Chuck Grassley

Mr. GRASSLEY

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President I ask unanimous consent that the Senate Committee on Finance be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 2, 2000 at 10:00 a.m. to hear testimony regarding the status of Internal Revenue Service Reform.

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Subcommittee on Public Health, be authorized to meet for a hearing on ``Gene Therapy: Promoting Patient Safety'' during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, February 2, 2000, at 9:30 a.m.

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, February 2, 2000 at 10:00 a.m. To hold an open hearing on intelligence matters.

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, February 2, 2000 at 2:00 p.m. To hold an closed hearing on intelligence matters.

Mr. GRASSLEY

Mr. GRASSLEY. I give the Senator from New York and all the other people on the other side of the aisle the benefit of the doubt, but as a matter of constitutional fact, there is always some theater when the Vice President has to cast a tie-breaking vote. Also, there is some justification for what I said, not based upon what I know is going to happen this time but what I have seen happen in the past. The other thing I want to tell the Senator from New York, regardless of what I said about the theater, I want to base my remarks upon what I think is unneeded legislation. This gets to some of the finer points of law that I am not going to argue and debate with the Senator from New York because he would say under certain circumstances, because of intent or because of court orders, the necessity to go back to State courts, his amendment will enhance the protection of people about whom he is concerned. Those are not serious considerations. His amendment is not needed. First of all, it is very necessary to say, and I hope the Senator from New York will not take offense with this, that we would not even be debating this amendment or anything with bankruptcy if he had his way because he was one of those who voted against the bankruptcy legislation. I do not fault the Senator from New York for doing that. That is, obviously, his right. He can say he wants bankruptcy legislation and he voted against it because this amendment was not included or maybe he is against bankruptcy generally, but the fact is that he voted against the bankruptcy reform bill we have before us. People who generally do not want a bankruptcy reform bill have proposed some pretty politically sensitive amendments--and this is one of them--that are basically a distraction from the real issue of why we need bankruptcy reform. I do not need to repeat what I said yesterday, such as we have had a 100-percent increase in personal bankruptcies over the last 7 or 8 years. From that standpoint, we have a very serious social and economic problem with which we have to deal, and particularly the way the present bankruptcy code is written, the amendment is not needed. I want to state why it is not needed because my colleagues are entitled to know. I hope a lot of the people in this Chamber who want a bankruptcy reform bill will view this amendment in its proper context of being proposed as a distraction from the real issues of bankruptcy reform, particularly since I am going to convince them that this amendment is not needed based upon the way the present law is written. But putting aside the obvious political nature of the amendment, this amendment should fail on its merits. The amendment would make judgments resulting from violent as well as nonviolent activities engaged in by pro-life activists nondischargeable in chapter 7 bankruptcy. The amendment does not provide for the same treatment for violent or nonviolent activities engaged in by pro-choice activists. In other words, this amendment does not even pretend to be fair and balanced. It is an effort aimed only at one side of this very hot political debate that is known as the abortion debate. I do not think the Senate should change bankruptcy policy in such a one-sided way. But the amendment does not even accomplish its one-sided goal. The amendment only affects chapter 7 bankruptcy. So I want to give you a second reason for being against it, based upon the fact that it fails on its own merits. Since it only affects chapter 7 bankruptcy, there is another way that people who are affected by this amendment, who want to go into bankruptcy to protect themselves, can do it. They can do that through chapter 13 because the amendment does not make any new debts nondischargeable in chapter 13. So any of the people to whom the Senator from New York refers to that his amendment is necessary for could file under chapter 13, pay pennies on the dollar, and walk away from debt. As I said when I voted on this amendment in the Judiciary Committee, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has concluded that court judgments resulting from violations of the FACE Act are already nondischargeable in chapter 7 under politically neutral provisions of section 523 of the code. This amendment, the Congressional Research Service says, isn't needed. Finally, it is worth noting that some Senators on the Democratic side have been very critical of making new categories of nondischargeable debts. If you listen to the White House--and we have listened to the White House quite a bit on this bill and have tried to satisfy people by making changes in it that have not hurt our general approach--if you listen to these same people, who have been listened to by me and other people in this body who want bankruptcy reform, you hear that anytime you create nondischargeable debts, the collection of child support suffers. I will bet the Senator from New York has made this same point on other nondischargeable debts concerning child support. Some of those concerns have been very legitimate. We have responded to them. I guess I would have to say, from where I started 2 years ago on this legislation, I have been educated on some of the writing of our original bill to make those changes so that we make child support No. 1 in our considerations in bankruptcy courts. But the White House, regardless, is saying nondischargeable debts make collection of child support much more difficult. But here we have an amendment from the minority to create a nondischargeable debt. So based on the arguments of the White House, this amendment should be rejected because it hurts child support claimants. This is a very serious inconsistency on the part of people, particularly on the other side of the aisle, in proposing this amendment. The fact is, bankruptcy reform is so popular with the American people, so popular with Members of the Senate, that those who oppose real bankruptcy reform look for distractions, distractions based on the merits of their amendment, based on their opposition to the legislation, but also a needless distraction. If, in their good conscience, they believe their amendment is needed, it in fact isn't needed because our bankruptcy code already deals, in a nonpolitical way, with these political questions that people believe can only be responded to by making one more thing nondischargeable. This amendment is, on balance, a distraction and should fail for the reason it was offered. But, most importantly, it should fail on its merits. The merits just do not call for its adoption. I have expressed my views on that. I yield the floor and ask our people to vote against it.

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, we have a speaker on his way. Senator Sessions wants to speak.

Mr. GRASSLEY. I object to that. Let's wait until we use our time and make that decision at that particular time.

Mr. GRASSLEY. We have done it that way already.

Mr. GRASSLEY. We will take care of ours. We will yield it.

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I yield 6 minutes, or whatever he consumes of the time I have remaining on the Schumer amendment, to the Senator from Alabama. What he does not use I will yield back.

Mr. GRASSLEY. We have now yielded back all time on the Schumer amendment. It is my understanding this side has 10 minutes reserved under the Harkin amendment.

Mr. GRASSLEY. I yield myself such time as I might consume on the Harkin amendment. I will not use all of the time because I want to encourage Senator Feingold or Senator Levin to go ahead with their amendments.

Mr. GRASSLEY. I thank the Senator.

Mr. GRASSLEY. I wish to respond to what the Senator from Massachusetts spoke about so passionately. I probably do not speak with the same passion he does, but I do want to say that he has it completely wrong. You cannot ignore the fact that since 1980 bankruptcies have increased from around 330,000 in that year to just under 1.4 million in 1999. That is a fact that cannot be ignored. Consequently, it seems to me to be completely wrong for some other Senator to say we do not have a bankruptcy problem in the United States. Congress ought to deal with it, and changing the law will help. I do not pretend changing the law is going to entirely respond to that problem, but the extent to which it does, we should do it because this increase in bankruptcies is a huge increase. The small dip in the filings that Senator Kennedy has referred to will not erase this very basic, fundamental problem we have in our economy with the bankruptcy laws. We have a real bankruptcy crisis on our hands. We cannot ignore that. Perhaps the Senator from Massachusetts does not remember what his own President said in the State of the Union Address. The President of the United States said, just a few days ago, these are prosperous times. People are not in bankruptcy then because of hard times. If this is a problem when we have very prosperous times, what sort of a bankruptcy problem are we going to have when we have a recession or a depression? One other point that the Senator from Massachusetts spent a great deal of time on is how he sees the problems of minimum wage in this bill. There is a minimum wage increase in this bill. It isn't there because we Republicans sought to join minimum wage with the bankruptcy bill. We were going to debate minimum wage at another time. We were going to increase minimum wage at another time, but it was the Democratic Party that made a decision to put minimum wage on the bankruptcy bill. I do not even like nongermane things being included on other pieces of legislation, but it is a pattern too often adopted and too readily accepted in the Senate. So it is done. But on this side of the aisle, I argued that we should not mix minimum wage with bankruptcy. I do not want the weight of that issue, as important as increasing the minimum wage is, with the issue of reforming the bankruptcy code. But on the other side of the aisle they chose to do it. So what do we hear? Now we are hearing complaints about the minimum wage bill on the bankruptcy bill. We are hearing threats about instructing conferees to do something about it. If it is a problem, it is a problem because the other side of the aisle made it a problem by including it. I remind them that they ought to be very careful what they wish for because sometimes they get it. The Senator from Massachusetts has asked who will win and who will lose. Under this bill, the honest American people, who have to pay the higher prices because other people go into bankruptcy and do not pay their bills--because we have deadbeats out there--are the ones who will win by this legislation. We still preserve the historic principle of our bankruptcy laws that some people who are in debt, through no fault of their own, are entitled to a fresh start. But when it comes to this basic principle of economics that there is no free lunch, there is no free lunch in bankruptcy, either. Somebody pays. In this particular instance, the honest American consumer is paying $400, for a family of four, to cover debts of somewhere between $30 billion and $50 billion a year that go unpaid because of people who ought to be paying their bills. Worse yet, we have a situation where some people who do have the ability to pay their bills are not paying their bills, either. We are sending a clear signal that those who have the ability to pay are not going to get off scot-free. I relinquish the remainder of our time. Hopefully, we can proceed, then, to the next amendment.

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I yield such time as he consumes to the Senator from Alabama.

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, how much time is left for this side on the Levin amendment?

Mr. GRASSLEY. I yield such time as he might consume to the Senator from Idaho.

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, before I proceed, I presume the Senator from New York is willing to have the time for his remarks come out of his time and not out of my time. I hope he will agree to that.

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I wish to take this particular time to not speak on either one of the amendments before us but to speak about the necessity of passing this bill. Because we have votes on two or three amendments and then final passage, I will not take the time of the Senate at the time of final passage. As we prepare for final passage on this bankruptcy bill, I remind all my colleagues what we are voting for and on. The most fundamental question we face with this bill is whether or not people should repay their debts. This bill says that when someone can repay their debts, they are not going to be able to take the easy way out. This bill will end the free ride for wealthy freeloaders and deadbeats who walk away from their debts and pass the bill on to the rest of us, to the consumers, who are honest and who should not pick up the tab for those who are not. We have a real bankruptcy crisis in need of action. This bill does it without violating the principle that people who are entitled to a fresh start have that fresh start. As a result of an amendment offered by Senator Torricelli and myself, this bill contains the most sweeping, wide-ranging set of consumer protections the Senate has enacted in a long time. Those of us from farm country have an extra reason to vote for this bill since it contains crucial protections for family farmers who may face bankruptcy due to low commodity prices. Chapter 12 will expire in June unless we pass this bill. Under this bill, farmers in chapter 12 will get significant tax relief when they sell off assets. Mr. President, this bill is fair and balanced and deserves to be passed by an overwhelming vote. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that two newspaper articles on the subject of bankruptcy be printed in the Record.

Mr. GRASSLEY. I yield the floor and reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, before we have a quorum call, I have a message from Senator Sessions, that Senator Sessions is willing to have me yield back our time on our side if Senator Feingold is willing to yield back the time on his side.

Mr. GRASSLEY. We yield back the time on our side.

Mr. GRASSLEY. I have been informed by staff that we will work on that agreement, and it seems that can be accomplished.

Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, we yield back the remainder of the time on our side.

Mr. GRASSLEY

Mr. GRASSLEY. I yield my time.