Fraudulent Joinder Prevention Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. COHEN. I thank the ranking member.

Mr. Chairman, this bill which has come before our committee is one that the President has said he will veto because the President says that it is a ``solution that is looking for a problem'' or something to that effect.

This bill will make it more difficult for plaintiffs--people who have been harmed--to get relief because their cases in State courts can more easily be removed to Federal courts.

Now, the gentleman from Virginia is exactly right in that it has always been permitted. You can remove a case to Federal court if you can show that the plaintiff in the State court is not a proper plaintiff, if you can show that there is diversity of citizenship and not complete diversity.

The problem is that this has always been the rule, and it is the way the rule is now; but the courts have not come to us and said this is a problem and have asked us to correct it. We are correcting this because the corporate defendants want to make it easier for them to remove these cases to courts at which they will get better results. It will make it more difficult for plaintiffs to get judgments in State courts, which have historically been a bit healthier. This makes it almost impossible.

It increases litigation. It makes you, on the front end, have to show your case. It increases the cost to the courts and the burden on the courts. It will make the government larger because there will be more activity in Federal court if this becomes law. It will take from the States the right to determine their own State laws, which is generally the position of my friends on the other side--being for states' rights. In certain parts of our country, including in my part of the country, they have been known to sometimes talk poorly about the Federal courts. This gives the Federal courts more power.

It is an aberrant position that this side has taken, kind of like they took when we had reciprocity on gun permits. Rather than having States' laws be paramount, they thought the Federal law should superimpose it. We have got a situation by which the idea of States' laws being sovereign and States having more authority and giving more power to the States falls second to being for things that corporations and the NRA desire. In those cases, states' rights come second, and that is an unusual aberration.

This bill will probably not pass the Senate, but if it does, it will be vetoed, and it won't be overridden.

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Mr. COHEN. Yesterday we had a program at which we honored the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement. One of the Republican Senators confessed: ``I should have done more.'' I hear that from a lot of folks from the South. They go to Selma and they march and they say they should have done more.

Meanwhile, one can do something today because there is a Voting Rights Act that needs to be extended or amended and approved to give people the ultimate thing that America is most well-known for, which is the right to vote in a democracy.

Voting rights are in peril in our country, income inequality continues, and millions of Americans of both parties are voting for candidates who appeal to those folks. Race relations between police and minority communities are fraught, young people have tremendous burdens of student loan debt, and our infrastructure is in danger.

Let's deal with those issues and let's make Congress great again.

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