Speaker John Boehner has Consistently Opposed Foreclosure Relief Programmes
Stephanie Moes of Legal Aid Society (Southwest Ohio) said that in some parts of Butler County predatory lending had been rampant. But recently the families are battling the downturn in the economy. These people tried their best to manage their mortgages; they never bought anything that was to them unaffordable but now they are facing unemployment that is persisting and refusing to go away.
Since the previous three years the legislators across the state have been pushing for foreclosure mitigation – frequently disregarding party lines for this purpose. But speaker Republican John Boehner was never part of this.
In 2008 Rep. Steve Chabot (Republican) the borders of whose districts borders that of Boehner, gave his support to a bill that would give relief to house owners in the bankruptcy courts; but Boehner declined to ink it When the Democrats passed another prevention bill for foreclosure later in 2008 Boehner came down heavily on it as “a bailout for scam artists and speculators”.
During the middle of the robo-signing mayhem last fall the banks for a short time halted their foreclosure operations. Last November President Obama used his veto against a bill that would have made it easy for the banks to go ahead with wrong foreclosures and more difficult for the house owners to prove that they had been victimized.
But Boehner together with his Republican colleagues and 16 from the Democrat camp tried but failed to override this veto. It happened at a time when the attorneys general had already started bringing lawsuits against the banks for fraudulent practices.
Boehner has always been reluctant to talk about housing issues but recently speaking to Harry Smith of CBS he said, “Over the last couple years, Congress has really set up four programmes to help with those mortgage problems.
And unfortunately, none of those have worked. And all they’ve really done is dragged out the length of time for the market to clear the problems”. Thus Boehner has been persistently opposing foreclosure relief programmes on the ground that these have been delaying the curing of the market. This argument might apply to the failure of the HAMP plan but in the district Boehner represents in the market there is nothing left to clear.
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