Everywhere one looks these days, state attorneys general seem to be transforming their offices from Solomonic dispensers of impartial law enforcement to crusading agents of special interest groups, most often the plaintiffs’ bar, whose members often finance their campaigns. Some, like Mississippi’s Jim Hood, find themselves hip-deep in controversies involving major political allies. In Hood’s case, state papers already have begun calling on him to resign even as he refuses to conduct a state investigation into tort king Dickie Scruggs. Hood says investigating Scruggs “would be like prosecuting a relative.” Hood is just one of the many state AGs who “contract out” loads of work to trial lawyers who contribute to them, with dispassionate justice being replaced by all of the profit motives that contingency-fee arrangements entail.
It makes little sense, then for Congress to invite state AGs to become what amounts to enforcement partners with the federal government in consumer product safety cases. Yet that’s precisely what a Senate bill sponsored by Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., would do. The Pryor bill is scheduled for a vote today in the Senate. In the course of adding requirements for voluminous product safety warnings and otherwise expanding the reach of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, it would give extremely broad powers to state AGs “to obtain penalties and relief … whenever the attorney general of the State has reason to believe that the interests of the residents of the State have been or are being threatened or adversely affected by a manufacturer, distributor, or retailer entity that violates this Act or a regulation under this Act.”
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But is anybody encouraging state AGs to step in when the CPSC already exists to perform just suchoversight? Even setting aside the fact that the state AGs have no uniform standards of conduct to guide (or restrain) them, a big problem is that the proposal would effectively double the bureaucracy involved in the regulatory scheme. What is the point of centralizing the enforcement of product safety in the CPSC when the very next step invites officers in all 50 states to put their own interpretations on the safety requirements? Already, the House has passed a bill on the same subject — but without the invitation to the state AGs — by the unassailable margin of 407-0. Such unanimity in Washington is exceedingly rare. It seems foolish, then, for the Senate to muddy the waters by advancing Pryor’s far more problematic bill.
