Spector: Asbestos Bill to See Senate Vote Early Ne
Washington, DC, October 24, 2005--Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has pledged to bring a $140 billion asbestos trust fund bill to a vote early next year, one of the legislation's sponsors, Sen. Arlen Specter, said on Friday.
"It is a complex bill and the majority leader has committed to bringing it up as one of the first items next year," Specter said on the Senate floor. There was no immediate comment from the office of Frist, a Tennessee Republican.
Asbestos, widely used for fireproofing and insulation until the 1970s, has been linked to cancer, and hundreds of thousands of injury claims have bankrupted dozens of U.S. companies.
Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, are sponsoring a bill to halt the lawsuits and pay claims from a fund financed by asbestos defendant companies and their insurers.
The bill was voted out of the Judiciary Committee that Specter chairs in May, but amid doubts about how much support it has, Frist has not brought it to the Senate floor. Meanwhile the lawmakers' calendar for the rest of this year is crowded with Hurricane Katrina relief, spending bills and the confirmation of a second Supreme Court justice.
Specter mentioned the asbestos bill as he outlined the contents of a spending bill for the Labor Department and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Included in that Labor-HHS spending bill, Specter said, is $2 million for start-up costs for administering asbestos claims, in anticipation of passage of the asbestos compensation fund. But he added that he was "not counting any chickens" on passage of the asbestos bill.
The Labor-HHS spending bill also contains $1 billion for a registry and tissue bank for mesothelioma victims, Specter said. Mesothelioma is a particularly lethal cancer linked to asbestos.
