The Iowa House will not vote on a bill passed by the Senate that would have provided new protections against lawsuits for corporations that produce pesticides, Speaker Pat Grassley said on Thursday. Even though Republicans control 67 of the 100 seats in the House, there was not enough support for the bill to guarantee passage.
Grassley’s announcement effectively ends any chance SF 394 has of becoming law this year.
Bayer, the international chemical conglomerate, has been pushing the Iowa Legislature to pass the bill, in order to protect it from lawsuits over allegations that glyphosate, the active ingredient in its widely used spray RoundUp, causes cancer. Monsanto, which Bayer owns, is the only manufacturer of glyphosate in the United States. Bayer has also inundated the public with radio and online ads portraying glyphosate as safe and predicting dire consequences for America’s economy and food supply if the bill doesn’t become law.
Bayer has been pushing similar bills this year in Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wyoming. The Germany-based conglomerate is also lobbying Congress to create new federal protections against the lawsuits over glyphosate.
The Iowa Senate passed SF 394 last week, 25-21. Six Republicans joined Senate Democrats in voting against it. This is the second year in a row that the bill has narrowly passed the Senate, only to die due to inaction in the House.
Bayer insists RoundUp and glyphosate do not pose a cancer risk to those who use it or are exposed to it, but in 2020, the company paid over $10 billion to settle more than 95,000 lawsuits filed over RoundUp’s label not warning users about the risk of cancer. Most of the lawsuits were from farmers or members of their families, and others exposed to agricultural chemicals.
This week, a jury in Georgia sided with a plaintiff who sued Bayer claiming exposure to glyphosate had caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The jury awarded John Barnes $65 million in compensatory damages and found Bayer liable for an additional $2 billion for punitive damages. Bayer said it would appeal the verdict, and a company spokesperson noted that previous jury awards in RoundUp cases had been reduced by nearly 90 percent on appeal. (It is not unusual for large jury awards in civil trials to be substantially reduced by appellate judges.)
SF 394 would prevent a lawsuit such as the one in Georgia from being filed in Iowa. The bill declares “a label provides sufficient warning” to prevent a lawsuit, as long as that warning label has language based on the warnings the EPA has published on those chemicals.
The EPA has not labelled glyphosate as a cancer risk, but in 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer determined the chemical to be “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The product was created more than 50 years ago, and the EPA has traditionally moved slowly when it comes to regulating chemicals. In part that’s because of the long-term nature of science, but it’s also been because corporations lobby and sue to prevent being regulated.
However, even that slow progress seems likely to halt now.
Last month, the Trump administration announced it was slashing a large number of EPA employees, eliminating the agency’s scientific research department — the Office of Research and Development — and launching a massive rollback of major environmental regulations. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin also said he was changing the agency’s mission.
When the EPA was founded in 1970, its first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, explained the agency had “no obligation to promote agriculture or commerce; only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment.” Even presidents who were hostile to the EPA, such as Ronald Reagan or Trump during his first term (Trump repeatedly tried to eliminate most of the EPA’s budget, but was stopped by Congress), did little to directly attack the mission Ruckelshaus articulated. That changed on March 12, when Zeldin announced “the agency is committed to fulfilling President Trump’s promise to unleash American energy, lower costs for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, restore the rule of law, and give power back to states to make their own decisions.”
Speaking about the Bayer bill during an appearance on Iowa Press at the beginning of this year’s legislative session, Senate President Amy Sinclair, a Republican from Allerton, characterized lawsuits over RoundUp not warning users about cancer risks as a “money grab, and it’s a money grab on a business where all they are doing is following the letter of the federal law and that shouldn’t be allowed.”
Sinclair used the same language last year when she moved the same bill through the Senate, before it died in the House. Bayer used very similar language in its radio and online ads.
Speaking about the bill during a news conference on Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Janice Weiner called it an “immunity bill” and said lawmakers shouldn’t be “taking away Iowans’ right to sue in the event that they believe they have been harmed.”
Weiner, an Iowa City Democrat, warned “once you give one set of companies immunity, others are going to line up for it.”
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Pat Grassley sounded supportive of SF 394, but suggested some House Republicans were worried they might appear to be siding with chemical companies instead of people afflicted by cancer, because of “some of the narrative that’s been out.”
“I’m not sure that the bill is being totally digested from the perspective of just the labeling,” he said. “This product has been following all of the EPA-approved labeling, and so it’s more about a labeling bill, but I think some of the narrative that’s been out there maybe distracts from that, and I think the caucus is just in a position where they’re not sure they can support it at this point in time.”
A lobbyist for Bayer used very similar language when he testified in favor of the bill during a Senate subcommittee hearing in February.
“We ask, simply support a very simple bill, which is merely addressing the labeling requirements,” Brad Epperly said. Epperly dismissed the arguments that the bill provided any immunity for Bayer, or that it would prevent legitimate lawsuits.
SF 394 was strongly opposed by Iowa environmental groups and by a large number of Iowans who have been personally affected by cancer. In February, more than 150 people gathered in the rotunda of the State Capitol to remember family members who have died from cancer and to protest the bill.
“What our legislators should be doing is working on bills that lower the risk for Iowans rather than working on bills that help the chemical companies protect themselves,” Rich Gradoville told the people in the rotunda.
Two years ago, Gradoville, a retired teacher from Johnston, was diagnosed with bladder cancer. He said doctors were uncertain about what caused his cancer, but he had come to the Capitol to make sure Iowans kept the right to file lawsuits to hold pesticide manufacturers accountable in cases where their products are believed to have caused cancer.
Iowa has had the second-highest of rate of new cancers in the country for the last three years.
