Pete Sessions: “I am pleased we have had a good week of debate on the bankruptcy bill, which I believe is a very important piece of…”

“I am pleased we have had a good week of debate on the bankruptcy bill, which I believe is a very important piece of legislation. It is something this Congress has a responsibility to deal with since bankruptcy procedures are Federal court procedures and bankruptcy judges, although not article III judges, are Federal judges. The court system, over the last 20, 30 years, has grown incredibly. We have gone from a few hundred thousand bankruptcies a year, to 1.6 million personal bankruptcies in 2003. It has been driven by a lot of things. Some say it is economic problems, but our economy compared to other times has not been as bad. We have had some tough years, but we have also had some good years. We have seen bankruptcies exceeding everything that could be based on the economy. I suspect a good part of it is because of the advertising of lawyers in the newspapers. People who have built up some debt and are having a hard time dealing with it, and creditors are calling, they see an ad that says something like this: Come on down. We can take care of those debts and help you. So people have been filing bankruptcies at a record pace, caused somewhat by these ads. Many of the people work their way out of it; many of them cannot. We absolutely believe and support the classic American view that you should be able to have a fresh start; that if debts overpower a family or individual, they can go to bankruptcy court and wipe out those debts and not pay a dime.”