Political Quotes

“unlike the situation at the time at which the Senator from North Dakota presented this amendment a week or so ago, we now have a bill in the Chamber in which there is no cap on punitive damages. I say that not in triumph but in regret. I believe that one of the great vices at which legislation of this sort properly should be aimed is at creating some kind of relationship between the actual damages caused by a tort, caused by a wrong, and the damages that can be recovered as a result. But with the latest set of amendments here, we have permitted a judge on certain findings of egregious conduct to go beyond what juries are permitted successfully to impose in the way of punitive damages. The entire matter, Mr. President, is at one level an argument on philosophy but at another level it is a debate about the Constitution of the United States. The Supreme Court in several recent cases, while not setting a specific ceiling or cap on punitive damages itself, has spoken of serious constitutional questions caused by unlimited punitive damages, or by punitive damages that are not related in any rational fashion to actual damages found by a jury or determined by a court. In other words, the Supreme Court of the United States has invited the Congress to do exactly what I had hoped we would do more successfully than we have accomplished in this bill.”