Orrin Hatch: “in the final hour of our legislative business early last December 10, we passed a remarkable bill. It had no ideological…”

“in the final hour of our legislative business early last December 10, we passed a remarkable bill. It had no ideological division, did not cost the taxpayers a dime, and will benefit Americans in every part of the country. And, like the House did, we passed it unanimously. This bill had the somewhat unwieldy title of the Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act. While not lending itself to a catchy acronym, it is accurately descriptive. For more than 50 years, a Federal law has provided legal protection for art loaned by foreign governments for exhibition in the United States. Confidence in that protection is an essential piece of the complex arrangements that can take years to complete in order to bring wonderful exhibits to American museums for everyone to enjoy. America has hundreds of museums of all sorts. The art museum at Brigham Young University, for example, is one of the largest and best attended in the Mountain West. When it began working on a major exhibition of art from Islamic countries, some of its loan requests were unexpectedly denied. It turns out that a 2007 Federal court decision had made such loans risky, rather than secure. After that court decision, the act of lending, even after State Department review and approval, could actually lead to a new category of lawsuits against the foreign lenders.…”