Washington, DC, June 7, 2006--A senior Senate Republican vowed on Wednesday to press ahead with his legislation for a privately funded $140 billion trust to pay asbestos injury claims, scoffing at a warning that taxpayers may end up paying the bill.
The Senate bill failed by one vote to overcome a procedural hurdle in the Senate in February. Its sponsors recently amended it to attract more support, but it is unclear how much they have gained.
"We're going to do whatever it takes to pass this legislation," Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, declared at hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee he chairs.
Specter and Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont are the bill sponsors.
Specter criticized as "highly presumptuous" a warning from Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, that the asbestos fund could run out of private money and end up in the taxpayers' lap.
Holtz-Eakin's emphasis on the fund's uncertainties amounted to "a 180 degree difference" from an analysis he did last year while still CBO director, Specter said.
In that report, Holtz-Eakin estimated the proposed asbestos fund would receive between $120 billion and $150 billion in injury claims--which the legislation's sponsors noted was in the ballpark of the fund's projected $140 billion revenues.
Holtz-Eakin testified on Wednesday he stood by his previous analysis, but was now also adding opinions that he had not expressed while head of the non-partisan CBO.
"It is my judgment, and my judgment alone, that in the future, Congress would continue this program" even if it ran out of private funding, he said.
The fund would pay claims of people sickened by asbestos because of occupational exposure to the mineral. It would be financed by companies that made or used asbestos and their insurers. In exchange, the companies would be shielded from legal liability.
Thousands of injury claims have pushed over 70 companies, such as building materials maker USG Corp., and auto parts supplier Federal-Mogul Corp., into bankruptcy.
One company that strongly opposed the previous bill, the engineering and construction contractor Foster Wheeler, said it now supported the measure because of adjustments that were made in fund payments from well-insured companies.
"We support it as a fair compromise," executive vice president Peter Ganz said.
But critics said the revised bill was worse than the old one. The new version would allow claims to be filed by victims of last year's hurricanes Katrina and Rita and by New Yorkers exposed to asbestos when the World Trade Towers collapsed.
The new bill says nothing about compensating these claims, said Jonathan Bennett of the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a training and advocacy organization with ties to organized labor.
"There is an incalculable difference between having the right to file a claim and having the right to compensation," Bennett said.
A Democratic senator who helped work on past versions of the bill expressed doubt it could ever get enough votes.
As the months have gone on, I've become more concerned as to whether we can ever get the kind of support that is necessary to move this," California's Dianne Feinstein said.
