Word: act
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Senate is expected to vote soon on a bill that could make the living for terminally ill patients much more painful. Grossly misnamed the "Pain Relief Promotion Act," the bill, which passed the House last year, would make it a federal crime for any doctor to prescribe morphine or any other controlled substances with the intent to hasten a patient's death. Convicted doctors would serve a minimum 20 years in prison. Opponents in the Senate have planned to filibuster the bill. But if it passes anyway, President Clinton should veto...
Secondly, the bill's understated purpose--to override Oregon's 1994 Death With Dignity Act--is an inappropriate infringement on a state's right to choose whether or not to legalize euthanasia. In 1997 the Supreme Court unanimously decided that, while it was constitutional to ban euthanasia, it was not unconstitutional for a state to pass a law making euthanasia legal. The onus of deciding the issue is on the states, not the federal government...
...first bill--the "Workplace Goods Job Growth and Competitiveness Act"--passed the House Feb. 2. It would have restricted the liability of durable goods manufacturers to 18 years after their products were first sold. Workers eligible for workers' compensation would have been directly targeted by the bill; Most compensation programs cover only economic damages, such as lost wages or medical bills, so a worker injured by a defective machine would be unable to collect damages for injuries such as death, loss of limb, loss of child, permanent disfigurement or chronic pain. In one 1995 case identified by House Democrats, Reginaldo...
...Interstate Class Action Jurisdiction Act of 1999," which passed the House Sept. 23, 1999, would have forced almost all class-action suits into an already clogged federal court system. Worse still, the bill would have unilaterally imposed federal standards onto state class-action claims, meaning that many cases previously heard as state class actions--often involving the environment, civil rights or consumer protections--would be sent to federal court, divided up into thousands of individual cases and sent back to the states to clog their courts as well. No wonder the Conference of Chief Justices, whose state courts would...
Perhaps the most stunning case of legislative malfeasance was found in the misnamed "Fairness in Asbestos Compensation Act." That bill would have again preempted state law and retroactively denied access to the courts to workers exposed to asbestos, forcing them to go through a new bureaucracy and jump through a series of arbitrary medical hoops with no basis in existing science before becoming eligible to file suit. Even greater obstacles to compensation would be placed in front of the spouse or children of asbestos workers who contracted lung cancer from breathing fibers off of work clothes. All of this would...