On Friday, the American Bar Association hosted a conference in Washington on national security. Among the speakers was Scott Stucky, General Counsel of the Senate Committee on Armed Services and President Bush’s nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. When the subject of the amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill that protected military families from payday lenders, according to someone in the audience, Stucky dismissed it as “junk.”
The Department of Defense had asked Congress to cap interest rates to military families at 36%, effectively outlawing the 400% loans and other high priced lending practices that the military said undermine military readiness, harms the morale of troops and their families, and add to the cost of fielding an all-volunteer fighting force. Sorry, Mr. Stucky, but this isn’t just “junk.”
DoD had done its best to make clear that predatory lending affects troop readiness. The Center for Responsible Lending estimated that the payday lenders had one in five military families in their clutches. After the DoD report came out, statistics also showed that there had been a nine-fold increase in the number of troops who have lost their security clearances because of debt problem, further undercutting our ability to field an effective fighting force.
We don’t need to talk about the ultimate sacrifice that military families are called on to make. And I realize I may be prickly on this subject. But when they finally catch a break and one small statute provides a little protection from a multi-billion dollar industry that was stealing the security and stability of their private lives, it stuns me to see a government official dismiss that protection as “junk.”
