Guest Poster Pasquino reads a story in the Times about a grout-sealant that is supposed to evaporate harmlessly, but sometimes sends people to the hospital instead. He remembers back to stories about Justice Samuel Alito’s belief that consumer safety laws are constitutionally suspect, and others about Bushy hostility to regulation generally, and he’s off to the laissez-faire races:
The Bush policy on dangerous products is this: If it makes you sick or kills you you have the option of not buying it. Why did you buy it in the first place if it was going to kill you? It’s a trick question.
If the product makes you deathly ill why did you buy it? Why did you buy that toy for your grandchild? Can’t you keep your two year-old from sucking on a toy car? If a freeway bridge collapsed, why were you driving on it? This makes sense to the president and his favorite governor. No one forced that man to regrout his bathroom. Did the manufacturer put a gun to his head? Did Home Depot? Of course not, they’re the friendliest people in the world.
Safe toys? Safe treatments? Safe home repair products? “Where” (Samuel Alito asks) “does the Constitution say anything about safe products?”
Safety is up to the individual. If government protects us we are less free. If a product kills a member of your family you have every right as an American not to buy it again. Just stay away from it next time, that’ll teach them.
Pasquino is the nom de plume of Minneapolis writer Eric Hanson
I was aware Alito was an ideologue on issues like privacy rights but I hadn’t heard that he is the reincarnation of George Sutherland, one of the 4 right wing bete noirs of the 1930’s Supreme Court. It would be just like him then to declare the caveat emptor (buyer beware) was enshrined in the Constitution and it was there to make us free. There is a similar logic in freedom of contract which the Supreme Court construed to exist in the Constitution to prevent employees from organizing in unions to bargain collectively. Right to contract for a job, yes. Right to collectively bargain, no. So, extending that logic to mass produced consumer products, you could say that you have a right to buy products but no right along with other consumer to join as citizens to get the legislature to make a law that it was unlawful to sell unsafe products.
By this logic, you can protect your freedom by say, avoiding eating food, to avoid being sickened by mass produced prepared foods. You could say, live in the woods in a homemade tree house to avoid living in a mass produced house; or not drive a car, and not buy mass produced clothes and make your own. You could in short cut yourself off from society and live like the Unabomber. (except not send bombs).
So where in the Constitution does it say Congress or a state legislature cannot enact consumer safety laws? Where does it say a subject has to be in the Constitution to be able to pass a law on it? Most of the laws on the books today are on subjects never mentioned in the Constitution. I find it hard to believe a modern jurist would make such stupid comments. In fact, any jurist who would make such claims would have to be a complete idiot.