Melvin Watt: “I think this has been a good debate, not long enough to do justice to this issue, but certainly a good debate. The first…”

“I think this has been a good debate, not long enough to do justice to this issue, but certainly a good debate. The first point I want to make, Mr. Chairman, is that this bill is referred to by my colleagues as the Common Sense Legal Reform Act, and I have seen it go through the process over time through the Committee on the Judiciary, and I suspect tomorrow and the next day on the floor it will cease to be a Common Sense Legal Reform Act and become a Nonsense Legal Reform Act. I think it is nonsense because it is contrary to everything I had thought my Republican colleagues stood for in their Contract With America. I thought they believed in States rights, but here I find in this bill that we are preempting all State law on punitive damages on products liability, and tomorrow an amendment will be offered to preempt State law in a number of other areas that have been traditionally reserved to the States, and I will remind my colleagues that the folks at the State level cannot want conservatives telling them what their values are and imposing their values on them any more than they want liberals doing that.”