This is Brad Miller. I'm a Democratic Member of Congress from North Carolina.
I am the lead co-sponsor of a bill to prohibit predatory mortgage lending, HR1182. Mel Watt, the Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Barney Frank, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, are the other two principal sponsors.
I read the diary the other day on predatory mortgage lending that began with David Sirota's discussion of the Ney-Kanjorski bill, and the 96 comments that the diary provoked. Some of the comments were kind of entertaining--how did you get from mortgage lending to marrying box turtles? The discussion of the prohibition on usury in the Book of Leviticus was also interesting, although a strict prohibition on lending for interest would be kind of hard to square with the demands of modern commerce. (I know, the real point of that discussion was how selective the right wing is in the biblical passages they apply to modern politics).
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