Opinion: GOP Objections to the Food Safety Bill Are Hard to Swallow

(Dec. 7) -- Two weeks ago -- the day my wife and I would have packed to visit our families for Thanksgiving -- I woke to feel a wave of pain sweep across my stomach. I broke out in a cold sweat, and lay trembling on the bed until the cramp subsided.

Then the next one came. And the next.

"Let's go to the hospital," my wife said.

I'm embarrassed. I said no. I didn't want to make a fuss. I lay there in agony for hours before giving in -- and becoming one of the 325,000 Americans hospitalized every year for that wonderful abstraction: "food-borne illness."

That means eating food loaded with billions of bacteria that breed in your gut -- shutting it down until without help you could die.

I also became someone with a rooting interest in the food safety bill that passed the Senate Nov. 30. Or seemed to, until a technical error allowed opponents of the bill led by Oklahoma's Republican senator, Tom Coburn -- a doctor! -- yet another chance to bring it down.

This weekend Senate and House leaders promised to negotiate a way to restore the coalition that passed it. They should. The bill is imperfect but good. For every million pounds of food Americans eat, we inspect one. One!

But I've worked on the Hill and know Coburn's views. His arguments were no surprise: complaints about the "250 pages of new legislation" to deceive people who have never seen how few words those pages carry; or the "private enforcement" argument -- which means trusting those who caused the problem to fix it on their own.

Particularly hard to -- might I say -- swallow is Coburn's objection to the bill's cost. Its total price tag is about equal to what it will cost to keep the Bush tax cuts for the rich in place for a single week.

I don't think it's possible to convince Coburn how infuriating his chintziness and bland reassurances about the effectiveness of "private" sector enforcement sound to someone who spent a week watching nurses pump one antibiotic after another into an IV, trying to get his rampaging colitis under control.

But 5,000 Americans a year die from these illnesses. In seven years that would wipe out as many people as live in Muskogee, Coburn's birthplace. And those 325,000 who wind up hospitalized? Almost the population of Tulsa. It's hard to believe a Coburn press release would reassure Oklahoma voters if everyone in Tulsa had a hospital stay like mine.

So I hope the Senate handles last week's monkey wrench. Why do it now? Because skilled tacticians like Coburn will have many ways to damage food safety legislation in the next session of Congress: writing in exemptions for various food makers who can make us sick, or blocking the sensible proposals that manufacturers should pay for keeping products safe -- just as drugmakers now pony up money for drug safety.

Most important, they'll decide not just what's appropriated but what gets spent. The bill authorizes money for hiring thousands of new inspectors. But putting that in a bill is like putting "renovate kitchen" on your to-do list. You still have to want it, hire a contractor and write a check.

In the next Congress, committee chairs controlling money for food safety won't believe in it. Watch to see how many inspectors they actually let FDA hire.

But we won't get to wonder about these things unless the Senate repasses the bill, something, in fairness, a story about my hospital experience isn't enough to justify. Today, though, I remembered another experience I once had that's more telling -- especially when it comes to the Coburn idea of letting bad guys police themselves.

It was 1970. I was teaching English at a community college. My students worked at a big household-name food processing plant nearby. They would give speeches about their jobs.

One student described how she'd stand by a conveyor belt shooing rats and mice off it as it sent tomatoes in to be ground up for ketchup. She said she got most of them.

Another told me about working in the big rail cars bringing soup-mix ingredients to the plant. You read that right. He worked in the cars. He'd jump into the soup mix, muddy boots and all, and slosh around, using a broom to shove the mix along till the car was empty.

I remember thinking those stories were funny. Now I think: That kind of company should police itself?

The people who dreamed up that system had four decades to fix things.

A thousand Americans enter hospitals every day to discover they haven't. I'm now one. I was lucky enough to get great care last week. But there's a doctor in the Senate who should be taken off the case.

Bob Lehrman, former chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore, is author of "The Political Speechwriter's Companion" (CQ Press 2009) and four novels, teaches speechwriting at American University and co-runs the blog PunditWire.