Protecting America’s Children Should Be Top Priority (Rep. Bobby Rush)

First of all I want to indicate that we will be introducing our own CPSC reform bill later this month, and we plan to hold a hearing for it in November of this year. My bill will be a response to my original declaration, when I became chairman of the subcommittee, that I felt the CPSC was woefully inadequate to meet its mission. I thought that the CPSC has been operating for decades, now, under diminished staff and a diminished budget, shamefully so while under the influence of the federal government.

In some instances, the CPSC has been the long-forgotten, orphaned child of the federal government. My initial statements were, in some sense, prophetic because subsequent to those statements we’ve seen the growing avalanche of recalls of toy products, and other products, from China. This stands as a glaring insult and a failure of the federal government to adequately fund and empower the one agency that has the sole purpose of protecting our children. That purpose has been abrogated by an administration that merely views it as an appendage of corporate America. The CPSC can’t be, and shouldn’t be, and will not be an appendage of the corporations that it has power to oversee. It cannot be an apologist for corporate America.

Now, here are the circumstances that the American people are confronted with: unsafe toys in children’s toy boxes, unsafe toys on the shelves in the marketplace, and unsafe toys in the nursery schools. We’ve failed the American public and now we have an opportunity to reverse that and try to correct the problem. My legislation goes a long way toward correcting the problem. We passed the four bills out of subcommittee and they passed the House earlier this week. That was just the infinitesimal first step. We’ve got a long way to go before we can ensure the American public that the toys that our children have access to, enjoy, and are clamoring for are safe, and that the safety process they are subject to is the best possible.