Yet that argument is belied by the credit industry's own aggressive marketing. Even while complaining of consumer irresponsibility, credit card companies are marketing their Visas and MasterCards and Discovers ever more aggressively, extending consumer credit to unheard-of heights, and returning with unprecedented profits. According to the Consumer Federation of America, in the third quarter of 2000 alone, credit companies mailed out 2.5 billion solicitations, extended 13 percent more credit than a year earlier and enjoyed profits at a five-year high.

The legislative angle of the bankruptcy bill, however, is only one half of the campaign to change bankruptcy protections. As with so many other hot-button legal issues, this pivotal debate now playing out in Congress owes much to the long arm of Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

In 1994, amid growing concern over sharply rising personal bankruptcy filings, Congress created a federal Bankruptcy Commission to consider whether changes to the current system (which dates back to 1980) might be in order. Congress, the president and the chief justice each were allocated appointments to the nine-member panel. Rehnquist took the opportunity to name Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court nominee who withdrew after admitting he'd smoked pot) and Judge Edith Jones, of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Both Ginsburg and Jones are prominent exponents of the so-called "Law and Economics" school of conservative judicial thinking, whose conferences and publications are routinely sponsored by large corporations and other business interests.

After two years of contentious hearings, a majority of the bankruptcy commission voted to support a report that declared the roots of the bankruptcy crisis caused by a growing rift between wages and debt. The commission supported a series of reforms widely regarded by consumer advocates and legal moderates, including President Clinton, as balanced. The reforms included measures such as clear rules on when the victims of corporate abuses (like women with Dow Corning breast implants) can join the line of creditors seeking part of a bankrupt corporation's assets.

But Rehnquist's commissioners, Ginsburg and Jones, along with two commissioners named by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, dissented from that analysis and those proposals. In particular, Jones -- as a Texan, now high on the list of possible Bush Supreme Court nominees -- became one of the most influential and acerbic voices in the bankruptcy debate, with the ear of bankruptcy reform sponsors Grassley and Gekas. In 1999, Jones told Congress that credit card companies are being "demonized" in the bankruptcy debate. What's really needed, she said last fall, is to send "an important moral signal" to consumers who are "violating their promises willy-nilly." Today's steep increase in bankruptcy filings, she wrote in a 1998 law review article, should be blamed not on the growth of consumer debt but on student loans, a higher minimum wage and high tax rates.

Jones accuses critics of pro-bank bankruptcy reform of "standing in the way of history." And she says middle-class consumers should "pay for the privilege" of bankruptcy protection by paying back a higher portion of their assets.

Jones does not limit her conservative bankruptcy agenda to lobbying Congress. As an appellate judge, Jones is periodically called upon to review the findings of bankruptcy court judges. While much of bankruptcy law rests on arcane procedures that do not easily translate into neat ideological categories, Jones, like some other conservative jurists, has had occasional opportunity to reinterpret bankruptcy law in creative fashion. Take the matter of child support. The current federal law allows bankruptcy judges to enforce child-support orders, even putting a lien on a deadbeat dad's home if necessary. But in 1999, Jones wrote a Fifth Circuit opinion declaring that a local Texas "homestead act" trumps the federal bankruptcy code's child-support protections. In effect, according to Jones's ruling, any deadbeat dad in the nation need only buy a home in Texas to keep it safe from the court's reach.

Jones' opinion amounted to an unprecedented intrusion of old-fashioned states' rights conservatism into the federal bankruptcy realm, eroding a national policy designed to protect single parents. If it were an isolated case of an activist conservative, that would be notable enough. But in New York, California and elsewhere, appellate courts dominated by Reagan and Bush nominees have followed Jones' lead, intervening in similar ways in bankruptcy cases. In some cases, they've made it harder for citizens poisoned by corporate pollution to collect settlements; in others, they've declared rulings by longtime bankruptcy judges too "debtor friendly," too soft on consumers.

If conservative jurists like Jones are remaking bankruptcy with their rulings and policy proposals, they are also quite literally changing the face of bankruptcy courtrooms. Under law, the country's bankruptcy judges are appointed by the federal appeals courts for the region in which they sit. Who gets chosen, it turns out, is very much a matter of politics -- in particular, the bankruptcy politics of increasingly conservative, anti-consumer appellate benches, and the politics of the banking and credit industries.

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