WASHINGTON – U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, today made the following statement after the conference committee for H.R. 4040, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, reached agreement on the last remaining issues:

"One of the roles of government is to get between kids and the sorts of hazards that are well beyond parents who aren’t engineers and chemists with laboratories at their disposal. This reauthorization gives the CPSC more teeth and a deeper bite, and makes it dramatically more certain that toys aren’t tested for safety by kids on the living room floor before they’re tested in a lab by experts. We also reached a sensible compromise on the use of phthalates that every member of the conference committee can support. Nobody wants our kids to be the guinea pigs in a quest for better living through chemistry, but it’s also imperative that we use unbiased, confirmable science to sort out the real dangers from the mythical ones.

"This bill also makes toy safety a national concern instead of relying on the growing conglomeration of local and state rules that threatened to leave everybody confused. Finally, the legislation demonstrates that normal congressional process works awfully well when it's allowed to, and that all the painful work of holding hearings, markups and conference committee meetings is more likely to produce a good outcome than the my-way-or-the-highway process that occasionally tempts lawmakers."