A Fighting Chance

In 1995, Congress launched a blue-ribbon commission to review the bankruptcy laws. President Bill Clinton appointed former Oklahoma congressman Mike Synar to head a nine-person nonpartisan commission. The commission would spend two years completing its review and then deliver a report to Congress. Now the congressman was on the phone, calling me. Would I join him in working on the National Bankruptcy Review Commission?

In one of those little twists that makes me wonder about divine intervention, Mike and I had crossed paths when we were teenagers. Mike had been a high school debater from Muskogee when I was debating for my Oklahoma City high school. We hadn’t seen each other in the intervening decades, but fourteen-year-old boys seem to remember fifteen-year-old girls who once beat them in tournament play.

I told him no. I was deep in my research, and I thought the way I could make a difference was by writing books and doing more research about who was filing for bankruptcy and what had gone wrong in their lives. I didn’t know anything about Washington, but the bits I picked up from the press made it sound pretty awful.

So Mike asked me to come to DC for lunch. Just lunch.

It was fun to see him. Mike had been a political wunderkind. He had been elected to Congress at twenty-eight, in the wake of a report that mentioned that his opponent slept in a heart-shaped water bed, a revelation that didn’t sit well with a lot of folks back in Oklahoma. While in Congress, Mike had battled Big Tobacco and the National Rifle Association. But after sixteen years in the House, he had just lost his seat.

Mike still looked boyish, with dark hair and bright eyes and a sort of goofy smile that reminded me of Opie on the old Andy Griffith Show. He was always in a hurry, the kind of guy who waves his hands a lot and interrupts—cheerfully, of course. We met in Mike’s Washington office, but he quickly gathered up a few young staffers and we all walked over to a noisy restaurant nearby.

Over lunch, we mostly swapped stories about our high school debate days. Mike talked about beer and poker. I talked about the kid who got left behind at the Turner Turnpike rest stop. He told stories about the times we had debated each other, regaling the young staffers with comic blow-by-blow descriptions of our early meetings.

We didn’t talk much about the commission at lunch. Mike knew why I was skeptical. Sure, the commission was supposed to be neutral, but I’d heard that the banks had already started lobbying to cut back on bankruptcy protection. I didn’t want any part of a process that would probably just make life harder for people who were already struggling to get by.

Besides, Mike and I weren’t exactly friends. I’d barely known him back in high school, and we hadn’t stayed in touch. Before our lunch, I’d checked him out, and each person I called had suggested that during his time in Congress, Mike had a pretty friendly relationship with some of the big banks.

When I stood up to leave, Mike walked me out of the restaurant. Once we were alone, he turned serious. He’d read one of my books, and he knew where I stood. Then Mike made his pitch: Think about the families the new commission would affect, the people who file for bankruptcy every year. Here’s an opportunity for you to make a real difference.

Then Mike offered me a deal. If I would work with him to come up with three good changes—changes in the law that could help the folks who were struggling with debt—then he would work hard to get them turned into law. The way he saw it, I would develop the ideas about how to change the bankruptcy law, and he would use his political savvy to try to get those changes enacted.

The whole idea was deliciously subversive—and not what I expected. Here was the guy a lot of people thought would carry water for the industry, and instead he was trying to figure out how to expand bankruptcy protection for families who needed it. Wow.

Even so, I hesitated. I believed Mike’s intentions were good, but I wasn’t sure he could deliver. Besides, I’d never worked in a political setting before. Heck, I’d never done anything more political than voting. But he had sunk the hook. If we worked together, we might be able to help some of those families that were going bankrupt every single day. Just think of the difference we could make with three good changes in the law. Here was a chance to do something about all those people getting hurt.

And that’s what I thought about, all the way home. My office was stacked with piles of questionnaires from people in bankruptcy, and many of them told personal stories about what had gone wrong in their lives and described the sense of defeat that they carried to the bankruptcy court. I thought about the family that finally got a shot at their lifelong dream to launch a new restaurant—and it went belly-up. The young and very tired woman who described how she finally managed to leave her abusive ex-husband, but now she was alone with a pack of small children and a pile of bills. The elderly couple who had cashed out everything they owned and then went into debt to bail out their son and put him through rehab again and again.