In the summer of 2021, Wade Hanicker felt a pain under his shoulder blade. He was working in a stone shop near Tampa, cutting and polishing kitchen countertops. One day the pain wrapped around to his chest and he couldn't breathe. After a wrong diagnosis and a string of biopsies, doctors told him what it was: silicosis, a lung disease that scars the lungs and can kill.

He got it from the dust.

Hanicker told The New Republic that he has lost about half his income. His kids are three and five, and "might get five or 10 minutes of actually good playtime before I'm winded and have to go sit down." He gets chemotherapy shots twice a year to hold the disease back. "That's all they can do for me until my lungs are bad enough for transplant."

After his second biopsy he got a bill for about $100,000. So, like hundreds of other workers around the country, he sued the companies that make the stone.

His own senator wants to make sure people like him can't.

What Ashley Moody's bill does

Ashley Moody, the Republican senator from Florida, is the sponsor of S. 4792, which she introduced on June 16, 2026. Its official name is the "Protection of Lawful Commerce in Stone Slab Products Act." What it does is simple: it would shield the companies that make engineered stone slabs — the "quartz" countertops sold at big home stores — from most lawsuits by people who get sick from them.

The New Republic reports that the bill would give stone makers a shield from lawsuits like the one only gun makers and vaccine makers have today.

The bill also states, as fact, that these slabs are "not inherently dangerous" and "do not pose an inherent risk of injury to human beings."

That claim is hard to square with the record:

• California has counted 668 confirmed cases and 35 deaths from engineered-stone silicosis since its health department started tracking it in 2019. The state expects 3,000 new cases by 2030.
• California's workplace-safety board is moving to ban the material outright, The New York Times reported. Australia already banned it in 2024.
• The slabs are mostly crystalline silica — usually at least 90 percent — and they have to be cut, ground and polished before anyone can install them. Every one of those steps makes dust.

The industry's line is "the process, not the product" — that the shops are to blame, not the stone. But a Bloomberg investigation found that Cambria — the biggest American maker of engineered quartz — had measured silica dust above its own safety threshold "dozens of times," and in six cases above the legal limit set by the federal workplace-safety agency.

Who gave Moody money

On October 30, 2025, Marty Davis, Cambria's CEO, and a man who appears to be his son, also listed as a Cambria employee, each gave $12,000 to the Ashley Moody Victory Fund — $24,000 in all, Federal Election Commission records show. The fund passed $14,000 of it on to her campaign, Moody for Florida.

Davis is a billionaire and a big Trump donor. The New Republic reports that he and a few other American stone makers won Trump tariffs on imported quartz that hurt their competitors.

Then, one day after Moody's bill was introduced, she got a donation from one of the lobbyists that Cambria and three other stone sellers hired to push for it in Congress.

Cambria didn't answer The New Republic's questions. Neither did Moody's Senate office or her campaign. Her office never put out a press release announcing the bill, and her campaign website doesn't mention it.

A bill that wipes out cases already filed

Moody isn't the only Republican doing this. The House version, H.R. 5437, was written by California Rep. Tom McClintock and cleared the House Judiciary Committee in June. We've reported that McClintock's bill would throw out about 500 lawsuits already filed by workers with silicosis.

These are some of the most exposed workers in the country. The New Republic notes that many fabrication-shop workers get little safety training, may be afraid to seek care because of their immigration status or lack of insurance, and have a hard time getting workers' comp. No state outside California is tracking the disease among them — which lets Cambria's lawyer tell Congress there are "only a handful of silicosis cases in the other 49" states, as NPR reported.

For a sick worker, a lawsuit is often the only way left to pay the bills. Moody's bill would close that door.

Even her own voters see it

Hanicker is a Republican. He still supports Trump. But after learning Moody sponsored this bill, he told The New Republic he's "up in the air" about voting for her.

"I don't support her on how she's supporting this bill," he said. "She was the main sponsor on that. I can't stand that."

He also had a simple explanation for why politicians push the idea that the stone is safe: "It's money in their pockets. Money for their campaign. It's sad to see that they're willing to put people's lives in danger."

The bottom line

Ashley Moody is the sponsor of a bill that would block most lawsuits against the makers of engineered-stone countertops, and it declares the stone "not inherently dangerous" while California counts 668 confirmed cases of silicosis and 35 deaths from it. The family of the CEO of Cambria, America's biggest maker of that stone, gave her victory fund $24,000 months before she introduced it, and a lobbyist for Cambria and three other stone sellers gave her money the day after. Workers like Wade Hanicker in her own state would lose their way to get paid for a disease that may cost them their lungs.

Source

Silicosis Kills Workers. Ashley Moody Just Worries About the Lawsuits. — Kate Aronoff, The New Republic, October 23, 2026