Before Biden and Warren were at odds for the Democratic Presidential nomination, they faced off against bankruptcy protection laws, with Biden successfully stripping them away right before the 2008 housing crisis. In 2005, Biden pushed through a bill called the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) intended to prevent people from abusing a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing. Restrictions were made for an income threshold, as well as types of credit card debt, and discharging student loan debt. GQ called Biden’s 2005 bill “the single piece of legislation most responsible for putting the U.S. in the current student debt crisis”.
Warren, as a Harvard Law Professor at the time before she was elected as a Massachusetts Senator, testified against the bill and its detrimental harm to people seeking their right to debt relief. The bill benefited credit card companies which hold tremendous political power in Delaware, Biden’s state. He argued against criticism of his questionable allegiances to corporations over the people but the evidence was stacked against him. Hunter Biden, yet again, put his father in hot water with his business interests. Hunter Biden, then, received a six figure salary from the largest credit card company in Delaware: MBNA.
The GQ article continued: “Melissa Jacoby, a University of North Carolina law professor specializing in bankruptcy, told Politico, ‘I doubt that the bill reined in the abuses that the bill was premised on, in part because they didn’t necessarily exist in the first place.’”
Biden’s campaign team is trying to spin his debacle as a necessary bill to appease Republicans in order to get other legislation passed. The bill did pass with unanimous Republican support, but to what benefit and what cost to US citizens? The facts are undeniable: BAPCPA stripped borrowers of their rights to bankruptcy protection, rights that are set in the US Constitution, as well as contributed to the trillions of accumulating student debt.
Image Credit: Center for American Progress Action Fund via Flickr