We Deserve Better Democrats Than Gonzalez

It’s deeply disappointing to find that someone you voted for isn’t living up to their stated principles. Late last week I noticed a news article about a bill that if passed will make it legal for attorneys doing debt collecting to harass debtors once again. While that in itself is disturbing the fact that our congressman, Vicente Gonzalez, is the co-sponsor of the bill is even more so. The bill passed out of committee with a largely party line vote with Gonzalez being the only Democrat voting in favor.

The bill Gonzalez sponsored would prevent the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (CFPB) from exercising supervision or enforcement authority over them and exempt debt collection attorneys from the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). H.R. 5082 will enable some debt collection law firms to engage in abusive and deceptive practices and get away with it.

Public interest attorneys like Carolyn E. Coffey, the Director of Economic Justice at Mobilization for Justice, and Claudia Wilner, Senior Attorney at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, who wrote the article say they know that debt collection attorneys engage in some of the worst debt collection misconduct. Only the FDCPA and the CFPB keeps them even partially in check.

In an example they wrote about their organizations used the FDCPA to sue a debt collection law firm for obtaining hundreds of thousands of default judgments against unsuspecting people,  mostly low-income people of color, by filing false affidavits with the court. The debt collection attorneys used the fraudulently obtained judgments to freeze their victims’ bank accounts, garnish their wages, and coerce them into entering “voluntary” payment agreements. Our FDCPA lawsuit returned tens of millions of dollars to their clients as part of a settlement and resulted in reversing of 200,000 state court judgments.

In a 2016 report by Human Rights Watch, Rubber Stamp Justice: US Courts, Debt Buying Corporations, and the Poor, the authors documented widespread abuses by debt collection attorneys in courts across the country, including cases brought beyond the statute of limitations and hundreds of cases where people never received notice of the suits, all of which resulted in wrongful judgments, often against the wrong people.

Congressional District 15 here in Texas is one of the poorest in the nation and based on the propensity for debt collection attorneys who abuse the law to do so in low-income communities it is likely that we’ll be among those to suffer the most. I find it deeply disturbing that it is our elected representative working to open the door to abuses that were outlawed 30 years ago when Congress first added attorneys to the definition of debt collector in the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. When Vicente Gonzalez met with voters in the district during the 2016 primary he claimed he would work for all the people here, his actions say something else entirely. Apparently Gonzalez made friends with the wrong kind of people at the New York office of his law practice.

It isn’t enough to elect more Democrats to Congress or the Texas legislature, we have to work to elect better Democrats too.