I'm a consumer bankruptcy attorney who spoke recently at a training session for the local bankruptcy bar.

I volunteered, realizing for the last few months that I had to learn the new law, the [ laughably so-called ] Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 signed into law in April and effective on October 17.

Let me simply say, it's a poorly-drafted a statute as can be imagined. Not that it isn't full of detail, deadlines and demands but, after 8 years in Congress before passage, no one [ apparently ] tried very hard to make it either easy or elegant or effective to use.

Any writer could accurately deduce from this that Congress held in contempt the poor and financially inept whom they regulate in this law, and also the lawyers of the inept, whom they regulated [ arguably ] worse.

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Like the good soldier I am, I prepared for my speech by focusing on the nuts and bolts that people will have to know to make the law work. Can't complain about the results if you don't put in the work to learn how the new system functions. Etc. I put in the time.

Like the good citizen I am, I assumed fundamentally good intentions from Congress. Oh those Congresspersons, and the credit card companies for which they stand, despise me and people like me, but they have their reasons. It's a democracy and people-like-me lost this battle. In a democracy, you are required to respect the views of others, at least up to the point you know they are powered more by malice [ in the medieval Latin sense of malizia, which is bad faith in the existentialist sense ].

Some other presenters though tackled the even more offensive parts, the actual restrictions on consumer bankruptcy attorneys.

I'd avoided reading those; I don't like to be told what to do. I was working up to it.

Imagine my surprise when I found that the Department of Justice, although fully aware that the changes may force debtor attorneys out of business on purely economic grounds [ the changes in required practice being that expensive to implement ] ... said that the Department of Justice is enthusiastic about suing the attorneys to establish, by litigation, the interpretations of the more poorly written, ambiguous clauses.

In case non-lawyers [ or persons accustomed to getting regular paychecks either for that matter ] miss the nuance -- when you regularly get poorly paid by poor people and then get sued by the Department of Justice too, you must defend yourself against its regularly-paid lawyers at your own expense and it can ruin you.

On top of that, DOJ is toying with the idea that one of the less-well-written phrases in the new law restricts the content of the legal advice that can be given to poor people-- a gag rule. There is a exception for advisers to the wealthy-and financially-inept. When assisting the wealthy, you can discuss any and all strategies with them but some strategies must be concealed from the poor ....

To be fair, this isn't a done deal yet. I believe the Speaker brought it up as a form of argument called "in terrorem" -- that is, to create by fear a result [ in this case, a gag rule ] that cannot be compelled by the law.

If you believe in America, now would be a good time to be afraid [ as if New Orleans wasn't warning enough ].