Henry Waxman: “I think we have so little time to talk about this bill on the House floor, I wanted some of our colleagues to understand…”

“I think we have so little time to talk about this bill on the House floor, I wanted some of our colleagues to understand what kind of laws we are talking about: State laws dealing with adulterated food, emergency permit controls, unsafe food additives, unsafe color additives, new animal drugs, animal feeds, poisonous ingredients in food. These are laws that States have adopted over the years and they are going to be swept away. It is so inexplicable to me why we would want to do that. States currently carry out 80 percent of food safety protection. There is no evidence they have been acting irresponsibly or incompetently. And in many cases, the Federal Government has never gotten around to looking at these issues because they have deferred to the States on them. So now the State laws will be struck unless the Federal Government allows those State laws to stay in effect and that could mean, even though there is no Federal warning law, for example, that would take its place. We would have no law at the local or State level, or at the Federal level. I guess the purpose of some of this legislation is to keep the public from knowing about the harm that they may be exposed to in food. Now Mrs. Capps and a number of others are going to be offering an amendment, the Capps-Stupak-Eshoo-Waxman amendment, that would say that State laws that require notification of substances that may cause cancer and birth defects in reproductive health all ought to be permitted.…”