DAVID SIROTA: Joe Biden has been working on bankruptcy legislation for the last three decades. He got into the Senate in the 1970s. He was on the Judiciary Committee. There began to be a push in the 1970s to reduce courts’ ability to lower student debt in bankruptcy court, starting in the 1970s. It started with government loans. There was a push in the 1970s to say that students would have to wait five years from graduating to be able to seek bankruptcy protections for their government loans. That was a bill that Joe Biden helped craft. He was on the conference committee. There was a series of other bills through the 1980s and into the 1990s in which Joe Biden worked on the same set of issues, lengthening the amount of time students would have to wait to be able to access bankruptcy protections for educational debt. And then, as you noted, into the late 1990s and the 2000s, there was this push by Biden—he was a key Democrat pushing the bankruptcy bill that was ultimately signed by President George W. Bush that eliminated the ability of most Americans to seek bankruptcy protections not only for their government loans, but also for their private student loans. So that was a big—a big objective of the private lenders. At the time, over his career, Joe Biden has raised about $2 million from the financial sector, while he’s been sculpting these bills. And again, he played the key role throughout the last three decades in the Democratic Party—really, in Congress—pushing these bills. Elizabeth Warren issued a paper, when she wasn’t in the Senate, when she was a professor, talking about how pivotal Joe Biden was in pushing these laws to, again, make it more difficult for students to reduce their student debt when they are in bankruptcy court. It really puts a prohibition on the judges themselves, saying you really can’t lower student debt, like you can most other forms of debt, when you are in bankruptcy court.