WASHINGTON – Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) sponsored the Family Farmer Bankruptcy Clarification Act of 2017, which is now on its way to the President’s desk for his signature. The bipartisan bill would resolve a 2012 Supreme Court ruling on a previous bankruptcy reform law that saddled family farmers with additional challenges when falling on hard times.
“The President will soon be signing the bipartisan bill that I sponsored overturning the Supreme Court decision to do what I tried to get done in the 1990s to be fair to the family farmers reorganizing in bankruptcy,” Grassley said.
Grassley was the original sponsor of legislation in 1986, during the farm crisis in Iowa, to create Chapter 12 of the U.S. bankruptcy code. This was a temporary, yet important development for farmers struggling to reorganize debt and continue family farming operations. In the years since, Grassley succeeded in making Chapter 12 permanent and continues to defend the law, including after an Internal Revenue Service interpretation that undermined the spirit and purpose of Chapter 12. The Supreme Court decision five years ago made it necessary to legislate again.
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