Bill Delahunt: “Mr. Speaker, the proponents, they do not want to reform class actions; they really want to destroy them. Not only have…”

“Mr. Speaker, the proponents, they do not want to reform class actions; they really want to destroy them. Not only have they for all intents and purposes barred States from considering these cases by means of a massive expansion of Federal jurisdiction, against the advice, by the way, of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Rehnquist, the Judicial Conference of the United States, and the Conference of State Chief Justices, but they have cleverly changed the rules in the Federal courts to further thwart class action suits. I want to acknowledge that it is a brilliant strategy. Do Members realize that even Washington cannot dictate the rules by which State courts handle their cases? So they simply remove most of these cases to the Federal court. Then once they are in the Federal court, they design an obstacle course to make sure that most of these cases will just linger and linger and linger and never see the light of day. They did this by adding a section which creates an automatic right of appeal. If a Federal district court simply certifies, simply certifies a class, that appeal comes before the case is even heard on the merits. Now, that is not all. The bill, as others have indicated, would halt all discovery proceedings in the case until the appeal, until the appeal is completed. This unprecedented new right for defendants is unheard of in the American civil justice system.”