For victims like Parker, the prospect of manufacturer immunity is an especially bitter pill.
The paralyzed Texas man, who had worked as a technician for a local utility, said he at least gained some financial security through litigation by extracting a settlement from Ford. Otherwise, he said, he and his wife "would have been living from hand to mouth."
He criticized the preemption clause, saying it was as if the industry had "this red phone and they just pick it up and it automatically dials NHTSA."
The immunity clause was unexpected, even to some in the industry.
"Whether this was some conspiracy or whether it was a pleasant surprise, I really don't know," said Barry Felrice, director of regulatory affairs with DaimlerChrysler in Washington.
Spokesmen for GM and Ford said that their companies had not lobbied for the lawsuit ban but that they supported it.
Bill Walsh, a former highway safety agency senior executive who worked on the rule before retiring in 2004, said the immunity language "was dropped in from out of the blue."
Preempting lawsuits, he said, was "different from how we normally operated ... in issuing regulations."
Rosen, the Transportation Department's general counsel, said this was not the first time the highway safety agency had tried to override state liability laws.
During the 1990s, the agency joined automakers in arguing that they shouldn't be sued for not installing air bags at a time when the agency allowed either air bags or automatic seat belts. In 2000, the Supreme Court agreed that such suits were preempted but said that compliance with a standard ordinarily "does not immunize a manufacturer."
Card, the White House chief of staff, and Glassman, the agency's chief counsel, declined to discuss how the roof-crush lawsuit preemption originated. Rosen said he did not want "to get into the specifics of who said what to whom.... As a legal matter, I'm obliged to protect the deliberative process."
The Rev. Lawrence Harris of Pittsgrove, N.J., sees the issue from the vantage point of his wheelchair. Had his claim been preempted after a devastating accident with his family in North Carolina, he might not be preaching on Sundays.
Harris, then 46, was wearing a seat belt but suffered a fractured spine in 1997 when his Ford Econoline van rolled over. Except for minimal movement in his hands, he was paralyzed from the chest down.
