The bills

S. 1304 and H.R. 2743: one bill, two numbers, and no vote

Reference The bills 2009 terminations

TFR-2026-01 · First published 2026-08-05 · Last substantively revised 2026-08-05

In the summer of 2009, after General Motors and Chrysler ended thousands of franchise agreements in about seven weeks, two bills with the same name were introduced to give those agreements back. S. 1304 was introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley [R-IA] on June 18, 2009, and drew 48 cosponsors. H.R. 2743, introduced by Rep. Daniel B. Maffei [D-NY-25] on June 8, 2009, drew 286 — which, with its sponsor, is 287 of the 435 members of the House. Neither bill was voted on in committee, and neither became law. Six months later Congress enacted something else, under a different name and with a different mechanism: Section 747 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2010, which gave terminated dealers a right to seek arbitration rather than a right to their agreements.

§1 One bill, two numbers, and what “identical” means in the record

Read side by side, the introduced texts of the two bills are the same instrument set twice. Both are titled the Automobile Dealer Economic Rights Restoration Act of 2009. Both carry the same four findings, in the same order. Both carry the same two operative commands, the first of them word for word. Both close with the same instruction that nothing in them unwinds the court-approved sales of the two companies’ assets. Every difference between the two texts is a difference of drafting.12

The differences are these. The section numbering: S. 1304 puts the findings at section 2(a) and the operative commands at section 2(b), each paragraph under its own heading; H.R. 2743 splits the same material into section 2, headed “Findings,” and section 3, headed “Restoration of Economic Rights,” and carries no paragraph headings at all. The findings open “Congress finds the following” in the Senate bill and “The Congress finds the following” in the House bill. One finding then reads “The automobile manufacturers obtain the benefits…” in the Senate bill and “The manufacturers obtain the benefits…” in the House bill. A serial comma appears in one and not the other. Because the material sits at different levels, the Senate bill’s internal references read “this section” where the House bill’s read “this Act,” and the Senate construction clause says that nothing “shall be construed to make null and void” the asset sales where the House clause says that nothing “is intended to” do so. And then the one difference that could ever have mattered: the House bill preserves any transfer of General Motors assets approved by a court after “the date of introduction of this Act,” while the Senate bill, drafted ten days later, fixes that same moment as a calendar date — June 8, 2009, which is the day H.R. 2743 was introduced.

So the Senate bill is the House bill with the House bill’s own introduction date written back into it as a fixed point. That is the useful answer for anyone meeting the two numbers together in 2009 coverage: this was one legislative proposal, and the two numbers are two chambers, not two ideas. Everything that follows — the sponsors, the cosponsors, the committees, the silence — happened twice to the same text.

§2 What the bills would have done

The proposal is a short title, four findings and two operative commands, and nothing else. Its findings state that dealers are an asset to manufacturers, that closing dealers would fall hardest on rural communities where a dealership is “a critical economic engine,” that manufacturers obtain the benefit of a national dealer network “at no material cost,” and that dealers have historically had franchise-agreement protections under state law.1

Then it commands two things. A manufacturer in which the federal government held an ownership interest, or which had taken federal loans, could not deprive a dealer of its economic rights, and had to honour those rights as they stood before the bankruptcies:

…may not deprive an automobile dealer of its economic rights and shall honor those rights as they existed, for Chrysler LLC dealers, prior to the commencement of the bankruptcy case by Chrysler LLC on April 30, 2009, and for General Motors Corp. dealers, prior to the commencement of the bankruptcy case by General Motors Corp. on June 1, 2009, including the dealer’s rights to recourse under State law.

S. 1304, 111th Cong. § 2(b)(1) (2009), as introduced. Identical language at H.R. 2743 § 3(a).

And, on the dealer’s request, the manufacturer had to restore the pre-bankruptcy franchise agreement and take assignment of it — the agreement itself, not a new one, and not a chance to argue for one. The final clause makes the limit of the exercise explicit: nothing in the bill was to make null and void the court-approved transfer of Chrysler’s assets to New CarCo Acquisition LLC, or a comparable transfer of General Motors’ assets. That clause is worth stating plainly, because a bill handing the dealers their contracts back could be read as an attempt to reopen the bankruptcies, and this text says in terms that it is not. The sales stood; the dealer contracts came back.

What the text does not contain is as informative as what it does. It names no adjudicator, no deadline, no eligibility date, no procedure and no penalty. It states a duty and leaves the consequences of breaching it to whatever a court would have made of it — and it expressly preserves the dealer’s “recourse under State law.” That preservation was overtaken almost immediately: on June 19, 2009, the day after S. 1304 was introduced and eleven days after H.R. 2743, the bankruptcy court supervising Chrysler’s Chapter 11 held the state dealer statutes preempted by section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code as to the rejected agreements.12 (This publication’s account of that ruling is Why state good-cause protections did not stop the 2009 terminations.) Every one of those absences is filled in, and filled in narrowly, by the statute Congress actually passed (§5).

§3 Who signed: 48 senators, and 287 of 435 members of the House

The 48 senators who cosponsored S. 1304 were 29 Democrats and 19 Republicans from 30 states. The first two names attached on the same day, June 23, 2009: Sam Brownback [R-KS] and John F. Kerry [D-MA]. Both of Iowa’s senators appear, the sponsor Grassley and Tom Harkin [D-IA], who signed on July 6. Massachusetts accounts for three of the 48 — Kerry on June 23, Edward M. Kennedy on June 24, and Paul G. Kirk, Jr. on October 15. The last senator to attach was Robert C. Byrd [D-WV], on December 8, 2009, which was the same day the congressional leadership announced the arbitration compromise that displaced the bill.39

The House bill’s roll is larger and faster. Fourteen members are named as original cosponsors in the introduced text itself — Kratovil, Van Hollen, Hoyer, McMahon, Sutton, Bartlett, Hall of New York, Posey, Heinrich, Paulsen, Shea-Porter, Manzullo, DeFazio and Davis of Alabama. By the end of the bill’s fifth day, June 12, the roll stood at 111 — more names in five days than S. 1304 collected in six months. The final count reached 286 cosponsors — 169 Democrats and 117 Republicans, including members from 49 states — and the last two attached on December 8, 2009, the same day as Byrd. The House side is set out in full at 287 of 435: the House side, and the amendment that actually moved.24

Two more House bills went at the same end by other routes. Rep. Steven C. LaTourette [R-OH-14] introduced H.R. 2796, also titled the Automobile Dealer Economic Rights Restoration Act of 2009, on June 10 — two days after Maffei’s bill — with three findings rather than four and a differently drafted operative section. It drew 25 cosponsors, 19 of whom also cosponsored H.R. 2743, eight of them signing Maffei’s bill only after they had signed LaTourette’s. LaTourette did not cosponsor Maffei’s bill and Maffei did not cosponsor LaTourette’s. Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee [D-TX-18], who had cosponsored H.R. 2743 on June 11, introduced the Automobile Dealers Fair Competition Act of 2009, H.R. 3450, on July 31: not a duty to restore, but a prohibition on unreasonably denying a franchise to a dealer who asked for one back, enforceable by the dealer in a federal district court. It drew 22 cosponsors and a referral to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, which sent it on to its Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection — the only one of the four dealer bills on this page to travel as far as a subcommittee. Counting sponsors and cosponsors across all three House bills without double-counting, 302 of 435 members put their names to some version of the proposition.56

One detail in LaTourette’s text is worth flagging without over-reading. H.R. 2796 limits its restoration duty to a dealer agreement that is “valid and in existence (and has not been lawfully terminated under applicable State law)” when the manufacturer filed. That phrase appears nowhere in S. 1304 or H.R. 2743. It appears again five weeks later, word for word, in the dealer provision the House passed as section 745 of the 2010 financial services appropriations bill — LaTourette’s amendment, and the subject of §5. And it appears a third time, six months after H.R. 2796, in the enacted Section 747, which conditions the right to arbitration on a dealership “not lawfully terminated under applicable State law on or before April 29, 2009.” The public record does not state that any one was drawn from another. The phrase is in all three.578

§4 How a bill with a majority of the House does nothing

The entire legislative record of S. 1304 is two entries: introduced in the Senate on June 18, 2009, and “Read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary” the same day. The record of H.R. 2743 runs to its introduction on June 8, its referral to the Committee on Financial Services the same day, and the sponsor’s own introductory remarks on June 9, printed at pages H6314–H6315 of the Congressional Record. After the referrals, neither bill’s record contains another entry of any kind. Neither was reported by a committee. Nothing in either record is a vote.34

That is the central fact of this page, and it is worth being exact about the mechanism rather than dramatic about the result. A cosponsorship is a signature on a bill, not a vote for it; it costs a member nothing, binds no one, and does not schedule anything. A bill moves when the committee holding jurisdiction reports it and the chamber’s leadership gives it floor time. The same text went to two different committees of jurisdiction — Judiciary in the Senate, Financial Services in the House — so the same proposal sat before two different sets of members, in two chambers, and neither set reported it. A majority of a chamber, expressed in signatures, is not a decision by the committee holding the bill, and neither committee made one.

What the record shows is that it stopped. The record does not state a reason, and this page does not assign one.

§5 What passed instead

The idea did move, but through appropriations rather than through the committees that held the bills. In the audit’s account, an amendment to the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, 2010, H.R. 3170, “offered by Representative Steven C. LaTourette required reinstatement of the terminated dealerships because ‘the closing of these dealerships was punitive and secretive.’”9 That provision is in the text the House passed. Section 745 of H.R. 3170 as engrossed barred the use of any funds to take an ownership interest in a manufacturer that “deprives an automobile dealer of its economic rights” and did not assume or assign each dealer agreement valid and in existence before the bankruptcy filing, and required any new entity created in the case to enter into a new agreement on the old terms. Its language tracks LaTourette’s own H.R. 2796 rather than S. 1304 or H.R. 2743. The House passed H.R. 3170 on July 16, 2009, by 219 to 208 with one member voting present.7

H.R. 3170 did not become law. That year’s financial services and general government appropriations were enacted instead as Division C of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2010, which cites itself by the same short title H.R. 3170 bore. What emerged there five months later, in the same Title VII of general provisions, was not reinstatement. SIGTARP’s account of the turn is one sentence long:

Ultimately, on December 8, 2009, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin announced compromise legislative language requiring binding arbitration to address the “ongoing dispute between GM, Chrysler, and dealerships that were closed during the companies’ restructuring.”

SIGTARP-10-008, Factors Affecting the Decisions of General Motors and Chrysler to Reduce Their Dealership Networks, July 19, 2010, p. 23.

That language went into the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2010, which President Obama signed on December 16, 2009 as Public Law 111-117. Its dealer provision is Section 747, at 123 Stat. 3219. The House’s own provision is not in it: in the enacted text section 745 is a federal pay provision, and the dealer section arrives two numbers later, doing something else.8

Set the two beside each other and the difference is not one of degree. The bills ordered a manufacturer to restore the franchise agreement at the dealer’s request. Section 747(b) gave a covered dealership “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.” Section 747(d) told the arbitrator to weigh seven factors and to decide whether the dealership “should be added to the dealer network.” Section 747(e) provided that “the arbitrator shall not award compensatory, punitive, or exemplary damages to any party,” and that a dealer who won received “a customary and usual letter of intent to enter into a sales and service agreement.” Section 747(g) preserved the manufacturer’s ability to terminate a dealership lawfully under state law anyway.8

The bills would have restored an agreement. The statute granted a hearing. The American Arbitration Association, which administered the program and reported to Congress on it, recorded the result: of 2,789 eligible dealerships, 1,575 filed, 803 settled, and arbitrators issued determinations in favour of dealerships in 55 cases.10 The statute is read subsection by subsection at Section 747: who qualified, what the clock was, and what winning was worth, and what a win turned out to be worth at Chrysler Group LLC v. Fox Hills Motor Sales.

§6 The error to stop repeating

The Automobile Dealer Economic Rights Restoration Act is sometimes described as having become law: the English Wikipedia article on it says so in its infobox, as retrieved on 2026-08-05.11 It did not become law, and the claim is wrong in two separate ways at once. No bill titled the Automobile Dealer Economic Rights Restoration Act was ever enacted: S. 1304, H.R. 2743 and H.R. 2796 all ended in the committees they were referred to, none of them reported. And the law that did pass was signed on December 16, 2009, not December 18 — it is the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2010, its dealer provision is Section 747, and Section 747 grants an arbitration rather than restoring an agreement.

§7 Considerations

Because the proposal was never marked up, amended or debated on a floor, there is no record of what it would have become. What can be compared is the text that was introduced against the text that was enacted, and the differences run in one direction.

Under the bills, restoration was the remedy and it was owed on request. Under Section 747 the dealer had to elect arbitration within 40 days of enactment, present a case to an arbitrator against seven statutory factors, and could not be awarded money in any amount; the best available outcome was a letter of intent. The bills expressly preserved the dealer’s recourse under state law. Section 747’s corresponding clause runs the other way, preserving the manufacturer’s ability to terminate lawfully under state law. And the bills fixed no eligibility cut-off, where Section 747 covers only dealerships whose agreements were in effect on October 3, 2008 and which were not lawfully terminated on or before April 29, 2009.18

Against that sits the government’s own position at the time, which is in the audit record rather than in anyone’s characterisation of it. In March 2009 the Treasury Auto Team rejected both companies’ restructuring plans, and in General Motors’ case, SIGTARP found, the Auto Team “specifically highlighted GM’s planned ‘pace’ of dealership closings as one of the obstacles to its viability.” A statute reversing the terminations would have undone the specific thing the government had required as a condition of continued support. Both of those are in the record. This publication takes no position on which should have prevailed, and none of the above is legal advice.9

§8 Still open

Nothing in Section 747 remains available. The election window it created closed on January 25, 2010, 40 days after enactment, and the section contains no mechanism that outlives it. A dealership terminated in 2009 has no live federal claim under either the bills on this page or the statute that replaced them.8

The idea in the bills did not disappear, though; it moved back to where their own findings had located it. Their fourth finding was that dealers “have had franchise agreement protections under State law,” and their operative section preserved the dealer’s “recourse under State law.” That is the law still standing in 2026, and it is why the current disputes over manufacturers selling around their own franchisees are brought under state franchise statutes rather than under any federal dealer-rights act. There is none to bring them under. Those disputes are covered at The same question, live: can a manufacturer sell around its own dealers?