Hillary Clinton was already an advocate for women and children before she took office as a US Senator and she continued to look out for women and children when she was in Congress.
In 2001, bankruptcy legislation was one of the immediate priorities of Congress. The Republican majority had just passed a bill that would have made bankruptcy tougher on a lot more people. It would have pleased the banks and credit card companies, too, if it became law. However, when Congress sent it to President Clinton on December 7, 2000, he killed it with a pocket veto. The clock ran out on the 106th Session with no chance of an override vote. (The bill passed with 70 votes in the Senate and by voice vote in the House, so it was possible that an override vote would have succeeded.)
The Republicans lost four Senate seats in the 2000 election. The incoming session began with 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans who barely held on to the majority with VP Cheney's tie-breaking vote. The Republicans also retained a majority in the House.
From March 7 to March 15, 2001, the Senate debated bill # S.420 – the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2001. True to her priorities, Hillary Clinton leveraged her influence by working with other key Senators to improve the bill with provisions for women who were left without child support payments after the child’s father declared bankruptcy. Another improvement eliminated a loophole for the wealthy. An important and controversial provision to protect the safety of women and doctors at reproductive healthcare clinics was also included.
After numerous amendments and 20 roll calls, Clinton said she would vote for the bill. It passed in the Senate, 83-15. The House passed its own version of the bill and the two were never reconciled. Here are some excerpts from Clinton's speech with a link to the Congressional Record.
Senator Clinton: I rise today in support of final passage of S. 420, the Bankruptcy Reform Act. Many of my colleagues may remember that I was a strong critic of the bill that passed out of the 106th Congress.
While we have yet to achieve the kind of bankruptcy reform I believe is possible, I have worked with a number of people to make improvements that bring us closer to our goals, particularly when it comes to child support. Women can now be assured that they can continue to collect child support payments after the child’s father has declared bankruptcy. The legislation makes child support the first priority during bankruptcy proceedings.
This year, we have made more progress. The Senate agreed to include a revised version of Senator Schumer’s amendment to ensure that any debts resulting from any act of violence, intimidation, or threat would be nondischargeable.
Earlier today, this body agreed to include a cap on the homestead exemption to ensure that wealthy debtors could not shield their wealth by purchasing a mansion in a state with no cap on homestead exemption.
In addition, I was concerned about competing nondischargeable debt so I worked hard with Senator Boxer to ensure that more credit card debt can be erased so that women who use their credit cards for food, clothing and medical expenses in the 90 days before bankruptcy do not have to litigate each and every one of these expenses for the first $750.
Let me be very clear—I will not vote for final passage of this bill if it comes back from conference if these kind of reforms are missing. I am voting for this legislation because it is a work in progress, and it is making progress towards reform.
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Clinton mentioned Schumer's revised amendment. Originally, it specified civil judgments against antiabortion extremists who were found guilty of violent crimes, and making intimidating threats at family planning clinics. The intention was to stop this form of domestic terror by preventing the guilty from using bankruptcy laws to avoid paying the debts that resulted from civil judgments against them.
The anti-abortion members of the Senate objected to the amendment's language at a Judiciary Committee hearing. They agreed to support a revised version that was just as effective as the original, so the language was changed.
The final bill made any debts resulting from violations of laws relating to the provision or acquisition of lawful goods and services nondischargeable in bankruptcy, whether the offense took place at a reproductive healthcare clinic or elsewhere.
Senator Feinstein spoke after Clinton during the debate and she explained the legal basis for the amendment. It also appears in Section 328 of the bill's text.
Even though the language was changed, the provision became known as "the abortion amendment." Over a year later, the House and Senate were still far from reconciling the different versions they passed. Conservative Republicans insisted on excising the Schumer amendment. The Senate Democrats had the upper hand after Jim Jeffords quit the Republican Party which lost the majority. The Democrats assumed control of the committee chairs and the agenda. They didn't budge. The session ended later that year without passing the bill.
Political Cartoon by Thomas Nast that appeared in Harper's Weekly, June 6, 1874.
In the 2004 election, the Republicans increased their representation in Congress so that they had 55 Senators and 230 House representatives. When the 109th Session began the bankruptcy bill was a priority once again.
The Democrats proposed the same amendments that improved the bill in 2001, but this time, they were defeated by the Republican majority. Of course, Clinton voted for the reforms she favored four years earlier, too. When the motion to end debate was announced, the Democrats tried to block the bill with a filibuster. Clinton voted to maintain the filibuster. The Republicans managed to gather the 60 votes they needed anyway. The filibuster was ended by a vote of 31-69.
Here's a partial list of the amendments with links to the roll call votes for them and the cloture motion.
On March 10, 2005 when the Senate voted on bill
#S.256 - the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, Senator Durbin announced that Clinton was necessarily absent. Her husband needed surgery that day because of complications resulting from a heart bypass operation six months earlier.
News reports said that she was with him at the hospital. She returned to Congress on March 11 and her statement about the bankruptcy bill is worth a read.
Mrs. Clinton. Mr. President, while I strongly believe that Congress should act to fix the problems in our bankruptcy system, I also believe that this bill is misguided and deeply flawed.
This bankruptcy bill fundamentally fails to accord with the traditional purposes of bankruptcy, which recognize that we are all better off when hardworking people who have suffered financial catastrophe get a ‘‘fresh start. . .’’
It [Bankruptcy reform] should be about making sure that both large corporations and individual citizens are held to the same standards of responsibility and accountability.
This bill is flawed in a number of ways. But I want to begin by commenting on one of its most distressing elements. As many people know, I have long been concerned about the burdens placed on America’s families by a lack of health care insurance and by rising healthcare costs. In this bill, the Senate had an opportunity to take one important step to help citizens driven to the point of bankruptcy by unavoidable medical problems. Instead, the Senate rejected this opportunity to lighten the load on Americans dealing with the twin blows of medical and financial difficulties. The Senate’s failure to act is all the more striking to me today, because I must submit this statement into the Record while attending to a medical situation in my own family.
The world has changed since this bill was considered in 2001. During the past 4 years, workers have sustained unprecedented job losses, endured termination of pension plans, and faced wage cuts and elimination of health care and other benefits as a result of their employer’s bankruptcy. Many of these bankruptcies have been the direct result of wrongdoing by corporate mismanagement. The people who take the biggest hit when big companies go bankrupt aren’t the top executives, but the ordinary employees whose pensions and healthcare coverage disappear overnight.
And to make matters even worse, yesterday the Senate, again led by the Republican leadership, rejected an amendment offered by Senator Kennedy, which would have outlawed unlimited homestead exemptions. This would have prevented the wealthiest Americans from avoiding responsibility by hiding their assets from creditors.
The Senate also rejected an amendment that was intended to reinsert language that had been in the legislation the Senate passed in 2001, which would have prevented the discharge in bankruptcy of all liability for willful violation of protective orders and violent protests of providers of lawful services, such as reproductive health services.
Even though this language was in the 2001 Senate-passed bill, it is conspicuously absent from the bankruptcy bill that the Senate is now considering 4 years later.
Because of unforeseen and unavoidable circumstances, I will not be present when the Senate votes on final passage of this bill today. But were I able to be here, I would vote no, because this bill is clearly not in the best interests of the American people.
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The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 was
passed by the Senate 74-25.
In the House, it passed 302-126.
President Bush signed it into law on April 20, 2005.