The U.S. Senate moves this morning toward a procedural vote that could diminish the hopes of U.S. Sen. Richard Burr to stop tobacco regulation by the Food and Drug Administration.
Burr, a Winston-Salem Republican, hails from the hometown of R.J. Reynolds, producer of Camels and the nation’s second-largest tobacco manufacturing company, Barb Barrett reports.
He has vowed to do anything possibly to prevent passage of S.B. 982, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act.
Burr's threat has been widely interpreted as including a pledge to filibuster the bill — engaging in an endless debate or launching a series of procedural motions that can only be cut off by a 60-vote margin in the Senate.
That cloture vote is scheduled for 11 a.m. today.
More after the jump.
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The bill Burr opposes, by U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, would allow the FDA to regulate tobacco and impose a host of advertising restrictions on tobacco products. It also would prohibit candy-type tobacco products, which could mean the end of a Camels smokeless tobacco product that resembles a lozenge.
Burr and fellow Sen. Kay Hagan, a Democrat, have introduced their own bill to create a different agency to regulate tobacco. Their bill does not include many of the restrictions found in the Kennedy bill, and it failed in a Senate committee vote.
Hagan, too, opposes the Kennedy bill. She is from Greensboro, next door to R.J. Reynolds. She and Burr argue the Kennedy bill would hurt manufacturing jobs and tobacco farmers in North Carolina, the nation’s largest tobacco-producing state.
Burr could have a hard time trying to stop the Kennedy bill, which 56 co-sponsors, including several Republicans.
Although both Kennedy and Sen. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat, are out sick and unlikely to attend the vote, observers expect the bill to get the 60 votes it needs for cloture — a procedural vote to limit debate on the bill.
That could still leave much of the week for Burr and Hagan to offer amendments, procedural votes and other methods for running out debate on the bill. Eventually, though, the bill is expected to pass.
The House passed its own version of the bill earlier this spring, and President Barack Obama is expected to sign it into law.
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