John Hope Bryant: “I rise in opposition to the Hoke amendment. Mr. Chairman, the Hoke amendment to some extent places really in, I think…”

“I rise in opposition to the Hoke amendment. Mr. Chairman, the Hoke amendment to some extent places really in, I think, very stark relief what we are doing with this bill and with the bills that are to follow. First, we are in the process of rewriting the rules in such a way that no no plaintiff can afford to bring a case because under the bill pending before the House at the present time, the result would be that they would lose their life savings, they would lose everything they had ever had, ever saved, ever earned for them or their children if somebody on the jury did not like the color of their skin or the way they parted their hair. So they are making it impossible for anyone to bring the case. The subsequent bills that are going to come up behind this one are going to rewrite the rules so even if you bring it, you have no hope of winning the case because these bills are going to rewrite all of the rules in such a way that the middle-class person who comes forward with it cannot have any chance whatsoever of winning the case, because all of the standards are going to be rewritten. But the Hoke amendment now goes one step further. It says you no longer can even really hire a lawyer because now you are going to be saddled with a new, untested, untried and unstudied system of compensating a lawyer.”