Yesterday, at the urging of lobbyists for the plaintiffs bar, President Obama ordered federal agencies to review a decade’s worth of regulations, to strip out "preemption" language that set a single, national regulatory standard for myriad consumer products. According to a report in BusinessWeek, the President's decision will "rewrite" the legal rules for everything from "pharmaceuticals to …. food sweeteners." 'Preemption' is the constitutional principle that when federal and state laws collide, the federal laws trump, or "preempt," the state laws. Practically speaking, preemption enables companies to do business across state lines without being burdened by 50 conflicting sets of rules and regulations.

So why are the trial lawyers lobbying so aggressively to get the Obama Administration to abandon agencies' analyses that their regulations preempt state laws? Because when a federal rule "preempts" conflicting state rules, it often means that trial lawyers can't sue businesses whose products conform to federal standards. In other words, the trial lawyers are lobbying for their very own federal bailout.

But the President can't unilaterally declare that certain federal statutes or regulations don't preempt conflicting state laws. Preemption is not simply a policy choice – it's a constitutional principle. Agencies have included preemption language in regulations because solid evidence on the record proves that the federal law in fact trumps state laws. The Chamber plans to closely monitor the federal agencies to make sure that any regulatory changes comply with the law and conform with the constitutional principle of preemption.