Want To Make MERS Illegal? Mortgage Activists Need To Stand Up To Members Of Their State Legislature!

“Talk does bring about political action. Action brings political action.” -George S. Patton, Jr.

For the past three years, I have been telling mortgage activists and politicians alike that what MERS does is not illegal. It may be underhanded but like many underhanded things in done in America it is legal.  Now federal and state courts are beginning to agree with me.  Cases in California, Florida, Kentucky, Michigan and Texas have all been struck down and mortgage activists are  bombarding the internet with conspiracy theories about corrupt judges and other such nonsense.

The main reason why judges rule they way have to is because they have their hands tied on MERS. In most states there are no state laws that require mortgages to be recorded unless you are attempting to foreclose. Even in most cases unless the originating lender sold their interest in the debt, they don’t need to record the mortgage to foreclose.

The other reason is that the recordation of land records and enforcement of mortgages is a states’ rights issue under the 10th Amendment. This is why when a foreclosure case is remanded into federal court or filed in federal court, federal judges use state law to determine their rulings not federal law. For example, the federal Truth-In-Lending Act limits a homeowner 36 months to make a claim of rescission. However, Massachusetts has a state law that allows a 48 month to make a claim of rescission. Therefore, because of the 10th Amendment, Massachusetts statute would trump federal law in Massachusetts.

Mortgage activists who think they’re Gerry Spence or Alan Derschowitz will have a conniption fit and write some long nonsensical rant on Living Lies or one of the many Facebook pages that have popped over the past three years about federal judges being in the back pocket of the banks or some other nonsense.

Comments like this just underscore the fact that the majority of these activists have no idea what they are talking about and need to quit listening to other activists who listen to other activists who listen to activists who heard from their hero, convicted felon Carol Asbury, who heard it from Neil Garfield who pondered one hot day sitting next to his pool in Arizona.

School House Rock’s “The Three Branches of Government from Jill Lyon on Vimeo.

It also shows how little these mortgage activists actually understand about the fundamentals of how our system of government works or even how the fundamentals of capitalism have worked in the western world since the Medici Family began one of the first banks in the 14th Century.

One of the key elements in this whole MERS debate that activists seem to have missed watching School House Rock Cartoons from the 1970s and 1980s is that judges only interpret the law and rule based on their interpretation of the law. They don’t make the law. Laws are introduced and passed by the state legislature.

So if you don’t like the way judges rule on MERS issues, then get the law changed in your state banning alternative mortgage recording services like MERS.

Yes, I know it’s not as easy as posting drunken rants on Facebook or other social media websites. It’s also not as hard as people think it is as long as you remember that at their core, most politicians are spineless sheep with no testicular fortitude. You also need to remember that most politicians and political appointees went into politics because they couldn’t hack it in the private sector and political office was a huge pay raise for them. So as the Tea Party showed America, threatening them with their jobs can be a great incentive for them to do what you want.

One of my first mentors in politics back in the early 1990s was the late Tom Lawton. Had Tom not died in late 1990s, he would have become one of the most powerful political players in Michigan. Tom used to tell voters the best way to get a member of your county commission or state legislature’s attention was to call them up angrily tell them if they didn’t do whatever it was you wanted done, you were not only going to tell your friends, relatives and neighbors to vote against him or her in the next election you were going organize your neighborhood to go out and canvass for their opponent.

It usually worked because if you had enough people on your side, you could the attention of local media and the last thing members of the legislature want is to have their mug on TV or in Youtube videos like this guy:

Tactics like this do work. Here’s a perfect example, when the GOP led Michigan Legislature wanted to change Michigan’s foreclosure laws earlier this year, I wrote two blogs about it and blasted them out. The first, basically accusing the two main sponsors of prostituting themselves to special interests using pictures of gay men in bed together and thanks to the awesome technology of targeted SEO I made sure the article was widely seen in their very conservative districts. They soon began reconsidering their positions when they started getting calls from angry constituents. I then did a follow-up piece three days later laying out how out of touch the Michigan Bankers Association who actually drafted the legislation actually was and how it would put a huge dent in the profit margins of their clients and that alone causes sales of Rolaids and Tums to skyrocket on Wall Street. Then executives at JPMorgan, Bank of America and other mortgage servicers on Wall Street who began bombarding the Michigan Bankers Association with phone calls.