Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act

The US House voted and passed the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act (367-59, 1 Present, 6 Not Voting). The intent of this legislation is to improve enforcement of mortgage fraud, securities fraud, financial institution fraud, and other frauds related to federal assistance and relief programs and for the recovery of funds lost to these frauds.

This legislation was sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). Senator Leahy's press release concerning the bill can be found here.

The Heritage Foundation's Senior Legal Research Fellow, Brian Walsh made this statement about the legislation:

Congress has many methods of responding to crises, yet some Members of Congress consistently choose a politically popular and expedient route: more and harsher criminal laws, criminal enforcement, and criminal punishment. The knee-jerk congressional response to virtually every crisis is to add to the over 4,400 federal criminal offenses already on the books and increase already harsh federal criminal penalties.

Not surprisingly, some Senators are bent on "solving" the subprime meltdown and the resulting financial crisis by adding more criminal offenses to the currently monstrous compilation of criminal laws. The faulty premise of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act (S. 386) (FERA), co-sponsored by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA), is that criminal activity caused the financial mess America is facing and that criminal prosecution and punishment can fix it. This is precisely the sort of reflexive criminalization that is behind the current over-federalization of crime and that Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have stated they abhor because it has contributed to the record federal prison population.

North Carolina delegation voted:

Butterfield: YES

Etheridge: YES
Jones: YES
Price: YES
Foxx: NO
Coble: YES
McIntyre: YES
Kissell: YES
Myrick: NO
McHenry: NO
Shuler: YES
Watt: YES
Miller: YES