Debbie Dingell: “as Yogi Berra said, this is deja vu all over again. In 1995, my Republican colleagues came up with a splendid idea that…”

“as Yogi Berra said, this is deja vu all over again. In 1995, my Republican colleagues came up with a splendid idea that we should close the courthouse door to innocent investors who had been wronged by scoundrels, rogues and rascals. They found that there was a loophole, however. That loophole is that, guess what, could investors still go to the State courts. But that was exactly what the citizens were told they could do when we passed that earlier legislation. Now we are closing that loophole and we are going to nail shut the courthouse doors of the State courts so a citizen wronged cannot now go to a State court. The 1995 act imposed extraordinary pleading standards, a stay of discovery so that special facts necessary to meet those heightened pleading standards could not be reached, and an unreasonably short time limit or statute of limitations for filing a fraud claim, and no ability existed under that law to fully recover from professionals such as accountants and lawyers who aided and abetted in stealing funds from innocent investors. Those same standards are now extended to State courts by fiat of the Federal Government. I am curious why it is my colleagues on the Republican side, who talk about States rights, are so diligently imposing this kind of mandate on investors and upon the States.”