The "Responsible Leading Act": A New Legislative Attack On Consumers

Civil Rights Leaders To Fight Lending Bill
Consumers Unprotected, Groups Say
By Sandra Fleishman
Washington Post
March 25, 2005

Consumer advocates are bringing out big names from the civil rights world to try to keep a lending industry-backed bill on predatory mortgage lending from rolling through Congress the way recent bankruptcy legislation did.

NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson and Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and their groups are joining with consumer groups to oppose a bill introduced earlier this month by Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Financial Services housing subcommittee, and Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski (D-Pa.), the senior Democrat on the capital markets subcommittee.

"Representatives Ney and Kanjorski have failed to provide meaningful protections in their mis-named 'Responsible Lending Act,' " Bond said in the statement. "Their bill demonstrates a failure to address the real pain caused by predatory lending and the harm it is doing to African-American families."

The strong words seem to take the long-running debate over how to crack down on predatory lending back to where it has been for years, with a deadlock between lenders pushing for federal preemption of tougher state laws and consumer and civil rights groups arguing that proposed GOP fixes are too weak. The new twist this year, however, is that Democrat Kanjorski and three black Democrats on the committee have co-sponsored the bill with Ney.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64650-2005Mar24.html

The Mortgage Bankers Association, the National Association of Mortgage Brokers, the Bond Market Association, the American Securitization Forum and the National Home Equity Mortgage Association support the so-called Responsible Lending Act.