Boehner Fights Foreclosure Relief As Housing Crisis Ravages His District

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Regina Moore has lived in her Hamilton, Ohio, home, in the heart of House Speaker John Boehner's district, for 50 years.

Her husband passed away in 2005, and in 2008 she took out a new $72,000 mortgage so she could afford to pay her medical bills. She had a steady job, having worked at the Champion Printing Company in Cincinnati for more than two decades. Her monthly payments on her $86,000 home amounted to about $450.

It was a simple mortgage for a simple home -- no exploding payments or swimming pools.

But last year, at the age of 70, Regina lost her job, and her $1100 a month Social Security payment wasn't enough to make ends meet. She called her son, Jeff, who works three part-time jobs, to ask for help.

"She had a mortgage on her home and just couldn't afford to pay the bills anymore," Jeff said. "She went through a period where she was embarrassed. She didn't want to say that she couldn't get a job or couldn't pay her mortgage. And finally it got to a point where she was facing foreclosure and called me."

While Jeff, a local housing group and a lender ultimately helped Regina modify her mortgage so she could stay in her home, many of her fellow Ohioans haven't been so fortunate.

Hamilton, about 45 minutes outside of Cincinnati, has one of the highest foreclosure rates in Butler County. And Butler County has been a foreclosure hotspot for years. Along with the Cleveland and Columbus areas, Cincinnati and its surroundings have seen the predatory subprime binge come and go and now watch as the crumbling job market pushes more and more homeowners into financial ruin.

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THE SPEAKER IS SILENT


Over the past three years, lawmakers across Ohio have pressed for foreclosure relief, often crossing party lines to do so. But Boehner has never joined the effort. When Rep. Steve Chabot, a fellow Republican whose district borders Boehner's and shares many of its economic hardships, backed a 2008 bill to grant relief to homeowners in bankruptcy courts, Boehner refused to sign on. When Democrats passed a separate foreclosure prevention bill later that year, Boehner blasted it as "a bailout for scam artists and speculators."

When banks briefly halted foreclosures amid the robo-signing scandal last November, President Barack Obama vetoed a bill that would have made it easier for banks to push through improper foreclosures and harder for homeowners to show they had been wronged. Boehner, along with 168 Republicans and 16 Democrats, embarked on a failed effort to override that veto, even at a time when Ohio's own Attorney General had begun suing banks for fraud.

Boehner is rarely pressed on housing issues publicly, even though the foreclosure crisis marches on unabated. While his office declined multiple invitations to comment for this story, the House Speaker made the case for his opposition to foreclosure aid in a recent appearance on CBS News' Face The Nation.

"Over the last couple years, Congress has really set up four programs to help with those mortgage problems," Boehner told CBS' Harry Smith. "And unfortunately, none of those have worked. And all they've really done is dragged out the length of time for the market to clear the problems."