Barney Frank: “first, this bill makes some substantive changes, including one of the things we came across was the problem of people…”

“first, this bill makes some substantive changes, including one of the things we came across was the problem of people who were renting who lost their right to live there when there was a foreclosure. We have compromised in this. I have had some conversations; I will have some further ones with the gentleman from Colorado. But we do try to preserve some protection for the renters in the bill. As passed by committee, we had 12 months. This reduces it some to 6 months as the maximum. We will talk more about it. Beyond that, there are two things that the manager's amendment clarifies, and I have found from some on the consumer side two objections in this bill, and we deal with these in the manager's amendment and we will deal with them further. One is the issue of preemption. I think a certain amount of preemption is essential if we are going to have a secondary market, but it is possible to read the language previously as preempting more than we meant to. What this amendment does is to make very clear that, no matter what the issue is, if the problem was based on fraud or misrepresentation, deception, or false advertising, there is no preemption.”