Yesterday, David and I both blogged about passing mortgage related bankruptcy reform in the stimulus package (see David's post and my post). The specific legislation we are seeking to include in the stimulus is, in the House, HR 225 from Representative Brad Miller and, in the Senate, S 61 from Dick Durbin. The legislation will allow bankruptcy judges to re-write mortgages according to current home values rather than inflated "bubble" values, thus allowing hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people to keep their homes over the next two years. It is good legislation that will help lots of real people, and start putting the country back on track toward a post-bubble economy.
Here is the state of play on this legislation:
- Senator Durbin is leading the charge to have the legislation included in the stimulus package. Considering his Senate position (ranking behind only Reid) and his close relationship with President-elect Obama, and that he is reportedly taking the inclusion of this legislation in the Senate as his personal mission, there is a good chance he can succeed. However, at this time, there is no definitive word that he has succeeded.
- In the House, Brad Miller is basically a one-man campaign for this bill. Representative Miller and his staff are basically the only people around and available for this campaign. He is out-resourced by the opponents of the bill, as the next bullet point discusses.
- In late 2007, Miller's bill was defeated by an alliance of Blue Dogs and the banking and realtor lobbies. At the behest of the National Association of Realtors, which gives more money to congressional candidates than any other PAC in the country, and which has 28 people working on the Hill full time as either lobbyists or researchers, sixteen Blue Dogs sent a letter to the House leadership asking them to spike the bill. The end result was that the bill was delayed, severely watered down, and ultimately deemed insufficient by the bill's sponsor, Brad Miller. There is every reason to expect a similar effort will be attempted to spike the bill this time around. And, as I already noted, the realtors and their Blue Dog lackeys have a lot more resources than Dick Durbin and Brad Miller, who are operating this campaign almost entirely by themselves.
To prevent this attempt to pass mortgage related bankruptcy reform, and thus a partial repeal of the odious Bankruptcy Bill of 2005, the strategy is simple: try to get as many Representatives and Senators supporting the inclusion of this legislation in the stimulus as possible. However, recognizing the relatively small size of our activist base here on Open Left, we can't just expect readers here to call their members of Congress, and the end result to be that enough members feel sufficiently pressured from their constituents to back the inclusion of this legislation in the stimulus. Instead, we have to be more selective in our targets, and choose carefully where we target our pressure.
So, my first idea is for Open Left readers to try and get all of our Better Democrats, for whom we raised money in 2008 and who are now members of Congress, to become sponsors of the bill and support its inclusion in the stimulus. Donna Edwards (MD-04) and Alan Grayson (FL-08) are already sponsors of H.R. 225, so they are spoken for. However, there are five members of the House and Senate from the Better Democrats page that have not yet sponsored either HR 225 (if they are House members) or S 61 (if they are Senators). Here are those four, along with the phone numbers of their Washington, D.C. offices:
The idea behind targeting these five is that, even though few of us are constituents of these five members of Congress, most of us can call as donors to one or more of these five members of Congress.
So, please, politely contact one of these five, and leave a message asking for to become a co-sponsor of either HR 225 (for House members) or S 61 (for Senators). Additionally, urge them to support the inclusion of this legislation in the stimulus package. If they ask for your constituent information and you are not a constituent, indicate that you were a donor to the 2008 campaign of that member of Congress.
Don't worry about it being after hours in D.C. If no one answers, leave a message-it will still be heard. Also, remember that we are entering a new era in D.C. where pressure like this can actually work. For example, Obama shelved his stimulus business tax cut proposal today, after Senators and grassroots alike raised their voice. Hopefully, we can get a few more sponsors for these bills as a result of this action. If it works, we can more onto more targets. |
