USA Today reports, “Each year, state lawmakers across the U.S. introduce thousands of bills dreamed up and written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks,” and “disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called ‘model’ bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them.” USA Today adds, “A two-year investigation by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity reveals for the first time the extent to which special interests have infiltrated state legislatures using model legislation.” USA TODAY and the Republic “found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.” The Asbestos Transparency Act “sounds like the kind of boring, good-government policy voters expect their representatives to hammer out on their behalf to safeguard public health,” but the bill “had nothing to do with requiring companies to disclose to consumers what products contained asbestos or informing those who had been exposed to the cancer-causing mineral how to get help.” The bill “in effect, cast corporations as victims of litigation filed by people harmed by asbestos,” and it “requires people battling the asbestos-triggered disease mesothelioma to seek money from an asbestos trust, set up to compensate victims, before they can sue a company whose product might have caused their cancer.”
From the news release of the American Association for Justice.
