Jack Reed: “I do not know if this is the final word, but the Senator is doing a remarkably good job moving this legislation forward.…”

“I do not know if this is the final word, but the Senator is doing a remarkably good job moving this legislation forward. I agree with him, it is quite important because of this increase in the number of bankruptcy filings. There has been a huge growth in my home State of Rhode Island, a 500-percent increase in just a few years. If we are going to do it, let's do it in a fair and balanced way. I also go back to the underlying legislation that we are trying to amend. It says essentially that a creditor may file a request to move the debtor from chapter 7 to chapter 13, and the judge will make a determination. It is not mandatory. As I read it, even if that judge determines that the debtor has 30 percent, the sufficient amount of money to repay, and that the debtor may have, in fact, been questionable in filing a chapter 7 petition, the judge is still not required to grant the request and move the petitioner from chapter 7 to chapter 13. So as I said before, I think, implicitly, we already have this good-faith standard, because that is what the judge is going to apply.”