Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 107th Congress, First Session, Volume 147, Part 10 Page: 13,351
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CONGRESSIONAL RECORD -SENATE
credit cards and the junk mail we get
is part of the cause that we have people
in bankruptcy.
It also creates new protections for
patients when hospitals and nursing
homes declare bankruptcy. The bill
makes permanent chapter 12 bank-
ruptcy for family farmers and lessens
the capital gains tax burden on finan-
cially strapped farmers who declare
bankruptcy. This is a bill that the Sen-
ate passed with this overwhelming
margin, which my colleagues probably
get tired of my mentioning so many
times, but it was 83-15. So I think it is
just common sense. Maybe common
sense doesn't rule around this institu-
tion enough, but it is common sense
that we move on to the next step. I
urge my colleagues to vote in support
of the cloture and in support of the
Leahy-Hatch-Grassley substitute
amendment.
I yield the floor, and since there are
no other Members present, I suggest
the absence of a quorum and that it be
charged to Senator WELLSTONE. I have
been advised by staff that that is the
proper thing to do.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tem-
pore. Without objection, it is so or-
dered.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to
call the roll.
Mr. WELLSTONE. Madam President,
I ask unanimous consent the order for
the quorum call be dispensed with.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tem-
pore. Without objection, it is so or-
dered.
Mr. WELLSTONE. Madam President,
my understanding is that there may be
a number of other Senators who are
coming to the floor to speak in opposi-
tion to the bankruptcy bill. Senator
DURBIN may try to come down. So Sen-
ator DURBIN and others know, when
they come I will simply break my re-
marks and others can speak at their
convenience.
At the beginning of last week, the
majority leader moved to proceed to
the bill and I objected. Then we had a
cloture vote on the motion to proceed.
In the time I had, I implored, called
upon, begged the Senate to step back
from the brink and to decline to go to
conference with the House on this so-
called bankruptcy reform. I believe we
would be making a grave mistake.
I am trying to figure out a way not
to repeat all the arguments I made last
week. I will simply say I think this is
a measure we are going to deeply re-
gret. There are a lot of people-Eliza-
beth Warren comes to mind, law pro-
fessor at Harvard- who have done some
very important scholarship at Harvard
in this area. I don't know that I can
think of a single law professor who has
argued in favor of this bill. Maybe
there is someone somewhere. The opin-
ion of the scholars in the field, the
opinion of people who work in the field,is almost unanimous that this is a
huge mistake.
We need to understand that bank-
ruptcy is something most families do
not think they will ever need. They do
not think they will ever need to file for
bankruptcy. But it is really a safety
net, not just for low-income families
but for middle-income families as well.
Fifty percent of the people who file
for bankruptcy in our country today do
it because of a medical bill. You have a
double whammy. It is not just the situ-
ation where you have the expense of
the medical bills but also it may be
that, because of the illness or injury,
you yourself are not able to work so
you are hit both ways, or it might be
your child's medical bill, but also you
may not be able to bring in the income
because you are not able to go to work
because you need to be at home taking
care of your child. That is 50 percent of
the people. We are not talking about
deadbeats.
Frankly, most of the rest of the cases
can be explained-it should not sur-
prise anybody-by loss of job or di-
vorce. These are the major explanatory
variables why people file for bank-
ruptcy, file for chapter 7. The irony of
it-and I tried to make this argument
last week as well-is that for a long
time my colleagues were facing a prob-
lem that did not exist; that is to say,
they were talking about all the abuse
and all the ways in which people were
gaming the system in American bank-
ruptcy, but they came out with a
record that said that is 3 percent of the
debt. So let's come out with legislation
that deals with the 3 percent, but let's
not have legislation where people who
find themselves in terrible economic
circumstances no longer are able to re-
build their lives, all because of a small
number of people who abuse the sys-
tem.
Moreover, actually the bankruptcies
were going down. So quite to the con-
trary of the claim we had this rash of
bankruptcies and people no longer felt
any stigma or shame and people were
no longer responsible, none of it really
held up very well if you closely exam-
ined the arguments.
Now what we have, in case anybody
has not noticed, is an economy that is
leveling off with a turn downward. It is
not the boom economy we saw while
the Presiding Officer's husband, Presi-
dent Clinton, was President of the
United States of America. It is a dif-
ferent economy now. There are going
to be more people who will lose their
jobs and more people who will be faced
with these difficult economic cir-
cumstances through no fault of their
own. We are going to make it well nigh
impossible for them to rebuild their
lives.
Madam President, I argued last week
that we are hardly talking about dead-
beats. This bill assumes people who file
for chapter 7 are deadbeats and theyare not. The means test aside, there
are 15 provisions in the House and Sen-
ate-passed bills that will affect all
debtors, regardless of their income-15
provisions. The means test will not
protect them. The safe harbor will not
protect them. These provisions are
going to make bankruptcy relief more
complicated, more expensive, and
therefore harder to achieve for debt-
ors-again, regardless of income. That
means they will also fall the hardest,
in terms of the people who will be most
affected by this legislation, on low- and
moderate-income debtors.
The irony is that those who advocate
for this bill justify it by arguing that
we need to go after the wealthy dead-
beats. But if the cost of filing for bank-
ruptcy doubles, which is exactly what
it does in this bill, who gets hurt the
most? A middle-income family who had
to save for 6 months, under current
law, to pay for an attorney and for fil-
ing fees, or a multimillionaire like the
ones the proponents cite in this state-
ment? It just makes no sense.
There will be no problem for million-
aires who are gaming the system. They
are not the people who get hurt by this
legislation. This legislation is the most
harsh on the most vulnerable.
I also argued and tried to make the
case that this couldn't be a worse time
to do this in terms of where the econ-
omy is headed.
So while the bill would be terrible for
consumers and for regular working-
class families even in the best of times,
its effects will be all the more dev-
astating now that we have a weakening
economy.
Colleagues, you are going to regret
this.
It boggles the mind that at a time
when Americans are most economi-
cally vulnerable and when they are
most in need for protection from finan-
cial disaster we would eviscerate the
major fiscal safety net in our society
for the middle class. It is the height of
insanity that we would be contem-
plating doing what we are doing right
now given what is happening to this
economy.
Colleagues, I couldn't support this
legislation in the best of times. Even in
the sunniest of economic cir-
cumstances, there are many families
who are down on their luck and who
are sent to the sidelines. Bankruptcy
relief lets these families rebuild their
lives again. It is a little bit like "there
but for the grace of God go I."
I think Time magazine had a series
which was just a blistering attack on
this bill. They did it in two ways. They
did it, first of all, by talking about
what this legislation means in times-
which quite often on the floor of the
Senate we don't make those connec-
tions as we should--to a lot of these
families and what happened to these
families because of their economic cir-
cumstances. They did not ask thatJuly 17, 2001
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United States. Congress. Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 107th Congress, First Session, Volume 147, Part 10, book, July 2001; Washington D.C.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1727835/m1/3/?q=food+rule+for+unt+students: accessed June 11, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.