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• What's Tobacco's Future in the Bush Era? 

While the rest of the world was focused on election lawsuits in Florida, tobacco industry lawyers were following not only that litigation but also other suits in Florida courts that could cause them serious harm.

Lawyers on both sides of the tobacco wars have long assumed that, if elected, George W. Bush would put an end to the Clinton administration's multi-front assault on Big Tobacco, including a pending racketeering lawsuit, so industry lawyers had a huge stake in the election outcome.

Indeed, President Bush's ascendency may signal the end of a period in which lawsuits can threaten to put tobacco companies out of business. But for now, two historic lawsuits are proceeding against the industry in Florida, long one of the most important battlegrounds of the tobacco war. Industry lawyers must also deal with other key litigation elsewhere. This includes recent mistrials in major cases in West Virginia and Brooklyn, N.Y., and a defense verdict in a second Brooklyn case.

The Justice Department suit, though, is still the big one. . .

"It would be a big-government travesty at its biggest," Ashcroft said at a press conference, "to use the tragedy of tobacco as a smoke screen to cover the expansion of the nanny state."

Many foes of Big Tobacco are left debating whether the Bush administration will pull the plug on the federal lawsuit or just choke off the money needed to pursue it. . .

John F. Banzhaf III, a professor at George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., envisions a third, more subtle threat. The government may simply settle the case on terms favorable to the industry, declare a false victory and walk away, he says. A deal might even include presidential backing for legislation giving the industry the legal immunity it tried desperately to win in a failed global settlement with state attorneys general and private lawyers in 1997.

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