Tobacco.org

• WAXMAN BEATS BIG TOBACCO.  

This weekend I read Waxman's forthcoming legislative memoir (a burgeoning and exciting genre), written with the assistance of Atlantic reporter Joshua Green, The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works. It's a very useful primer on congress and the long battles Waxman has led on behalf of a variety of key progressive causes. You also learn, strangely enough, that Waxman was one of the first members of congress to undertake the now common practice of donating to his colleagues' campaign funds in an effort to keep around representatives he saw as effective and curry favor. For all Waxman's idealism, you can't say he isn't savvy.

Waxman began his attempts to regulate tobacco in the early 1980s, with oversight hearings featuring Captain Kangaroo, and continued his work through then-Representative Dick Durbin's controversial 1987 amendment to ban smoking on airplane flights shorter than two hours, Waxman's own groundbreaking 1994 hearings where tobacco executives lied under oath, Newt Gingrich's torpedoing of a 1998 tobacco regulation compromise, and finally President Bush's threat to veto this bill last July that left it hanging...until today.

It says something about Waxman's tenacity and how political change comes about in the face of entrenched interests that it has taken nearly thirty years to achieve federal regulation

Jump to full article »