With the prospect of new coronavirus vaccines becoming available to medical workers and the most vulnerable only days from now, the process of restoring normalcy after the COVID-19 plague is finally about to begin.
It will take some time. As the weeks and months pass, tens of millions of doses of a vaccine will become available, and more and more people will enjoy greater safety going out in public. People will feel an increased confidence to go back to their business as they did before the virus struck a year ago.
This is all good news. But it could quickly become a nightmare unless Congress acts to protect responsible businesses from frivolous lawsuits over coronavirus transmission.
Currently, Republicans are pressing for appropriately extensive and lengthy protections for businesses that take the standard precautions to protect employees and consumers. Democrats, led by Sen. Dick Durbin, are fighting back on behalf of trial lawyers, imperiling the possibility of economic recovery, especially for schools and the small businesses most vulnerable to such lawsuits.
Durbin, who is leading Democratic negotiation efforts, reportedly wants nothing more than a six-month moratorium before the coronavirus lawsuits begin. Republicans want to see a long-term shield to protect businesses that have followed federal guidelines to prevent infections. After all, Congress has sent so many billions of dollars in aid to businesses during the pandemic. It would be foolish to let trial lawyers with dubious lawsuits devour what was intended to be an economic lifeline for the nation’s businesses and their employees.
For the better part of this year, Durbin has been falsely claiming that a strong, long-term liability protection “would result in more people being infected by the coronavirus, more people getting sick.” It isn’t true. Lawsuits don’t make people healthier, but they might discourage businesses from reopening and bringing back needed jobs (and healthcare for their laid-off employees) for a needlessly long waiting period.
Businesses want to stay open. This means they already have incentives to avoid doing anything reckless that makes employees sick or causes a local outbreak to be traced back to them, leading to their closure. The threat of a lawsuit does not add to this incentive. However, especially for small businesses, lawsuits can be so much more expensive than short-term closures that the threat could discourage many businesses from reopening at all.
Sen. Mitt Romney has reportedly proposed a compromise plan for a new prospective relief package, which would at least retroactively protect businesses that behaved according to federal guidelines from liability for infections contracted during the year. Durbin has reportedly rejected even this compromise. If he doesn’t get a big favor for his trial lawyer donors, he won’t support another relief package.
There is speculation that Durbin, in particular, is trying to demonstrate his fealty to his party’s trial lawyer donors because he is in a tight competition to become the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
But this should especially reinforce how important it is that Democrats not be permitted to win the Senate special elections in Georgia on Jan. 5. If they do win, Durbin will likely find himself in a position to prevent any long-term protection for reopening businesses. That would be a gut punch, a confidence-shattering, Charlie-Brown-kicking-the-football moment for millions of small businesses that want to get back to reality. It would be devastating for tens of millions of employees looking to return to work and investors who had been led to believe that vaccine development meant better days were nearly here.
