The media battle over preemption has begun.

In what is clearly an organized campaign by the political and public relations arms of the Chamber of Commerce and other "tort reform" sponsors, today we are treated in the Wall Street Journal to another article designed to alarm the tort reform lobby and business that trial lawyers have decided to fight back. The tone of this article is that after 7 years of being a punching bag for the Bush Administration and the tort reform lobby that trial lawyers are girding up to fight the pending Wyeth case before  the Supreme Court, on the assumption the court will find for Wyeth and uphold the concept of federal preemption and it's ability to strangle most pharmaceutical mass torts.

You can read the Wall Street Journal article on preemption by clicking here.

At what point in time exactly did the trial lawyers ever stop fighting against tort reform?

Obviously the tort reform movement realizes that they have over played their hand in the courts and that while they may have packed the court with enough votes to win a preemption ruling, that the House and Senate aren't going to tolerate this massive taking of citizens rights to see compensation for injury. The fact is that both a President Obama or a President McCain would likely sign legislation over turning any preemption ruling and this fact has caused the tort reform movement to crank up the PR machine and start to raise cash. The goal, as the WSJ article points out is to, as usual, dramatically outspend the big bad lawyer lobby by about a factor of 4-1 in an effort to target key house and senate races to promote representatives that would be sympathetic to this wholesale taking of citizens rights and access to the courts.

I'm sure this is only the beginning of the next scare tactic by the tort reform groups and it is going to take a concerted effort on the part of writers, commentators and others to refute the lies that are about to pour out of the press machine and shadow organizations financed by the Chamber and others in the tort reform lobby.

Watch the Wyeth case closely, but watch the election effort of the tort reform movement even more closely. They know they are vulnerable on this one and that they may have over reached now that the Bush years are drawing to a close and the PR and press campaign in going to relentless start hammering how "the trial lawyers" are raising massive sums to "undo" what the Supreme Court settled. Do your research, look up the facts of the issue and decide for yourselves where the truth lies. The Legal Broadcast Network will be following this story closely.