Before buying a seat in getting elected to Congress to “represent” the 11th Congressional District three years ago, David Trott was a quiet, unassuming parasitic leech on the jugular vein of society. He had built up a vertically integrated business where he got money from foreclosing on poor people’s homes every step of the way.
Here’s how David Dayen described Trott’s operation on “All in with Chris Hayes” back in 2014:
CHRIS HAYES: What money is there to be made the process of [foreclosure]?
DAVID DAYEN: There’s not a whole lot of money to be made if you’re just doing the legal work. But Trott & Trott had a unique business strategy where they bought up practically every company down the line that gets a little bit of money out of the foreclosure process. There’s a requirement in Michigan that you have to put legal notices out in the newspaper. They bought the newspaper that did that. There’s a requirement that you have to do a title search. They bought the company that does the title searches and they get money off of that. They bought a real estate agency that then sells the houses after they go into foreclosure. So they kind of made money at every step down line and once you add that up, it’s lucrative.
HAYES: Yeah, they created, it’s sort of a “turnkey” foreclosure operation for the banks where they’re, basically, at every step in the line, they own it.
Once in Congress, Trott did pretty much exactly what you’d think he would do: He set out to pass laws that will financially benefit his foreclosure business. The most blatant of these was the introduction of H.R. 1849 – the “Practice of Law Technical Clarification Act of 2017”. This bill would “amend the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act to exclude law firms and licensed attorneys who are engaged in activities related to legal proceedings from the definition of a debt collector, to amend the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010 to prevent the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection from exercising supervisory or enforcement authority with respect to attorneys when undertaking certain actions related to legal proceedings, and for other purposes.”
As I wrote earlier this year, if the bill became law, Trott’s firm could go about its shady business of capitalizing off the financial hardship of families and turn a tidy profit without the nuisance of oversight from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau getting in the way. The bill is now in the House Committee on Financial Services and, fortunately, it hasn’t gone anywhere. But Trott knows his Republican colleagues have his back and that’s probably why he has decided not to run for his seat again in 2018.
I mean, why should he? With a corporatist despot like Trump in the White House and a cadre of complicit Republican supplicants in Congress, there’s not much Trott can add to the conversation. And there’s no question he can make more money in the private “screw over poor people” sector. It must be galling to him to be paid a paltry $174,000 per year. Heck, he can make that much and more every month operating his foreclosure racket.
We’re well rid of Trott and there are some exciting Democrats running like Haley Stevens and Fayrouz Saad. You can listen to our interview with Stevens on last week’s Sit and Spin Room podcast HERE. Without an incumbent multi-millionaire Republican on the ticket, the 2018 midterm election in the 11th Congressional District just got VERY interesting.
