Chabot came to Congress during the 1994 GOP takeover. He narrowly won his seventh term in 2006 with 52 percent of the vote, after his hometown paper, | John Shinkle/POLITICO Economy prompts GOP defections

Congressional Democrats, pushing controversial legislation to help struggling homeowners escape foreclosure, have an unlikely ally in their fight against conservative and industry opposition: Republican Rep. Steve Chabot of Ohio.

In his 13 years in the House, Chabot has earned a 97.5 percent lifetime rating from The American Conservative Union and has largely stuck to the Republican ranks, except to oppose some pork-laden spending bills.


But when foreclosures in his hometown of Cincinnati skyrocketed, Chabot found himself aligned with Democrats — and against his party’s leaders, his conservative colleagues and the White House.

Chabot’s bipartisan dalliance illustrates how tough economic times could erode the Republican conference that House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) is counting on to blunt Democratic victories running up to the November elections.

In the recent debate over a stimulus package, Rep. Phil English (R-Pa.) broke ranks to push for Democrat-backed extension of unemployment insurance benefits. And, in the foreclosure bankruptcy debate, Chabot’s fellow Republican Ohio congressman, Michael Turner, recently joined him as a co-sponsor of the bill. Turner’s district includes Dayton, where the foreclosure rate is even higher than in Chabot’s Cincinnati.

Chabot, and now Turner, supports empowering bankruptcy judges to help homeowners keep their houses, an adjustment supporters say could avert as many as 600,000 foreclosures.

It is legislation that is being driven through the House by Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), whose lifetime conservative score sits at just 5 percent but whose hometown district woes mirror those of Chabot’s district. Conyers’ hometown of Detroit led the nation’s cities in foreclosures last year, according to RealtyTrac Inc.

“Rep. Chabot is in a bellwether state, … so he’s seen the problems firsthand, closer than other representatives,” said Eric Stein, senior vice president of the Center for Responsible Lending, one of the consumer groups pushing for the bankruptcy measure.

Chabot’s support is crucial, Stein said, because the legislation will need bipartisan support to clear Congress.

Chabot came to Congress during the 1994 GOP takeover. He narrowly won his seventh term in 2006 with 52 percent of the vote, after his hometown paper, The Cincinnati Enquirer, reversed course from the previous election and endorsed his Democratic challenger. The paper, which favored Republicans for most other races, said Chabot’s “effectiveness seems to have peaked.”

The subprime mortgage crisis hit the national consciousness the following summer, but the alarm had sounded in Ohio earlier. Ohio’s Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, announced the creation of a foreclosure prevention task force in March.

That same month, Democratic State Rep. Steve Driehaus announced his plans to challenge Chabot in the state’s 1st Congressional District, which the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sees as ripe for takeover.

Chabot, meanwhile, was seeing the effects in his own neighborhood of Westwood on Cincinnati’s West Side, where small but sturdy middle-class homes, many more than 100 years old, line the streets. Even Westwood’s nicest streets suffered foreclosures, leaving behind vacant, uncared-for properties.

“It creates blight, and that hurts a neighborhood that’s on the cusp,” said John Eby, president of a nonprofit business development group that has lobbied Chabot, along with state and local officials, to do more to alleviate the housing pain. “Westwood’s a neighborhood that can either shoot through the roof, it can be the next Hyde Park, or it could be the next Gary, Ind.”

“Steve sees that everyday,” said Eby, who lives two blocks from Chabot. “When he’s driving to the airport, he’s driving by a lot of these houses that have been foreclosed upon.”

Cincinnati, while not the hardest-hit city in Ohio, still ranked 33rd on a national list of metro foreclosures for 2007, up 104 percent from 2006. Ohio, where foreclosure filings spiked more than 200 percent since 2005, ranked sixth last year among states suffering from the housing meltdown.

In late September, Reps. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) and Linda T. Sanchez (D-Calif.) introduced a bill that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of any primary residential mortgage, which current law prohibits.

A few weeks later, Chabot introduced a more limited version of the same proposal. And a November editorial in the Enquirer praised him and other officials for seeking creative solutions to the problem.

Although Miller and Chabot have served in Congress together for the past six years, the two men rarely interacted. But when Chabot introduced his version of the bankruptcy bill, Miller approached him on the House floor, “and we talked, and we continued talking,” Miller said.

Negotiations moved to the Judiciary Committee, where Conyers’ and Chabot’s staffs worked to find middle ground.

They reached a last-minute compromise to scale back the original Democratic bill. Only homeowners with nontraditional and subprime mortgages would be eligible for the bankruptcy help, and they would have to have a foreclosure notice in hand. Chabot also succeeding in limiting the legislation to existing loans made after Jan. 1, 2000.

Despite his work to cut the bill’s reach, the committee’s ranking Republican, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, has led the charge against it.

“It is the economic equivalent of throwing cold water on a freezing man,” Smith complained. He and other opponents argue the change will force up mortgage rates across the board, causing lending to fall off and the current housing problems to deepen.

Chabot wound up casting the lone Republican vote for the legislation when the House Judiciary Committee approved it in December.

And the vote didn’t score him points with his Republican leaders. “They weren’t supportive of the effort, let’s put it that way,” he said. “Some were more aggressively in opposition than others.”

In the end, though, “I’m responsible to the folks who sent me up here,” Chabot said. “In my view, this is in the best interest of the people in my community, and I think there are many other communities across the country that are in similar straits.”

Smith said he understood that Chabot needed to respond to his district’s suffering, even though he still believes the bankruptcy measure is bad policy. “It’s OK for Republicans to do what they need to for their districts,” Smith said. “There’s no hard feelings.”

But Miller said Republican leaders and the mortgage finance industry did put “tremendous pressure” on other Republicans and succeeded in keeping them off the bill.

“Most Republicans are reading verbatim from the talking points of the Mortgage Bankers Association,” Miller said.

Chabot remains convinced that the bankruptcy legislation will get a fair number of Republican votes, especially from lawmakers from states, such as Ohio, that have suffered high foreclosure rates. He continues to actively search for them, making his case through letters and meetings.

And he has reason to hope. A separate bill that seeks to curb the lax lending practices blamed for spurring the current crisis passed the House with 64 Republican votes, many from those representing states with the worst foreclosure problems.

Chabot’s decision to take a leadership role on the bankruptcy bill could quell some criticism on the housing issue at home. But Democrats are still gathering ammunition based on his other votes. They are already arguing that his support for trade and opposition to expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program have exacerbated the district’s troubles.

And the subprime issue isn’t going away.

Foreclosures have “been hitting Ohio hard for the last several years,” stressed Driehaus, the Democratic challenger, who said he has worked against predatory mortgage lending since 2002 and was a member of the state foreclosure task force.

To show real leadership on this issue, Driehaus said, Chabot should have been pushing legislation curbing such abusive practices years earlier, co-sponsoring the measures that Democrats had introduced in previous Congresses, rather than “showing up when the house is in ashes with a fire hose.”