A Fighting Chance

Stacking Sandbags

Two months after Mike Synar died, President Clinton appointed a lawyer from Madison, Wisconsin, to head the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. Brady Williamson was a quietly remarkable guy. He maintained an active law practice, but he had represented Bill Clinton in negotiations involving the presidential debates and in setting up various trips to meet with foreign leaders. In legal circles, he was known for his work on the First Amendment and for a bankruptcy case he had won in the United States Supreme Court. He’d done great work on the case, but I didn’t know him. Now the commission was his problem.

Officially, I was still the senior advisor for the commission, although we hadn’t done much work since Mike’s death. When Brady called, I was blunt: Mike and I had a deal, but that was then. Mike is gone, and I’m out of here.

Brady asked me to wait to resign until he could come to meet me and talk with me about his plans. I said okay.

Brady is cute. Not movie-star handsome—just cute. He’s short, with glasses, a mustache, bright eyes, and a quick sense of humor. When he came to the house a few days later, we sat on the enclosed porch, enjoying an unexpectedly warm day. I offered him iced tea, and Faith put her head in his lap. Unlike most goldens, Faith was a little picky about people, so I took this as a sign that maybe Brady was a good guy. More than anything, though, I felt a little sorry for him. By now I knew that most of the other commissioners didn’t share Mike’s vision, and leading this group was going to be tough. But this wasn’t my problem. I was going back to my books and my classes.

Like the superb lawyer he is, Brady had done his homework and knew what the commission was up against. Once he got past the preliminaries, he didn’t sugarcoat the situation. President Clinton was facing a Republican-controlled Congress bent on fighting him at every turn, and Washington was still reeling from two government shutdowns. Besides, the big banks were pushing harder than ever to change the bankruptcy laws. Brady didn’t think President Clinton would pick a fight with the big banks right now. And if the president didn’t want to push back, who would?

I was starting to understand. Despite the huge numbers of people in bankruptcy, it’s almost impossible to form a political coalition around them. They come into the bankruptcy system and exit as soon as they can, a big, fast-moving river of people who lose a job or face some terrible health crisis. Our research had shown that they aren’t especially old or young, northern or southern, black or white, male or female. Instead, they’re a cross section of pretty much everyone who has reached the end of their rope. They spend most of their waking hours scrambling to sell off a car or hold down a second job. They barely have time to fend off calls from angry creditors, let alone write letters to Congress. And most are profoundly, desperately ashamed of their situation. For many, the decision to file for bankruptcy proves to be the darkest secret of their entire lives.

Politically speaking, they are almost invisible. And yet these families were up against what was already one of the best-organized, best-funded lobbies in America. (It would get even better organized and better funded in the years to come.)

The situation looked pretty hopeless. Mike had died, and the committee’s work had stalled. Now the banking industry would get what it wanted, and the families who needed some relief would get rolled. If ever a game was rigged, this was it.

Brady’s pitch was different from the one Mike had made a year earlier. The way Brady saw it, millions of middle-class families were sinking, and the banks were moving fast to make a bad situation worse. He admitted that the commission might not be able to make much progress and that we probably couldn’t achieve Mike’s ambition of improving the bankruptcy laws. But Brady thought we had a good chance of holding off the banks—at least for a while. If we stood our ground and started fighting right now, we might be able to deny them the opportunity to use the commission as a rubber stamp for everything they wanted. And if we could do that, maybe we could do more.

My three wishes were gone. Now it was about hanging on to whatever we could salvage from the existing law. Besides, as Brady pointed out, every day the current bankruptcy protections stayed strong was a day that another five thousand families would get the fresh start they so desperately needed.

Lord, this was discouraging. But I signed on, and we started stacking sandbags as fast as we could. Maybe we’d lose in the end, but every day we held on was a better day for struggling families.





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