Pete Sessions: “Mr. President, I must register my strongest opposition to this amendment. It continues the one thing that causes so much…”

“Mr. President, I must register my strongest opposition to this amendment. It continues the one thing that causes so much grief. It makes a Federal case out of eviction proceedings. We know that in Los Angeles 3,886 bankruptcy cases were filed in 1996 simply to delay the eviction cases that were pending in the State court. In other words, if you file for eviction, under the current law when a person files bankruptcy, that eviction case is stayed. It then goes to bankruptcy court. The landlord, many of whom are individual people without great wealth, have already hired a lawyer to handle the eviction and now has to hire a Federal court bankruptcy lawyer to go into Federal court. After they win, as they always do because an expired lease is not an asset of the estate and cannot be subject to the control of the bankruptcy judge, they have to then go back to State court, ask the State judge to pick up the litigation, and proceed. The 15-days that the Senator suggests is better than his first amendment, but it does in no way deny the person from going to Federal court. They can then have a hearing after the 15 days. They can contest whether the tenant used drugs or not in Federal court. They are evicting them from the apartment because of drug use or other reasons. We simply should not do this. The true fact is that eventually all these contests in bankruptcy court are eventually lost. Why go through the process?”