| Also posted at GLOWDemocrats.com.
Last year, Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act in response to the erosion of product-safety regulations that let toxic toys made in China onto shelves in the US.
The CPSIA required that any product intended primarily for children under 12 be tested for lead contamination and other dangerous chemicals, as well as gradually reducing the legal limit for lead from 600 parts per million to 100 ppm. Everyone loves safer toys, right? |
| The only problem was, apparently nobody in Congress realized that the definition of "products intended primarily for children under 12" could also reasonably be interpreted to include things like books, which obviously didn't have any lead content. This led to some people making messianic doomsday style predictions that libraries would have to take all their children's books out and destroy them because they couldn't afford the testing.
Anyone with an ounce of sense could see that that was about as likely as the sun turning into a lemon, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission has now officially issued a stay of enforcement excepting libraries and second-hand stores like Goodwill from having to test all of their items. Of course that didn't stop Congressman Chris Lee from coming down the mountain proclaiming that his lobbying saved all the children's books in America from the Big Government.
The truth is that this should have been a page D13 footnote type story. Congress fails to make adequate exceptions, libraries point this out, Congress (or, so far, the CPSC) goes back and makes a correction. Open and shut, with the only "news" being that nobody in Congress thought of the problem in the first place.
Unfortunately, some people chose to use it as political fodder to beat their chests and rend their garments. Campaigning to "save" the children's book collections would mean more if there were any debate about the issue. But since it was obvious that it would never actually happen, the noisemaking about it is nothing less than a grab for the cheap political points, like kissing babies and hugging widows. |
