WASHINGTON, D.C. — The plaintiffs’ bar demonstrated its disproportionate clout on Capitol Hill a few days ago when it persuaded energy bill conferees to jettison a rule protecting producers of an EPA-sanctioned fuel additive against frivolous lawsuits.

A handful of wealthy personal injury lawyers wants to sue large oil companies with deep pockets because trace amounts of the mileage-enhancing additive MTBE had leaked from storage tanks into water supplies around the country — primarily in New York and California.

Although MTBE is not considered carcinogenic in humans and no illnesses have been reported from the leaks, the tort lawyers saw the additive as a new revenue stream worth billions of dollars — a la the asbestos and tobacco bonanza of recent decades.

The EPA hailed MTBE, an oxygenate which makes gasoline burn cleaner, when it was seeking an antidote for smog-shrouded urban areas like Los Angeles and New York City in the early 1990s. The Sierra Club joined the chorus, praising MTBE as one of its top ten environmentally friendly products.

Bear in mind, that MTBE is a safe and effective product in your car’s gas tank; it only becomes a headache when it’s placed in old, porous storage tanks at local service stations and distributors.

While the leaks are a nuisance, they are neither life-threatening nor widespread — EPA estimates that just 16 of nearly 4,000 public water systems are a problem and some 95 percent already are cleaned up or in the process of being decontaminated.

And Robert Hirsch of the U.S. Geological Survey notes that MTBE leaks primarily are a problem of taste and odor and “almost always below levels of concern from a public health standpoint.”

So why did the House-Senate energy conferees decide to scrap the liability waiver — especially when it only applied to “product defect” lawsuits and still left defendants liable for the larger MTBE spills that oozed into water systems?

The answer can be found in Federal Election Commission files that show personal injury lawyers mail tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to federal candidates each election cycle — most of them incumbent senators.

When Congress has to choose between companies obeying government orders and fat-cat trial lawyers with dollar signs hanging in their eyes, the winners are obvious.

  Congress, for much the same reasons, also has repeatedly failed to rein in the lawyers’ asbestos scam. Dozens of companies have been bankrupted, many of which never used asbestos. More than 60 percent of a federally created, asbestos trust fund has gone to personal injury lawyers and their “expert” witness. Much of the rest went to workers who weren’t actually suffering from asbestos exposure — in effect, short-changing workers with genuine asbestos-related illnesses.

Tort lawyers specialize in attacking companies that make desirable products in good faith. Teflon is one of their latest targets. After decades of successful use in a multitude of products, the plaintiffs’ lawyers are now fanning fears that Teflon is hazardous even though tests show that Teflon-enhanced products, including coated frying pans and Gore-tex clothing are perfectly safe.

The British, from whom we got our tort law model, have built a low-cost safeguard into their legal system that reins in such speculative and rapacious lawyers —without jeopardizing the rights of people who have actually suffered wrongs. In Britain, a plaintiff who sues and loses generally is ordered to pay the defendant’s court costs.

Similar reforms to our out-of-control civil justice system would unclog our courts and stimulate full-throttle job creation, but as long as personal injury lawyers hold sway on Capitol Hill the chances of passage appear to be stuck on absolute zero.

ARE WE KIDDING? TRIAL LAWYERS’ INFLUENCE HAS BEEN STRICTLY BUSH LEAGUE SINCE 2001

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Imagine a country where big business virtually owns the White House, Congress, and majority of federal court benches.

In a social environment that would even have shocked Charles Dickens in 19th century London, unscrupulous businesses have a free pass to put workers in danger, pollute the environment at will, place patients at risk by manufacturing risky pharmaceuticals, and push unsafe products on unwary consumers.

Well, imagine no more. Welcome to George W. Bush's vision of "anything goes," big business-oriented America.

This did not occur because personal injury lawyers have too much influence on Capitol Hill. To the contrary, the fact that Capitol Hill has become a coin-operated law making domain for big business interests shows just how little influence trial lawyers have these days in the halls of Congress.

The first bill President Bush signed this year was the Class Action Fairness Act — manna from heaven for corporations.

In a slap at the power of state attorneys general to protect poorer citizens from corporate abuse, the new law allows defendants to transfer any multi-state class action suit in excess of two-million dollars — what President Bush called "junk lawsuits" — from state to federal court jurisdiction.

To no avail, more than 80 consumer, civil rights, environmental, and senior citizen rights groups, in addition to the American Trial Lawyers' Association, opposed the legislation.

The alleged "all powerful" trial lawyers did not have enough power to muster more than 26 "No" votes in the Senate (all Democrats) and 149 nays in the House of Representatives (147 Democrats, one Republican, and one Independent).

As a result of the bankruptcy bill passed this year by Congress and signed by President Bush last April, woe be it to those who do have to declare personal bankruptcy because of an injury suffered on the job or the untimely death of a family breadwinner.

If injured people default on medical bill payments, a federal judge will force them into Chapter 13 rather than Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. That means the injured parties will be forced into a stringent, and possibly lifetime, repayment schedule. Any effort to sue for the injury can now be detoured into an over-burdened federal court system where pro-business judges increasingly hold sway.

Was Congress beholden to the trial lawyers on the personal bankruptcy bill? It

would not seem so since the bill passed in the Senate 74-25 and the House 302-126.

The trial lawyers' campaign donations went overwhelmingly to the Senators and Representatives who opposed the legislation. Not exactly a sign of political clout.

The next item on the Republican pro-business agenda is medical malpractice lawsuit reform. According to the Center for Justice and Democracy, only two percent of people who are injured sue for compensation. But the Republicans and their corporate allies invented a medical malpractice strawman, featuring a few isolated cases, to create the perception of massive jury awards driving up the price of medical care.

Under the proposed medical malpractice bill, a cap of $250,000, a little more than

half of President Bush's annual salary, would be imposed on punitive damages arising from medical malpractice. That amounts to a windfall for doctors, hospital conglomerates, and HMOs. With a majority of Congress and the White House pushing for the bill, trial lawyers are finding their attempts to kill the legislation a tough but not overwhelming battle.

Congress is not the domain of an alliance of unions, consumer groups, and trial lawyers, as Republicans allege, but for the good of the American people, it ought to be.