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Around the Nation
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Around the Nation
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"There's an interest on both sides, Democrat and Republican, to get this done before we adjourn'' for the year, said Rep. Jack Quinn (R-N.Y.), a GOP moderate who has been working with Democrats to produce a bipartisan majority to pass the legislation.
The first test is likely to come tomorrow when Senate Democrats will try to use a pending bankruptcy bill to force votes on legislation backed by President Clinton and most Democratic lawmakers to raise the hourly federal wage floor by $1 to $6.15 during the next two years.
Democrats appear to have the votes needed to block a move by GOP leaders to keep the bankruptcy bill from being expanded to include a minimum-wage increase, gun controls or other proposals opposed by most Republicans.
This could open the way for consideration of the wage initiative - or another delay if GOP leaders decide to shelve the bankruptcy measure to avoid votes on unrelated issues.
If the Democrats' proposal comes to a vote in the Senate, they are "on the cusp'' of picking up enough Republicans to win a majority for passage, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the bill's chief champion, said in an interview
Friday.
In the House, moderate Republicans plan to appeal directly to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., this week to schedule
a vote on the legislation. And Minority Whip David E. Bonior, D-Mich., will seek signatures on a ``discharge
petition'' under which a majority of House members could force votes even if the leadership continues to balk.
While Hastert is eager to dispose of the issue during a non-election year, he is far from enthusiastic at the prospect of
enacting one of the Democrats' top priorities. ``I assume it's probably going to come up,'' Hastert said last week. But
``for most folks, the tax cut probably means more than a minimum-wage increase,'' he added.
To some extent, this year's struggle resembles the successful effort to pass the last minimum-wage increase in 1996,
when Kennedy tied the Senate in knots until Republicans agreed to consider the measure and Republican moderates
helped force a vote in the House. That bill increased the wage floor by 90 cents to $5.15 an hour by September 1997
and gave small businesses a variety of tax breaks to help pay the cost of the higher wages.
The fate of the measure this year appears to hinge on a half-dozen moderate Republicans in the Senate and a centrist
bloc of ``Blue Dog'' conservative Democrats and GOP moderates in the House, who have more than enough votes to
tip the outcome either way.
The politics of the wage issue present problems for Republicans, however. Lower-income workers have gotten less of
a financial boost from the nation's booming economy than wealthier Americans, according to many studies, and
Democrats have pounced on the tax-cut bill to portray the GOP as the party of the rich. Republicans could also find it
difficult to square opposition to wage increases for low-income workers with the ``compassionate conservatism'' of
George W. Bush, their presidential front-runner.
In addition, Democrats are poised to point to recent passage of a spending bill raising congressional salaries by $4,600
to $141,300 a year to shame Republicans into supporting the measure. ``It would be the height of hypocrisy, stunning
hypocrisy, to oppose this . . . after voting a pay increase for themselves,'' Kennedy said.
Thomas E. Mann, senior fellow for governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, said it will be difficult for GOP
leaders to ignore the issue. ``They can't beat it back indefinitely, and every effort to keep it from emerging will cost
them politically,'' he said. ``They're probably better off doing it as quickly and quietly as possible.''
As a result of pressure from their own ranks as much as heat from the Democrats, House Republicans are considering
a wage increase spread over three or four years, rather than the two years favored by Democrats, and they want tax
breaks for small businesses.
In the Senate, John Czwartacki, spokesman for Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., said Republicans have an
``outline'' of a proposal that may or may not include a minimum-wage increase but will, in some fashion, ``improve
the lot of workers earning the minimum wage.'' He declined to spell out details but said it will include tax breaks
aimed at expanding employment for lower-income workers.
Democrats in both houses are willing to go along with tax breaks for small businesses, though, according to Kennedy,
they would draw the line at resurrection of more general tax breaks that were included in the larger tax-cut bill that
Clinton plans to veto.
Bonior's discharge petition would allow for small-business tax breaks to be attached to the minimum-wage bill. In an
interview Wednesday, he listed possible business incentives ranging from an increase in the business meal deduction
to extension of a tax credit for employers providing entry-level jobs.
``My preference is we just do the wage increase,'' Bonior said. ``But I understand that in order to get this done, we
have to provide (tax) breaks on the side.''
Government officials are calling the step a milestone in joint government-industry attempts to find technologies to achieve a mass-produced, family car that gets far greater fuel efficiency than today's family cars.
The Ford car, called the P2000 LSR, has a hybrid diesel-electric engine system and can easily be refueled and driven daily. It has the passenger room, trunk space and driving acceleration of a Taurus. But it is made mostly of aluminum and other light weight materials, making it 40 percent lighter than the Taurus, or about 2,000 pounds in weight, Ford engineers said.
Ford will turn over the keys to the car in October, company officials said. Other automakers are working on similar fuel-efficient hybrid cars or have produced working models. But Ford is the first automaker to give the Energy Department such a hybrid family car that can be driven daily and that they can test.
Judges in Southern California could decide as early as this week to send the federal cases to trial, and some legal experts say the suits could have a dangerously chilling effect on the media's willingness to publish negative reviews.
The product-disparagement suits, by Japanese auto makers Suzuki Motors Corp. and Isuzu Motors Ltd., claim the magazine rigged driving tests for its 1988 review of Suzuki's Samurai and its 1996 review of the Isuzu Trooper and its twin, the Isuzu-built Acura SLX.
Consumer Reports called the sport-utility vehicles "not acceptable" - its worst rating - and urged consumers not to buy them because they exhibited a dangerous propensity to roll over under emergency steering conditions. The magazine's publisher, Consumers Union, stands by its reviews and maintains that its right to criticize is protected by law. But the auto makers' suits raise substantial questions about the magazine's methods - questions legal specialists say should be compelling enough to send the cases to trial despite Consumers Union's pending bids in U.S. District Court to have them dismissed.
Two key questions:
-Why did Consumer Reports devise a tough new accident-avoidance handling course for SUVs and other light trucks as part of its Samurai test only after failing in 46 tries - on the course it had used since 1972 - to get the vehicle to tip during a highway-speed directional change?
-Is the avoidance test objective and scientific, as the magazine maintains, or is it a subjective test heavily influenced by the driving style of the testers, as claimed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, and the agency's counterparts in Britain and Switzerland.
The two auto companies are seeking more than $50 million in combined damages and say the negative reviews have cost them more than $500 million in sales.
The consumers group may be fighting for its life. Some observers believe that the huge legal bills being run up could affect Consumers Union's ability to keep the estimated $30 million in liability coverage it needs to conduct its work.
Consumers Union President Rhoda Karpatkin vehemently denies that the case is causing financial difficulty. But others do worry.
"If Consumers Union, which has no agenda, is silenced, there's got to be not only an effect on it but a trickle-down effect on much less hard-hitting reports by the mainstream media," said Jonathan Kotler, a University of Southern California journalism professor and media law specialist.
The $35 million spent thus far on cases that haven't gone to trial "seems to be outrageously expensive and indicates there is intimidation at work," said University of California, Berkeley law professor Robert Post, a libel and slander specialist.
"The value of a lawsuit isn't always about the law. Sometimes it changes the ballgame because it shows that certain industries are willing to use their financial muscle to bully the press, especially the (financially) weaker members, into feeling it is not worth their while to criticize," he said.
Consumers Union officials scoff at the auto makers' claims that there was a hidden agenda at work in the negative reviews - that the magazine was attempting to generate controversy to bolster its circulation and fund-raising abilities.
There are myriad legal issues raised in the suits, but the heart of both cases is the attack on Consumers Union's honesty.
So far, according to insiders in the complex case, Suzuki and Isuzu collectively have spent more than $25 million on legal fees, expert witnesses, private investigators and technical studies. These insiders say Consumers Union has spent $10 million or more trying to kill the suits without a trial, arguing that Suzuki and Isuzu are attacking a fundamental right of the media in this country: the right to criticize.
But Suzuki attorney George Ball says the company has practiced restraint, not intimidation, waiting eight years to sue even though the initial review almost killed the then-popular Samurai, whose sales plummeted by 73 percent the year after the article ran. It wasn't until Consumer Reports repeated its charges against the Samurai in a 60th-anniversary edition in 1996 that Suzuki went to court.
And Isuzu waited almost a year to file its suit and says it did so only because Consumer Reports began republishing its condemnation of the Trooper after NHTSA issued its third report since 1978 criticizing the magazine's claims that its accident-avoidance test is a scientific one with accurate, repeatable, real-world results.
For now, both the Isuzu and Suzuki suits are idling as federal judges craft decisions on Consumers Union's requests for judgment in its favor without a trial. The publisher maintains that even if it made mistakes in its reviews, the auto makers have not shown evidence of the malicious intent needed to prove their claims.
The Isuzu case is scheduled to go to trial Nov. 30 in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles if Judge Richard Paez rejects Consumers Union's summary judgment motion. Trial of the Suzuki case, filed in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, Calif., was postponed indefinitely this summer by Judge Alice Marie Stotler pending her decision on a similar motion.
In any trial - win or lose - Consumer Reports is likely to emerge with a bit of tarnish on its shining armor. The car companies are throwing too much muck for some of it not to stick.
That bothers Karpatkin, Consumers Union's president, who cannot imagine losing but sees damage spreading far beyond her organization if the unimaginable happens:
"The issue is whether they can silence this major independent consumer product testing organization. Because if they do, there is nobody else like us out there to take manufacturers' products, purchase them anonymously and tell people honestly what we found."
09-20-99
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