White House nominates two to CPSC

goldeneggs21 President Obama has nominated South Carolina lawyer and former schools commissioner Inez Moore Tenenbaum to chair the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and former CPSC staffer/academic Robert Adler as a member of the commission (White House press release). The appointments are likely to bring important implications for CPSIA reform, since they would double the number of active CPSC commissioners (joining Republican Nancy Nord and Democrat Thomas Moore) and since many Democrats on Capitol Hill have refused to work with Nord, the current acting chair. Unfortunately, the new appointments carry with them some definite elements of bad news for the cause of CPSIA reform, and it takes some fairly strenuous guesswork and supposition to see this bad news as balanced by any good news.

  • Start with the relatively good (or at least neutral) news. Inez Tenenbaum, the designated chair, is an important political ally of President Obama’s (background: Howard Fineman, Newsweek) best known for her work on a different subject, education (and in fact evidently tossed the CPSC as a consolation prize for not getting the job she wanted, the Cabinet post of Secretary of Education). An optimistic view would be that because Tenenbaum has not spent the past year digging into an entrenched defense of CPSIA and all its works, she might be free to rethink the issue, developing more nuanced or moderate positions that acknowledge the views of CPSC career staff on the law’s various defects. And because of her background as an education advocate, she might be particularly sympathetic to the pleas of libraries and schools harmed by the law. That’s the optimistic theory, anyway.
  • Let’s be frank: for virtually any Democratic administration, an overriding political consideration in staffing the CPSC is finding someone acceptable to the plaintiff’s personal injury bar, the one anchor-tenant Democratic constituency that cares intensely about the agency’s work. Tenenbaum appears to pass this test: in her 2004 Senate campaign, she drew substantial contributions from two of the South’s best-known injury law firms, Motley Rice ($17,250) and Beasley Allen ($19,000). Incidentally, Tenenbaum lost that 2004 race to none other than Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, who emerged in recent months as the sponsor of the most serious and far-reaching bill to reform CPSIA. Most likely it’s sheer coincidence, but let’s hope DeMint wasn’t relying on a sympathetic ear from CPSC for his legislation.
  • Obama also announced that he is calling for an expansion of the CPSC from three to five seats, and that he intends to nominate for one of the new seats veteran Washington consumer-safety hand (and now University of North Carolina professor) Robert Adler, who participated in the CPSC transition effort on behalf of the incoming Obama-Biden team. Few figures are more closely identified than Adler with the cluster of Washington institutions and personalities that brought us CPSIA: after serving in a staff capacity at CPSC for many years he joined the staff of none other than Rep. Henry Waxman, where his work included overseeing the agency. As the White House press release also notes, Adler “has been elected six times to the board of directors of Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports magazine”; in its blind and clueless advocacy of a maximally onerous CPSIA, Consumers Union has taken a back seat only to Public Citizen and PIRG. Another online source describes Adler as a “longtime colleague” of Pamela Gilbert, a key figure both in the litigation lobby (Public Citizen, PIRG, trial lawyer lobbying) and in CPSC affairs.
  • Among early press coverage, Bloomberg News is out with a reasonably fact-filled account that at least acknowledges in a passing sentence the continuing outcry over CPSIA’s calamitous effects on producers and sellers. That contrasts with the short, lame account in the New York Times, and the longer, much-worse-than-lame account in the L.A. Times, from which you’d think the only controversial thing about the agency was that it was too lenient on the regulated. You do have to wonder whether L.A. Times reporter Mark Silva even reads the stories in his own paper.

More: Deputy Headmistress has been thinking along very similar lines. And Sen. DeMint has kind words for nominee Tenenbaum.
Public domain image courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org: Walter Crane, illustrator, The Baby’s Aesop (1887).

7 Comments

  • […] best-known injury law firms, Motley Rice ($17,250) and Beasley Allen ($19,000). From “White House nominates two to CPSC“: An optimistic view would be that because Tenenbaum has not spent the past year digging into […]

  • New Obama appointments to CPSC…

    I’ve got a post up at Overlawyered taking a quick preliminary look at the nominations of Inez Moore Tenenbaum as the new CPSC chair and Robert Adler as a commissioner…….

  • It’s not clear to me how Obama can take credit for increasing the Commission to five and increasing the budget when both of these things were mandated by the CPSIA itself and set to take place this year anyway.

  • That’s wise of Jim to offer Inez his support. As for me, I was not impressed with her tenure as State Superintendent of Schools. Nearly every morning we heard a sound bite from her on the news about how she was fixin’ to do this or that, but I saw stagnation. Sadly, stagnation in South Carolina stinks. She is looking to move up the ladder. She will do what the ladder holders say. “I seen it myself.”

  • Adler’s appointment is akin to the unions running Chrysler. Huge conflict of interest, IMO. Definitely doesn’t meet Obama’s requirement of no lobbyists in his administration, but maybe he will make ANOTHER exception.

  • […] been critical of the Los Angeles Times yesterday, let me accord all due credit to the paper for its investigative […]

  • If a politician runs for a position on the Railroad Commission and then a railroad station is situated in his home town, the appearance of a conflict of interest is clear. Ralph Nader and his groups are a different matter. They caused vast waste with airbags, but they do not work for air bag companies. The same with the breast implants. They just like to make mischief, using strained logic to override the informed opinions of experts. Like all religious zealots, they believe that God talks directly to them.

    President Obama seems to be smarter than President Clinton. I hope that he will filter out the quacks that had a hold on President Clinton. We have a policy to ban bicycles because their air values are made of brass. But we can only hope that a Harvard trained instructor at the University of Chicago can see the foolishness of such a policy. And it is a long shot. So much for American education!