Here’s something funny. Only eight Republicans had the courage to vote against Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) amendment to the Food Safety bill that would have imposed a two-year moratorium on federal earmarks in the Senate: Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, Richard Shelby of Alabama, Richard Lugar of Indiana, and retiring senators Bob Bennett of Utah and George Voinovich of Ohio. Obviously, Olympia Snowe is feeling the heat below the teapot up in Maine. Meanwhile, twenty-seven Republican senators failed to vote in favor of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, which has now passed both houses of Congress and will move to Conference.
The bill, which President Obama supports, still needs to be reconciled with differing provisions in legislation passed by the House in July 2009.
But the Senate’s approval, by a 73-25 margin, was cheered by food safety experts and advocacy groups as a sign that the long delay could be nearing an end and the nation’s food-safety laws will receive their first major overhaul in decades.
The Food Safety and Modernization Act would require improved planning and record-keeping by food producers and would give the Food and Drug Administration the power to recall contaminated food under its own authority, instead of relying on industry cooperation.
“Today’s vote will finally give the FDA the tools it needs to help ensure that the food on dinner tables and store shelves is safe,” Richard Durbin, D-Ill, the bill’s primary sponsor, said in a statement.
Chris Waldrop, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, called it a “paradigm shift for the FDA.”
“It moves the agency from reacting to outbreaks and recalls to preventing them,” he said.
It’s a wonder we’re not all dead:
“It’s shocking to think that the last comprehensive overhaul of the food-safety system was in 1938,” Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who heads the health committee, said in debating the legislation this month. “Food safety has too often become a hit-or-miss gamble. That is frightening, and it’s unacceptable.”
This isn’t the bill progressive agriculture and food-safety experts would have produced. It has enough concessions in it that it won the unanimous support of Republicans on the HELP Committee. Having said that, it is a landmark piece of legislation that is probably several decades overdue. And most Republicans still managed to vote against the safety of our food. I mean, think about that:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) FDA Food Safety Modernization Act today, saying it will “improve America’s ability to prevent food borne illness and boost consumer confidence in U.S. food supplies while minimally burdening small farms and consumers.”
“This legislation would improve food safety by requiring all food manufacturers to develop a food safety plan, providing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with new tools to ensure the safety of imported food, and employing a rational, risk-based approach to inspection,” wrote R. Bruce Josten, Executive Vice President of the Chamber of Commerce. “On this basis alone the Chamber supports final passage of the bill.”
But the president is going to sign it, so who cares whether the Chamber of Commerce supports it? Any good Republican must oppose.
