The bills

287 of 435: the House side, and the amendment that actually moved

Reference The bills 2009 terminations

TFR-2026-02 · First published 2026-08-05 · Last substantively revised 2026-08-05

H.R. 2743 was the House half of the effort to give terminated General Motors and Chrysler dealers their franchise agreements back. A majority of the House of Representatives put its name on it in writing, as did 45 of the 71 members of the committee it was sent to, and that committee’s chairman. Its entire legislative record is three actions, none of them a vote. The dealer provision that did move that summer was written by a different member, travelled on an appropriations bill, passed the House on a spending vote, and was gone by the time the bill was signed.

The companion Senate bill, S. 1304, and the question of how nearly identical the two texts were, are treated in this publication’s page on the two bills together. This page is the House record: who put their names on H.R. 2743 and when, what the committee that held it looked like, and what happened to the one piece of dealer-restoration language that reached the House floor.

§1 The bill, and the fourteen names on its face

H.R. 2743, the Automobile Dealer Economic Rights Restoration Act of 2009, runs to three sections on three printed pages. Section 1 gives the short title. Section 2 states four findings, among them that forced dealer closures would be “especially devastating” in rural communities, where dealers “serve as a critical economic engine,” and that dealers have historically held franchise-agreement protections under state law. Section 3 carries the operative weight: a manufacturer in which the federal government held an ownership interest, or which took federal loans, could not deprive a dealer of its economic rights as they stood before the Chrysler filing of April 30, 2009 and the General Motors filing of June 1, 2009, and had to restore and take assignment of the pre-bankruptcy franchise agreement at the dealer’s request. Section 3(c) states that nothing in the Act was intended to void the court-approved sale of substantially all of Chrysler LLC’s assets to New CarCo Acquisition LLC, or a comparable General Motors sale approved after the bill’s introduction.1 The design was restoration of the agreements without reopening the sales.

A bill as introduced prints its original cosponsors on its own face, and that list is a useful thing on a bill later described as a partisan or a regional cause. H.R. 2743 was introduced by Mr. Maffei “for himself” and fourteen others: Mr. Kratovil, Mr. Van Hollen, Mr. Hoyer, Mr. McMahon, Ms. Sutton, Mr. Bartlett, Mr. Hall of New York, Mr. Posey, Mr. Heinrich, Mr. Paulsen, Ms. Shea-Porter, Mr. Manzullo, Mr. DeFazio, and Mr. Davis of Alabama.1 Four of the fourteen — Bartlett, Posey, Paulsen and Manzullo — were Republicans, and the Democrats included the Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer. It was referred the same day to the Committee on Financial Services, which is where it stayed.

§2 The five minutes it got

The day after introduction, on June 9, 2009, the Speaker pro tempore recognised Maffei for five minutes. His statement appears in the Congressional Record under the bill’s own name, and it is the only floor statement the bill’s own record contains.2

We want to preserve GM and Chrysler car dealers’ rights to recourse under State law and, at the request of an automobile dealer, require GM and Chrysler to reinstate franchise agreements in effect prior to those companies’ bankruptcies.

Rep. Daniel B. Maffei, 155 Cong. Rec. H6314–H6315 (daily ed. June 9, 2009)

The same statement records two efforts that preceded the bill: a letter to the administration’s auto task force in May 2009, which Maffei says he wrote with Rep. Christopher Lee of New York and more than 65 other members, and a letter to the President signed with Rep. Chris Van Hollen, Majority Leader Hoyer and, in Maffei’s account, over 100 colleagues.2 Whatever the House lacked on this subject in mid-2009, it was not signatures.

§3 The arithmetic, and the committee that held it

H.R. 2743 finished with 286 cosponsors. With its sponsor that is 287 of the 435 seats in the House, on the record, in writing — and the signatures arrived in a rush and then stopped. Fourteen members were on the bill at introduction. By June 30, 2009, 202 of the 286 had signed; by July 31 the count stood at 271. Six more signed in September and seven in October. The last two, Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts and Rep. David Reichert of Washington, signed on December 8, 2009 — the day the House and Senate leadership announced the compromise that became the arbitration programme. Nobody signed after that.3

The number that explains more than 287, and that appears not to have been printed anywhere else, is the count inside the committee that held the bill. The Official Congressional Directory for the 111th Congress lists 71 members of the House Committee on Financial Services. Matched against the cosponsor roll by name, state and party, 45 of those 71 were on H.R. 2743: 44 cosponsors, plus Maffei himself, who sat on the committee his own bill was referred to. The committee’s chairman, Barney Frank of Massachusetts, cosponsored on June 9, 2009, the day after introduction. Its ranking Republican, Spencer Bachus of Alabama, did not.4

A committee majority is not a committee decision. There was no hearing on H.R. 2743, no markup, no report and no vote. Its complete legislative record is three actions: introduction and referral to the Committee on Financial Services on June 8, and the sponsor’s own remarks the next day.3 What the record establishes is that it stopped. The record does not state why it stopped, and this page does not assign a reason.

§4 Four bills, one subject

H.R. 2743 was not alone, and the crowd is itself a signal about where the idea was stuck. Between June 8 and July 31, 2009 four bills addressed the terminations, three of them under a single short title.

Sponsors, dates and cosponsor counts are from the congress.gov bill records, retrieved 2026-08-05.356 H.R. 2796, introduced by Rep. Steven C. LaTourette of Ohio two days after Maffei’s bill, carries the identical short title and a different text: three findings instead of four, no rural-economy finding, and an operative section written in the vocabulary of bankruptcy practice rather than of restoration.

… no automobile manufacturer in which the Federal Government has an Federal financial interest or ownership interest may deprive an automobile dealer of its economic rights under a dealer agreement and must assume (or assign to a successor) each dealer agreement which is valid and in existence (and has not been lawfully terminated under applicable State law) before the date of the commencement of a case under title 11 of the United States Code by such automobile manufacturer.

H.R. 2796, 111th Cong. § 3(a) (2009), as introduced

That wording is worth holding on to. Where H.R. 2743 told a manufacturer to restore the agreement, H.R. 2796 told it to assume the agreement or assign it, and where it did neither, to require the new entity created in the bankruptcy to enter into a new dealer agreement “on the same terms as existed immediately before such date.”5 It is this version, not the one with 286 cosponsors, that reappears five weeks later in a bill that passed the House.

The fourth bill, H.R. 3450, the Automobile Dealers Fair Competition Act of 2009, was introduced by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas on July 31, 2009. It went not to Financial Services but to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and on September 8 to that committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, which is the last entry in its record. Jackson Lee reintroduced it as H.R. 75 on January 5, 2011, in the following Congress, where it also died without a vote.6

§5 The provision that moved, and where it went

On July 10, 2009 the House Committee on Appropriations reported H.R. 3170, the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, 2010. Among the general provisions in Title VII — immediately after a provision directing the Attorney General to hand Congress the records of Miranda warnings given to captured terrorism suspects, and immediately before the housekeeping clause saying which titles the general provisions reach — the committee had added a new section 745. Its report explains the addition in a single sentence.7

Section 745. The Committee includes a new provision to reinstate the same legal rights of auto dealers to remain in business that they had before the companies filed for bankruptcy in the case of auto companies partially owned by the Federal Government.

H.R. Rep. No. 111-202, at Title VII general provisions (July 10, 2009)

The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, auditing the terminations a year later, attributes that amendment to LaTourette and records the ground stated for it: the amendment “required reinstatement of the terminated dealerships because ‘the closing of these dealerships was punitive and secretive.’”8 The text bears the attribution out. Section 745, as reported and as passed, is the assume-or-assign formulation of H.R. 2796 rewritten as a limitation on the use of appropriated funds — the only shape in which a policy command can ride an appropriations bill.9

The House passed H.R. 3170 on July 16, 2009 by 219 to 208, with one member voting present. The division was not the coalition that had signed H.R. 2743: 215 Democrats and four Republicans voted yes, and 38 Democrats and 170 Republicans voted no.10 The dealer provision passed the House inside a spending bill, on a spending-bill vote. No member ever cast a recorded vote on it as a dealer question.

From there the Financial Services bill was folded into H.R. 3288, which became the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2010. The conference report was agreed to by the House on December 10, 2009 and by the Senate on December 13, and the President signed the bill on December 16, 2009 as Public Law 111-117.11 Two days before the House acted on the conference report, on December 8, the House and Senate leadership had announced compromise language requiring binding arbitration instead.8

What happened to section 745 in conference can be read directly off the enacted law. In Division C, Title VII of Public Law 111-117, section 745 is no longer about dealers at all: it amends title 5 of the United States Code on differential pay for federal employees called to active duty. Section 746 is the same housekeeping provision the House had passed. Section 747, which had no counterpart in the House-passed bill, is the arbitration programme, under which a covered dealership “shall have the right to seek, through binding arbitration, continuation, or reinstatement of a franchise agreement, or to be added as a franchisee to the dealer network of the covered manufacturer.”12 The word “reinstatement” survived the conference. The command to reinstate did not.

§6 Cosponsorship and floor time

The general lesson here outlives the subject, and it is not that Congress was indifferent. Two hundred and eighty-seven members took a position on this bill in public. The lesson is about which currency counts.

A cosponsorship is a signature. It costs a member nothing, commits no vote and creates no obligation on anyone to act. In particular it does not place a bill on a committee’s agenda, because scheduling belongs to the committee, and H.R. 2743 is the demonstration: a majority of the House, a majority of the committee of referral and that committee’s chairman were all on it, and it was never called up. Floor time and committee agendas are the scarce goods, and they are allocated by a small number of people.

The provision that reached the President’s desk that year did so on a vehicle that had to move — an appropriations bill with a fiscal year attached to it. That is also why it arrived in a weaker form, as a funding limitation rather than a freestanding right, and why it could be traded away in conference without a recorded vote on the trade. The bill with 287 names produced no vote at all; the amendment nobody cosponsored produced a House-passed provision, and that provision was then replaced by a different mechanism behind a closed conference door.

§7 Considerations

Because the bills died and section 747 passed, the two are often described as versions of the same thing. The texts do not support that. H.R. 2743 would have required the manufacturer to restore the franchise agreement itself, at the dealer’s request, while expressly preserving the dealer’s recourse under state law. Section 747 required no restoration of anything: it gave a covered dealership the right to seek continuation, reinstatement or addition to the network through binding arbitration, on a statutory clock and against seven statutory factors. One is a remedy; the other is a hearing.

Two things cut the other way and belong on the page. H.R. 2743 was drafted narrowly, against two named companies in two named bankruptcies, and its text says nothing about how the duty it created would be enforced or what a court should do if a manufacturer refused; section 747 at least named a forum, deadlines and a decision-maker. And the appropriations route that produced section 745 is a route with a known cost — provisions that ride a spending bill are traded in conference, which is precisely what happened. Which of these instruments should have prevailed is not a question this publication answers, and none of this is legal advice.

§8 Still open

Nothing in the federal record has reopened. Jackson Lee’s reintroduced bill died in the 112th Congress, no successor to the Automobile Dealer Economic Rights Restoration Act has been enacted, and the arbitration window section 747 created closed on January 25, 2010, forty days after enactment. There is no live federal mechanism for a dealership terminated in 2009 to invoke in 2026.12

The shape of the coalition, though, is still visible in state legislatures, and it still favours narrow bills over general ones. Washington’s ESSB 6354, which widens direct-sales authority to additional electric-vehicle manufacturers, was first read on February 19, 2026, passed the House 84 to 9 on March 11 and cleared the Senate on final passage 47 to 2 the next day; the governor signed it on March 24, 2026 as Chapter 186, 2026 Laws, effective June 11, 2026.13 Thirty-three days from first reading to signature, for a bill written to fit a small number of named companies. The general question H.R. 2743 raised — what a manufacturer owes the dealers who hold its franchises — has moved nowhere near that fast anywhere since 2009. What that carve-out says, and the litigation running beside it, are set out in this publication’s page on the 2026 direct-sales fights. Status as of 2026-08-05.