View Story | 19 comments
Comments: Expand Shrink Hide (Always) | Indented Flat (Always)
Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act did what is was theoretically supposed to do (not letting people who got into debt by going on spending sprees and generally being irresponsible with their money get out of debt while retaining the stuff they bought by filing for bankruptcy), and only that, then my only problem with it would be that Congress doesn't have a leg to stand on, since they're setting a terrible example by spending far beyond the government's revenue.
The problem is that it penalizes people whose debt was caused by medical problems (Kennedy's amendment failed 39-58, people who had their identities stolen (Bill Nelson's amendment failed 37-61, soldiers who are having a harder time paying the bills because they left their primary jobs to fight for our country (Durbin's amendment failed 38-58, primary caregivers who save the taxpayers money (Corzine's amendment failed 37-60, allows the rich to protect their money with asset protection trusts Schumer's amendment failed 39-56, doesn't protect people who lose their retirement savings due to Enronesque corporate malfeasance (Durbin amendment failed 40-54), allows abortion clinic blockers to get away with not paying court-ordered fines by filing for bankruptcy (Schumer's amendment failed 46-53), and fails to do anything to protect naive consumers from the predatory credit industry (Durbin's amendment to prevent predatory lending failed 40-58, Dayton's amendment to limit interest rates on extensions of credit to 30 percent failed 24-74, and Akaka's amendment to require disclosure to consumers regarding the consequences of only making the minimum payments failed 40-59.
Join the College Kossacks on Facebook. Hat Thief
by DemocraticLuntz on Mon Jun 05, 2006 at 05:25:01 PM PDT
complaining about how the dem party can't hold it together on these kinds of votes.
look at all those links. (thanks for putting them together by the way!). looks pretty depressing to see defeat after defeat like that.
what are dems good for anyway??
well. yeas are uniformly D.
nays are uniformly R.
there were 961 votes in all.
591 nays.
370 yeas.
but look at that.
98% of the aggregate Yea vote is from Dems.
91% of the aggregate Nay votes were from Repugs.
now we can either look at that and bemoan the defectors, in this case, the carpers, the nelsons, the bidens....
or we can look at that and just chuckle at anyone who says there's no difference between the two parties.
statistically you can take out the high and low deviations.
the percentage of concentration comes out to ...
98.4% of all Yea votes on these amendments came from dems.
Only 7.6% of all Nay votes came from dems.
a 3 seat swing in the senate would have tilted most of those amendments in our favor.
at the very least would have given us more leverage on the writing of the legislation itself.
i'm not saying the legislation would have gone away.
it just would have had most of these amendments.
I want Lamont to win, but I won't cry when he doesn't.
by BiminiCat on Mon Jun 05, 2006 at 06:05:23 PM PDT
[ Parent ]
wide narrow
View Story | 19 comments