The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update

Issues in the News

1. CONSUMER

CEI launches a campaign to protest substandard appliances resulting from energy efficiency mandates.

CEI Expert Available to Comment: General Counsel Sam Kazman on the results of the new efficiency rules:

“If more efficient appliances are so good, you don’t need laws to force consumers to buy them. Those pushing for efficiency mandates may think this is a pure, unsullied cause, but for consumers it’s dirty politics, soiling our democracy and our laundry.”

2. BUSINESS

The Securities and Exchange Commission considers relaxing regulations on corporate business practices.

CEI Expert Available to Comment: Center for Entrepreneurship Director John Berlau on how some Democrats are reconsidering the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting rules:

“Chuck Schumer also criticized the excesses of the law in a Wall Street Journal op-ed he co-wrote a few days before Election 2006. Schumer and New York City’s liberal Republican mayor Michael Bloomberg charged that “auditing expenses for companies doing business in the U.S. have grown far beyond anything Congress had anticipated” and that “there appears to be a worrisome trend of corporate leaders focusing inordinate time on compliance minutiae rather than innovative strategies for growth.”

3. LEGAL

President Bush issues an executive order banning federal agencies from hiring trial lawyers on a contingency fee.

CEI Expert Available to Comment: Special Projects Counsel Hans Bader on the abuse of the contingency system:

“…contingency-fee arrangements are often used by government officials to transfer huge amounts of money to trial lawyers for bringing lawsuits that require little skill or risk. The trial lawyers are often campaign contributors to the government official. For example, in New York State, trial lawyers who were major political donors received $625 million for bringing New York State’s copycat lawsuit against the tobacco companies. They received this obscene sum even though they were hired by the state’s attorney general only after the tobacco companies were already on the verge of capitulation, and had already agreed to pay billions of dollars to two other states.”

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