Bush hits 'frivolous lawsuits'

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President Bush said yesterday he is "passionate" about protecting the business community from "frivolous lawsuits" and will work hard to get legal reform through Congress, including making the issue a topic of his State of the Union address next month.

Mr. Bush was the star attraction of a two-day economic summit filled with speakers who praised the president's first-term economic record and touted his new, aggressive agenda of tort reform, restructuring Social Security and making permanent the tax cuts he pushed through Congress in the last four years.

Mr. Bush chose to sit in on the panel discussing liability reform, a favorite topic of his stretching from his days as governor of Texas in the 1990s through his re-election campaign this year.

"I told you then and I'm going to tell you again: This is a priority issue for not only me, but for a lot of people in the Senate," Mr. Bush said, predicting an easy road in the House for restrictions on class-action suits against businesses and doctors, but a struggle in the Senate.

"It is being blocked by a few in the United States Senate, and the trial bar has made this the number one issue for them," he said. "We cannot have the legal system to be a legal lottery.

"We want the legal system to be fair and balanced so people can get good health care, so small businesses can afford to stay in business, so we don't hear these horrible stories about someone drug through this class-action meat grinder that has caused [many] to go out of business," the president said to applause from his hand-picked panel.

Democrats in Congress called the summit all but pointless because Mr. Bush was not likely to hear any opinions that didn't match his own.

"Unfortunately, day one of the administration's 'economic summit' seems little more than a collection of like-minded individuals who are intent on pushing a preordained partisan agenda rather than conducting an open, honest dialogue on issues that require broad bipartisan support," said House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat.

South Carolina Rep. John M. Spratt Jr., ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said he wished the summit was like the "real conference" President Clinton convened with Republicans and Democrats alike in 1997.

"That was a genuine bipartisan effort," Mr. Spratt said. "There has been no effort by this administration to reach out to involve us in the process. We haven't even had an invitation to a conference like this, much less to a real working conference where there is a true exchange of ideas and give and take and bargaining. It's simply missing, and there's no indication that there's going to be anything like that this year."