Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act of 2022
Floor Speech
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Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Madam Speaker, I thank the chairman for the time today to speak on the FAIR Act, and I ask my fellow colleagues to vote ``yes'' on this bill.
My colleagues and I on the other side of the aisle will disagree on much, but on one thing we can all agree, and that is the Constitution of the United States of America is a great document.
At the beginning of that document is the preamble, and the first 17 words of the preamble read as follows: ``We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice,'' and then it goes on. But you can see at the very top, the ideal of the Founders was to establish justice in this country.
So they went about the Constitution by giving power to the legislative branch in Article I, to the executive branch in Article Number II, and to the judicial branch, the Court system, to establish justice in Article III.
And then, in the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution where the Bill of Rights for we, the people, gave us our individual rights, with the exception of Amendment 10, which gives the States all powers not reserved to the Federal Government.
So the Bill of Rights, in the Seventh Amendment to the Constitution, it guarantees the right to a jury trial, a trial by a jury of one's peers for any civil case where the amount in controversy exceeds $20 or more. That is still the law in this country. That is our Constitution.
But the Supreme Court has seen fit to erode our freedoms insofar as a right to a jury trial by allowing corporations, employers, to take away that right from people. That is forced arbitration.
Gretchen Carlson, with FOX News, when she came forward with her claims that she was fired because she resisted the demands of Roger Ailes to have sex with him, and she filed a civil rights action, she was met with the bar of a forced arbitration clause in the employment agreement that she signed.
I was so happy, Madam Speaker, to attend a bill signing ceremony a couple of weeks ago at the White House where my colleague, Cheri Bustos' legislation, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act was signed into law.
We need to go further. We just heard, within the last couple of weeks, of former coach Brian Flores of the Miami Dolphins, who filed a lawsuit against the Miami Dolphins and a couple of other clubs, as well as the NFL, alleging that he had been discriminated against racially. He had been denied hiring opportunities and retention and compensation. He filed a complaint.
He is met by the NFL with an arbitration clause. If it is good enough for sexual assault and sexual harassment cases, constitutional rights, those rights, that same ability needs to enure to those who have been aggrieved by racial discrimination and other types of discrimination. And consumers need to be allowed to assert their Seventh Amendment right when it comes to a dispute with a shop owner or shopkeeper.
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Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. And so, what we have seen with the U.S. Supreme Court is they have allowed corporations to have rights under our Constitution. Nowhere in it is there a section for corporations.
Let's restore freedom to the people of this country as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights under the Constitution that we all live under. It is a constitutional right that, when there is a dispute, a party should be able to take that dispute to court and have a jury trial, and no forced contract should deprive that person of that constitutional right.
That is what the FAIR Act will do. It will render unenforceable, after the act is signed into law, unenforceable, any pre-dispute forced arbitration clauses in consumer agreements and in employment agreements, and also in civil rights cases, causes of action and also antitrust actions.
Mr. BISHOP of North Carolina. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
The distinguished gentleman from Georgia suggests that this bill is about whether or not we are preserving the right to jury trial in the Constitution. But I submit, that is not really what is at stake.
The question is whether you resolve a dispute through arbitration or you go to the court system. If you go to the court system, there are innumerable paths within the court system that lead to not having your case decided by a jury.
In fact, only about 1 to 2 percent of cases end up proceeding to a determination by a jury. That means 99 or 98 out of 100 cases do not. They might be dismissed on a motion for summary judgment. They might be dismissed for failure to state a claim. There may be settlement processes that come to fruition during the course of the case.
But it is almost never true--think about that--that a case in court goes to a jury. So this notion that this bill, by eliminating the choice of arbitration, somehow preserves everybody's jury trial magically is a false choice.
And more to that point, the gentleman from Georgia, and also the chairman, in the inception, noted that we have just had a bill signing of a bill that excepts from enforceable arbitration agreements the category of sexual assault, sexual harassment. The majority of Republicans supported that.
The majority of Republicans will not support this bill because it represents the throwing out of the entire mechanism of arbitration, which has been, as I indicated, a feature of the legal landscape used with great utility and utilized throughout the last hundred years almost, since 1925.
Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Bentz).
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