Senate Passes Food Safety Bill

By Ellyn Ferguson, CQ Staff

The Senate passed a long-delayed comprehensive food safety bill by voice vote Sunday night, sending it back to the House to clear for the president’s signature. The action resurrected legislation some supporters had begun to write off as a casualty of a technical error and shifting partisan sentiments after the Nov. 2 elections.Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave the legislation new life by stripping language of a bill (HR 2751) originally written to aid consumer recycling and inserting the text of the Senate-passed food safety bill (S 510).Reid, D-Nev., said the bill was an “extremely important” step in preventing food-borne illnesses that can disable or kill consumers.Reid said he had spoken with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., about the House acting quickly on the bill.

The quick and easy passage came as something of a surprise after speculation for much of the weekend centered on the Democrats possibly adding the food safety legislation to a spending measure.“It’s not dead yet,” Majority Whip Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., author of the Senate food safety bill said Sunday afternoon. Sen. Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, ranking Republican on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, also said efforts to keep the measure alive were continuing.Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn had said he would block any spending measure that included food safety, and Republicans have said they want a clean bill.

Putting the food safety legislation into a non-spending bill skirted those potential hurdles. Coburn, who had previously held up the food safety bill for months over objections to the cost and demands for a vote on an anti-earmark amendment, raised no objection to the unanimous consent agreement Sunday. The food safety measure — which would expand Food and Drug Administration regulatory authority and empower the agency to order mandatory recalls — enjoys broad bipartisan support in both chambers. The Senate passed its bill last month with 73 votes, and clearing it in the House appeared to be a formality. But the Senate bill included user fees that ran afoul of a constitutional requirement that revenue measures originate in the House.

Efforts to resolve the impasse by including it in legislation to fund the government through fiscal 2011 fell apart when Senate Republicans said they would only accept a short-term appropriations measure.

The House had passed a companion food safety bill in 2009. Rep. John D. Dingell, D-Mich., sponsor of the House bill, expressed frustration over the weekend that the legislation seemed trapped in a Senate procedural maze. “This bill has been laying over in the Senate for 17 months,” he said. “The result of doing nothing is millions of Americans getting sick, hundreds of thousands being hospitalized and thousands more dying every year. How many more are going to have to get sick, be hospitalized and die before the Senate takes action on a bill that passed overwhelmingly in the House and Senate with support of the industry and consumers?”
Reid said overhaul of food safety laws was long overdue and would reassure Americans that the food they eat is safe. “This is a common-sense issue with broad bipartisan support,” he said. “Tonight we unanimously passed a measure to improve on our current food safety system by giving the FDA the resources it needs to keep up with advances in food production and marketing, without unduly burdening farmers and food producers.”