We've all heard about Republican "tort reform" -- the effort to restrain large jury awards from the rich to poor people, lest the 12 commoners on the jury overturn the clear judgment of the divine marketplace that those people deserve to be poor. (They claim that the problem is that runaway juries are ruining the medical profession, but the facts there don't check, so it's really the threat to the moral order. It's got to be. They're just too respectable to be making policy out of naked greed -- right?).

Well, it seems that their leading minds have come up with a new and improved twist on the idea. Rather than going through the time-consuming, tedious procedures of the courts, they want to settle lawsuits quickly and efficiently in Congress. So, for instance, the recent attempts to absolve companies that supplied vaccines tainted with mercury and firearms manufacturers from liability for their actions. And now, they're trying to use the same approach to grant blanket immunity to restaurants whose unhealthy food is super-sizing their customers:

"The food industry is under attack and in the cross hairs of the same trial lawyers who went after big tobacco," said Representative Ric Keller, a Florida Republican who is the chief sponsor of the measure, which was adopted 276 to 139.

Because we all know what a tragedy those tobacco lawsuits were. They were clear proof that the courts don't understand that little people are little people because it's the divinely ordained order of society that they are not supposed to win...