Being there when it's important

u u u

You may have missed all of this. The vote on May 7 didn’t get much attention. There was a story back on page A20 of the New York Times that didn’t mention the absent presidential candidates. But David Lightman of The Hartford Courant reported the next day that the no-show candidates and the power of the pharmaceutical lobby contributed to the death of the drug measure.

The importation amendment was part of a larger bill that provides for a major overhaul of the regulatory powers of the Food and Drug Administration, legislation considered so important that some supporters of importing drugs, like Sen. Edward Kennedy, voted against the import amendment. Kennedy feared it would inspire a presidential veto that would kill the entire bill, which later passed without the drug amendment and the drug industry’s opposition.

u u u

But the missed votes became an issue because of the stature of the absent senators. Dodd’s people quickly tried to explain away his absence by saying the senator, who was in "private meetings" when the vote was cast, would have voted for the amendment but they were told his vote would have had no impact on the 49-40 defeat of the measure.

Although that’s technically true, one of the measure’s sponsors, Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine, said if Obama, Dodd, Biden and McCain had voted, they might have influenced others to join them. Maybe, maybe not, but the four, whose alleged leadership skills have been celebrated in story and song by their followers, could have been on hand to try.

Vice President Cheney went to the trouble of standing by just in case the Senate vote had ended in a tie. If it had, he could have broken the tie and thereby blocked the sale of cheaper drugs to the cheers of the administration’s very close friends in the pharmaceutical industry.

The measure died when Republican Thad Cochran added a provision calling for the secretary of health and human services to certify the safety of any imported drug. Sen. Byron Dorgan, the amendment’s co-sponsor with Snowe, said the Cochran provision was fatal to the amendment because there are not sufficient resources to certify there are no risks with any new drug just as "he couldn’t certify there is no risk with spinach coming from Mexico."

u u u

Mexican spinach, however, lacks the lobbying clout of the American pharmaceutical industry, which has long tried to scare the public and the Congress into believing that imported drugs are unsafe and has contributed heavily to mostly Republican lawmakers in furtherance of that position.

But not only Republicans. Our own Joe Lieberman, now an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, was a Democratic senator when the drug industry donated $250,000 to his re-election in 2006 and he received a similar amount from lobbyists for all interests, including many pharmaceutical companies. His wife, Hadassah, was employed by an industry lobbyist.

Lieberman, a supporter of easing drug importation laws back when he was seeking Democratic primary support, voted with the 49 senators who doomed the importation measure. A Lieberman spokesman claimed "his vote was entirely based on his concern for drug safety." The industry’s generous contributions, he said, "have absolutely nothing to do with the senator’s position."

Senators would never dream of suggesting their votes can be bought but Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who regularly runs chartered buses to Canada so his elderly constituents can buy inexpensive drugs there, almost did. He told Lightman the question in the debate over drugs was whether "the Congress of the United States has the courage to stand up to the greediest, most powerful special interests in this country."

Some do stand up, some do not and a few are just absent.