Orrin Hatch: “I respect the motivation of my colleagues who are offering amendments on the proposed global tobacco settlement tonight.…”

“I respect the motivation of my colleagues who are offering amendments on the proposed global tobacco settlement tonight. As we all know, the issues surrounding this settlement prove easy to frame, but difficult to resolve. I have been listening carefully to this debate, and the timing is very interesting to me. Here we are now in September. Everybody would like to see this session end sometime near the end of October, or early in November, at the latest. But as far as the proposed global tobacco settlement goes, people around here seem to be assuming it is going to happen when, really, basically, nothing is being done. Yet, tonight we are making arguments and amendments on the assumption that something is going to get enacted. I would suggest to my colleagues, though, that this discussion is premature. We do not have all the details of the agreement. No one, that is no one, does, not even any of the parties to the agreement has final legislative language. We have not even reached a discussion in this body of the most general question we have to answer before we decide if the Senate will consider the global tobacco settlement: do we want to further regulate the use and sale of tobacco products in order to protect the public health and bring a degree of accountability and finality to the surge in tobacco-related litigation.”