it has had an effect on their bottom line.

Here is what this bill does. We can beef up this agency that has been languishing for years. We can put sensible, responsible rules in place that make it easier for them to do the job. This is not just numbers on a chart. This is about a little kid that just in the last year, in the year 2007 in the United States, could swallow just a little toy, which kids have done for centuries, and end up in a coma, unconscious from a date rape drug. This bill is about numbers. This bill is about our economy. But more than that, this bill is about these kids.

I urge my colleagues to support it. I thank Senator Pryor and the other members of our committee for their leadership.

I see Senator Durbin from Illinois. I thank him for his great leadership on this bill. It is the most significant consumer safety legislation in our generation, as the Wall Street Journal has said. We have an opportunity, and we must work swiftly.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, let me thank my colleague from Texas for coming to the floor and offering an amendment. I don't know if I will be able to support it, but I do commend him because the amendment clearly relates to the bill, a very important bill, and it draws us into something perilously close to debate which hardly ever happens on the floor of the Senate. I hope the spirit in which he has offered this amendment will be respected on both sides of the aisle.

I know there are many pressing issues facing us in Congress and few opportunities to bring them up. But I hope this bill can pass this week, that we have an honest debate on the merits of the bill, and then bring it to passage. I support the bill. I thank Senator Pryor.

Senator Pryor of Arkansas has been a leader on this issue. He has done an extraordinarily good job making this a bipartisan bill. All of us read the stories last year about toy safety. Many parents came up to me in Illinois and said: What am I supposed to buy this year? Is everything dangerous? If it says ``made in China,'' am I supposed to stay away from it?

I didn't have a good answer. I couldn't recommend toys. That is not what I do for a living.

I have to tell you, a lot of the stories that were coming out in the newspapers were troubling, not just for parents but for grandparents such as me. Magnetic toys, I never had those when I was a kid. All we had were Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys and all kinds of stuff like that--erector sets. But these were little objects that could stick together with magnets. Kids could build them into huge forms. My grandson loved them. He had boxes full of this stuff and he would make these huge things with his dad, and always wanted more.

Well, I bought it--something to bring around at Christmastime--and did not realize, until the newspaper stories came out, this toy was a danger. Because the reason it worked is, it had these tiny, little, rare earth magnets. It looked like a pill, a little black pill. They were on the end of these sticks of plastic, and that is what kept all this toy structure together.

It turned out in the earliest design of these Magnetix toys, if a kid threw it on the floor, stepped on it, whatever--ran over it with a bicycle--the little magnet could pop out. And that little magnet, for my grandson, who was a little older, was not a problem. But for tiny children, it turned out to be a big problem. If they popped it in their mouth--which little kids, crawling infants would do--and swallowed it, and swallowed more than one, those two magnets could come together inside their body and cause serious obstruction in their intestines, forcing surgery to take care of it, and in the most extreme cases killing a baby.

That was the reality of a badly designed toy on sale in the United States. The Chicago Tribune did a front-page story on it. That is when I first started paying attention to this more closely, because I thought ``I bought one of these for my grandson, and it is a danger''-- at least it is for smaller children. The Chicago Tribune told the story in a very good series, about what happened when they discovered this toy was dangerous.

What happened added to my sense of urgency to deal with this issue. Because no sooner did this hazard appear than the lawyers appeared, and the lawyers took these toys and went to

their legal playground and played with them for month after month after month, while they were still being sold across America. That has to stop. If there is a dangerous toy in America, you cannot expect every family to do a test. You cannot expect every family to be able to certify safety. They expect the Government to do that. That is what we are supposed to do--the Consumer Product Safety Commission. When they do not do their job, it puts families and children at risk. So this law we are currently trying to amend may have been good many years ago. Today it is not up to the challenge.

Senator Klobuchar of Minnesota has been another great ally of Senator Pryor on this effort. She had a chart earlier, and I want to show you kind of a version of it, if you will. This is a little bit different chart than hers. It indicates the number of imports coming into the United States.

I talked about toys, but we are concerned about the safety of all products--electronic products and so many others--coming into the United States. You can see from the chart, starting back in the 1970s and all the way up to today, this dramatic surge in the number of imports. Now, this may be hard for people to see, but here are the numbers of full-time employees at the Consumer Product Safety Commission--reaching a high number of about 1,000 employees in 1980, it looks like, and then this steady decline of employees, until we are down around 400 employees today. So here is a surge of imported products, and a dramatic decline, by more than 50 percent, of inspectors. Well, what is going to happen? Fewer products are inspected, fewer unsafe products are detected, and there is more danger in the marketplace.

There was kind of a popular cliche on Capitol Hill back in this era: Get Government off my back. Well, this is an example of where a safety agency fell victim to that mentality and dramatically reduced its staff, at a time when it should have kept up with the imports to protect American citizens. That is what I think troubles many of us.

I am the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee for the Consumer Product Safety Commission. We increased the President's request for this agency, I believe from $62 million to $80 million in this year-- that is an $18 million increase in real terms, about 30 percent--and said to the agency: Now staff up. Put the inspectors in place. Protect the consumers across America.

I suppose we could have given them more, but I am a little bit reluctant, having watched the process for a number of years, to put too much money too fast into an agency. I am afraid many times they do not hire the best people and they cannot adjust to change. Thirty percent, I think, is probably tops out of what you can do in any given year without running some real risks, and even that has to be carefully monitored.

So we are hoping in this bill--and I commend Senator Pryor--to see a steady increase in the number of employees and inspectors at this agency in the hopes that when we get this done, at the end of the day we will have enough people to do the job.

When you look at the millions of dollars worth of toys brought into the United States, and all the attention we paid to those toys, there is a legitimate question about: Well, how many people out of about 400 at the Consumer Product Safety Commission were actually inspecting toys? Well, it turned out that when it came to certain types of toys, such as these loose magnets and that sort of thing, there was basically one man. His name was Bob. I had a picture of Bob standing at his inspection station which I had back in the cloakroom and somebody took it. I wish I could have brought it out here because Bob became kind of legendary. Bob has since retired. He is retired from the Federal Government. But we did manage to save a picture of Bob's workspace.

Shown in this picture is Bob's testing laboratory for toys imported into the United States. That is not a real confidence builder. It looks like my work bench in my basement in Springfield, IL. In fact, that work bench looks a little better, when I think about it. This is a mess. His toolbox is over here, and there is a bunch of toys stacked up.

Bob, the Federal inspector of toys for the United States of America-- he was making do with what he had, and it was not a lot. What he did was draw this little line on the wall about 3 feet up, and then he drew another one at about 6 feet up, and he would take these toys out of the boxes and drop them on the floor to see if they broke open. That was one of Bob's impact tests in his laboratory. I do not want to make light of Bob's contribution to safety in America, but I will bet you families across America thought it was a little different process that led to an inspection of a toy that might end up in the hands of their child if they bought it in a store in America.

The good part about Senator Pryor's bill that I am happy to cosponsor is that he goes after this whole laboratory inspection process. We should not and cannot build enough laboratories in the United States owned by the Federal Government to inspect every product that comes into our country, but we can certify laboratories in other countries that are recognized to be professional and trustworthy--that is a good investment--and then make sure that the products go through these laboratories, and make sure when they come to the United States we can identify where they came from, when they were produced and, if there is a problem, trace them back.

So Senator Pryor's bill moves in the right direction: more inspectors here, but people also to certify laboratories in the countries of origin. If there is a toy coming from China, as an example, it may go to an underwriter's laboratory that is open in China that has been certified by the United States as a reliable laboratory, and they will have to give a seal of approval before it is shipped to the United States. That, to me, makes a lot of sense. It is a way to use our money wisely and to avoid this kind of sad situation here where you cannot believe this is going to result in a reliable process.

The funding increases in this bill are important, but even more important, from my point of view, is to make sure this Consumer Product Safety Commission is run by people who care, who want this to work. It is sad. There are supposed to be five members of this Commission. Unfortunately, there are only two who are currently serving.

This Commission under current law has to negotiate press releases with companies. If you find a Magnetix toy with a magnet that a child can swallow and can have terrible health consequences and want to take the product off the shelf or recall it, it turns out to be a battle royal between lawyers even negotiating the wording of the press release. While all this is going on, unsuspecting families are buying these toys. Now Senator Pryor in this bill is going to expedite this process.

Secondly--and this is one that I think is essential--we have to fine those who violate this law in a manner where they will pay attention. If you have a product you continue to sell that is dangerous, that is on recall and you sell it anyway but figure: My company will make enough money that I can pay the fine and live through it to see another day, that is not a good outcome--certainly not for the consumers across this country.

So what Senator Pryor in this bill does is to increase the fines to a level where they truly are meaningful, and companies will have to think twice before they would consider selling a product that is facing recall.

This package also over time increases the authorization level for the agency. It strengthens civil and criminal penalties. It requires third- party certification and testing, as I mentioned. It makes it mandatory for manufacturers of toys and children's products to comply with accepted safety standards. It bans the presence of lead in all children's products. My hat is off to Senator Klobuchar. She has been a great leader on that issue. It allows for parents to have faster access to injury reports and other information to help alert parents to product safety risks. It improves the way this Commission conducts its business.

It allows State attorneys general to enforce product safety law in specified instances. I believe it is only injunctive relief they can seek, and only if the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Federal agencies do not move forward to protect the consumers. It restores the Consumer Product Safety Commission to a five-member Commission, which it should be.

I hope my colleagues will look at this bill closely and realize we are doing something that is rare. We are taking a law that has not been touched for 18 years and bringing it up to speed.

Eighteen years ago, as my chart showed earlier, imports were at a very low level. Imported products have risen dramatically. We have to rise to the challenge. It is heartening this bill Senator Pryor brings to the floor, along with Senator Stevens, Senator Collins, Senator Inouye, myself, Senator Klobuchar, and so many others, has a broad coalition of groups supporting it: the Consumer Federation of America, the American Association of Pediatricians, and Consumers Union, to name a few. One of the CPSC Commissioners, Mr. Moore, has endorsed this legislation, and a number of State attorneys general.

Passing a strong, consumer-oriented bill such as this is the next step in safeguarding consumers. I do not think American families should ever have to go through a Christmas or holiday season as they did last year wondering if products on the shelf are safe for their kids. If history is our guide, we may not have the chance to revisit these policies if we do not pass this bill right now.

I want to thank a number of individuals who played a significant role in helping me work on this issue and helping others: Rachel Weintraub, who was at the press conference yesterday for the Consumer Federation of America; Ami Ghadia and Ellen Bloom of the Consumers Union; Ed Mierzwinski with U.S. PIRG; David Arkush and Mike Lemov from Public Citizen; Cindy Pelligrini with the Association of Pediatricians; Nancy Cowles with Kids in Danger; and Patricia Callahan and Maurice Possley with the Chicago Tribune. The last two did an exceptional job as reporters. This was journalism at its best. They told a story--a gripping story--well documented, which caught the attention of this legislator, which led me to take this issue more seriously. My hat is off to the Chicago Tribune, Patricia Callahan, and Maurice Possley for their work on this issue.

Finally, let me say this: Passing this law is not the end of the story. My Appropriations subcommittee is going to call the Consumer Product Safety Commission in. We are going to keep an eye on them. We are going to make sure that taxpayers' dollars are well spent, that there is no question in the minds of those who are running this Commission about what Congress wants to achieve with this new authority and these new resources. If there is push-back and resistance from this agency to change, they are in for a battle. I hope we do not see that.

I think American consumers want to know the toys and products they buy off the shelves across America are safe for their families and safe for their kids. We focused on toys, but it is not the end of the story. There are an awful lot of products, many products which we buy every day, trusting this Government to put its seal of approval on and some inspection behind it. We have to meet our obligation to people who count on us to make sure that government does its job in an effective, efficient, and dollar-efficient way. Unfortunately, this agency has fallen behind. As it fell behind, so did some of the confidence of American consumers about products on the shelves.

I also think we ought to work with foreign governments. The Chinese came to see me repeatedly during the last holiday season and said: We have gotten the message. We are going to straighten this out. I am hoping they live up to that promise.

Also, in fairness to China, for example, which has been the butt and focus of many of the critiques when it comes to imports, the fact is that many of the toys they sold were designed by American companies, and those companies need to be held responsible for the toy design that the Chinese actually implemented.

The last word I will say is for special recognition to two companies which, during the midst of this toy scandal, did the right thing as corporate citizens of America--one was the chain Toys R Us, and the other, a major toy maker, Mattel--when this story came out. The CEOs of both of those companies contacted my office and said: We are going to work with you. We are not going to run away from this issue. We know that if American consumers don't have faith in our stores and in our commitment to them, it will not only hurt our sales, but it will put families in jeopardy.

Jerry Storch from Toys R Us was at the press conference yesterday. I commented that in the old days, corporate strategy used to be duck and cover. If a scandal emerges involving your company or your products, you duck the press and you try to cover it up. Jerry Storch didn't do that. He stepped right up and said: Toys R Us is going to work with you to make sure the products are safe. He kept his word and came to the press conference yesterday.

The same thing is true with Mattel. I think they are genuinely committed to the safety of kids and families, and I thank them for their leadership, as well as others, but those two really impressed me, that they would do the right thing from a corporate viewpoint. I hope consumers across America will hold them to their promise, and if they keep it, we will reward them with our business. They deserve it.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.