Hot damn, Jeff is good!

While I'm also sorely disappointed by the three Democrats who were so influenced by subprime mortgage industry lobbyists that they voted against this, they deserve the chance to explain to us why they did what they did.

But the real question is the Senate. If this doesn't pass, or doesn't even come up in a body overwhelmingly dominated by Democrats, I think we're owed a full accounting of who killed it. So we can make sure they have a serious challengers in the primary.

It bears mentioning here that this morning the Street Roots paper has pegged Subprime the latest policy of poverty.

Hooray! Another half step bill barely passed in the House because Dems were too afraid to be criticized while passing a strong bill--that's the pattern we've come to expect. Nothing says "change" like a weak half-measure fix to a tough problem!!

A weakened bill passes on the narrowest of margins, 31 to 29, in a chamber which Democrats have the slimmest of majorities - which is the most that the Oregon house could do given the circumstances, which include heavy Mortgage Industry opposition. Next it goes to the senate where Democrats have a much larger majority, can reinsert the stripped provisions and still pass it even if a few Dems defect.

Those are the realities and yet the Purity Trolls would prefer that Democrats in the house ought to have effectively cut off their noses to spite their faces by taking an unwinnable stand which would have resulted in ZERO progress?

I;'m guessing that we don't have to wonder too much about the defections of Boone and Schaufler as they've often been reliable votes for the perceived interests of the development industry (Mike is, after all, a general contractor), but I'd like to know a bit more about Galizio's reasoning.

kevin,I'm pretty sure any changes to the bill would need to be ratified by the house, so they can't just "put them back in."

And I'll assume you're not talking to me since I'm certainly no purity troll--but just in case, where did you get the idea that I would have preferred no bill at all? You made up the same utter nonsense on marriage equality, and it's no less off base in this context. You can say it's a capitulation born of weakness AND find the weaker bill better than nothing, you know.

TJ:

Exactly. Any changes the Senate makes has to be voted on by the House. They have to approve the exact same versions.

Okay, RuMo... I'll bite.

You're the Speaker. There's a bill (SB 1090) that you'd very much like to see pass, but in order to pass it needs get more votes in favor than votes against. It's stuck in committee... in the senate and of course your authority doesn't extend to the senate. Which is a crying shame because the Democrats have a significantly larger majority over there than you have to work with in the house.

Even though it's not your job, you are nevertheless personally tracking down every senator you can find to pressure them into voting for SB 1090. But the clock is ticking. You know that the special session ends in a few days and the odds are against SB 1090 ever reaching your chamber.

What more could you have done?

You know that the only option you have under your own control as Speaker is to try to at least get something through your chamber which might also have a chance of getting passed in the senate. It's not what you want. Heck, one of the chief backers of SB 1090 is an organization which has explicitly endorsed you over Steve Novick. But you are powerless to move SB 1090 through the senate, despite your best efforts which by any measure go way above and beyond the call of duty, and passing nothing means that there will be zero progress made until next year at the earliest.

What do you do?

Salem Report: Running the stairs Posted by Ryan Frank February 21, 2008 17:39PM Categories: Mortgage Reform Mortgage reforms cleared the House today but their future in the Senate is not clear. Late this afternoon, House Speaker Jeff Merkley circled the Capitol searching for Senate Democrats to make his case. Democrats have an 18-11 advantage but Merkley wasn't sure yet he had the votes. "I'm tracking down any senator I can find in the building," Merkley said. His search was complicated by Capitol romodel. Legislators don't have their normal offices.

andy: The terms are in the contract, if you can't understand it then hire a lawyer.

If you're scraping every penny you have for the downpayment for your first house, how exactly are you going to afford to do that?

Ask most kids promised the world when being recruited into the military, or people who've bought a car off some shyster's lot, there's a lot of crap buried in contracts that they make hard to hard to understand on purpose. And all the contracts say the writing is controlling - to allow the salesman to lie their asses off without consequence.

But legalized fraud shouldn't destroy people's lives, so it's high time we put a stop to these deceptive practices in the mortgage industry.

Andy... I sympathize with your view. For months now, every time I heard some sap on television complaining how their ARM was going to bankrupt 'em, I'd holler at the TV - "What did you think was going to happen, you moron?"

But that's not what we're talking about here. We're not talking about basic run-of-the-mill mortgages. And we're not talking about stupid lenders.

There are predatory mortgage officers (not many, but enough) that didn't disclose to people, as they were required to, what the terms of the loans were that they were setting up. The loans were exceedingly complex, with clauses and exceptions that weren't disclosed or explained. In some cases, the loans were set up to bait them with a few thousand "cash back" at closing, and then drain their assets in a matter of months.

I have no patience for morons, especially house-flippers, that got caught with their pants down on a basic ARM. But we need to do something to crack down on the predators that were taking advantage of people.

Brilliant solution! Of ocurse [sic], I'd expect nothing less from politicians who have never had a real job.

They had better have real jobs. Being an Oregon legislator pays next to nothing. They're like minor league baseball players who have to drive UPS trucks the rest of the year to pay their bills.

So effectively you will exclude these people from ever owning a house.

Don't be silly. Some of these won't be able to qualify for a loan, sure. But forever? Not likely.

Others were perfectly capable of qualifying for a regular loan, but were taken advantage of by predatory mortgage lenders.

I appreciate much of the discussion on HB 3603A.

I filed a vote explanation on the bill in question; although those are probably only read by opposition researchers.

For what it's worth, I'll briefly add my observations. (And I mean briefly, since I'm still a bit tired from the session).

First, it shouldn't be forgotten that coming out of this very short session are bills concerning so-called "rescue mortgages" and loan originators - both of which should be useful. These bills were products of the mortgage workgroup that is expected to continue meeting as we move toward the '09 session.

In no particular order, I voted against this bill for the following reasons:

The agency tasked to implement the policy remained uncertain as to the significance and consequences of the bill. It was described as a "vanilla bill" by one member of the agency. Not only did the agency (which pushed hard for a much more comprehensive and stronger legislation) view the bill as tepid, and express uncertainty of its impacts, they admitted that they didn't necessarily have the expertise in-house to properly implement the legislation.

Second, the bill was actively opposed by the very consumer groups that worked the hardest to get mortgage lending reform this session. All legislators received an email from AARP opposing the bill; additionally, OSPIRG was essentially neutral, if not hostile to the bill. And Our Oregon (which walked out of the mortgage work group months earlier) came out with tepid support at the eleventh hour.

Third, the bill wouldn't have done that much. As has been expressed in this discussion, the bill was a last-minute watered-down collection of "reforms." This doesn't mean that it was completely useless, but the benefits were outweighed by the costs of passing the bill.

And this last point might be one of the most important areas where we find disagreement among those seeking mortgage lending reform. My view, one not shared by the bulk of my colleagues in the House, was that passage of this weak, vanilla bill would provide the mortgage industry the evidence they needed to argue against doing anything more in 2009. This is certainly a debatable point - and I respect my colleagues whom came down on the other side of this debate - but that was my conclusion. Since the rescue mortgage and loan originator bills came from the work group and passed with overwhelming support, it's more difficult for an industry lobbyist to point to those bills as evidence that mortgage reform was complete. In contrast, had 3603A passed out of the Senate on a vote that was as split as the one in the House, then it would have been much easier for the industry to point to 3603A as "the bill that represented a tough stance against the industry" and therefore one that "took care of mortgage lending reform in Oregon."

There are other political reasons that this effort may have been doomed from the outset, but it's not worth going over those again.

As a member of the Consumer Protection Committee, I'm gravely disappointed that we weren't able to come out with a robust set of reforms to confront this real set of issues. Unfortunately, this problem isn't going away anytime soon.

Posted by: Anon | Feb 23, 2008 1:48:03 AM The Oregon Senate refused to vote on or even hold a hearing on this mortgage lending bill. Ugh. House Democrats pass this bill with a 31-29 majority, but the Senate Democrats won't even consider it with an 18-11 majority? Ugh again.

Ugh indeed! And therein lays the crux of this story.

Despite having joined a party which controls the Senate with a 62% majority, Sen. Westlund was unable to make progress with his mortgage bill which enjoyed very wide support by the fine organizations Rep. Galizio mentions.

Seeing the proverbial handwriting on the wall, the merely 51% Dem House crafted a weakened alternative bill which was obviously driven more by the intransigence of Senate Democrats than anything else. Even so, it was still stiffly opposed by the mortgage industry lobby.

Speaker Merkley somehow managed to get HB 3603 through and then set about personally lobbying Senate Democrats to try to get it through their chamber too. But what he was able to do with the slimmest (literally) of majorities, the much larger majority Dems in the Senate have been unwilling to do.

While I can appreciate and empathize with the explanation given here by Rep. Galizio, I disagree with his characterization of the value of HB3603 - although in fairness it's only really seen in hindsight. By HB3603 getting through the House but not the Senate, Oregonians are much, much better able to see where the legislative obstructions are than if HB3603 had never been attempted. We can now look forward to the next election and vote accordingly.

As Dr. Rex Hagans (Coalition for Economic Fairness, Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon - Public Policy Advocacy Committee) said about Speaker Merkley after he got payday loan reform done, "Speaker Merkley is the most stand-up political leader I have ever seen. A lot of folks want to tell you how they are for the "little guy," but Jeff is the real deal!"

Andy:

We're not talking about homes with a set rate - we're talking about adjustable rates. Some people have seen their monthly payment increase hundreds of dollars each month until its more than a thousand higher per month than the first payments. And I'm talking about people who have made all their payments, bills, etc. on time - these aren't increases because of late payments.

<h2>Thank you very much, Rep. Galizio, for that frank explanation. It confirms some of what I suspected and adds additional information I did not previously have. Your candor is much appreciated.</h2>