Stephanie Herseth Sandlin: “Mr. Chairman, my good friend, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goodlatte), mentioned earlier that we need fair…”

“Mr. Chairman, my good friend, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goodlatte), mentioned earlier that we need fair, across-the-board reform in the area of class action. I agree with that; it needs to be fair, reasonable and workable. That is what we should pursue. In typical fashion, our friends have cited isolated cases over a number of years that they say cry out for reform. However, they forgot to mention the case in Georgia at the Tri-State Crematory where they had been foregoing cremations for bodies received from funeral homes. Instead, they passed off wood chips and other substances as ashes. They forgot to mention the Ohio case wherein an Ohio neighborhood was filled with noxious gases when an 8,500-gallon resin kettle exploded at a Georgia Pacific plant. An employee was killed, 13 were injured, and 15 houses near the plant were evacuated. They forgot to mention the Foodmaker case which we heard earlier where the parent company of Jack-in-the-Box agreed to pay $14 million in a class action settlement in the State of Washington. That class included 500 people, mostly children, who became sick in early 1993 after eating undercooked hamburgers tainted with E coli. They forgot to mention the Indiana case, TRG Marketing LLC, who sold fraudulent health insurance policies to more than 5,000 Floridians who were left with several million dollars in unpaid medical bills.”