Page:Dennis Obduskey v. McCarthy & Holthus LLP.pdf/13

10 interpret statutes, the history of the FDCPA supports our reading. When drafting the bill, Congress considered a version that would have subjected security-interest enforcers to the full coverage of the Act. That version defined a debt collector as “any person who engages in any business the principal purpose of which is the collection of any debt or enforcement of security interests.” S. 918, 95th Cong., 1st Sess., §803(f) (1977) (emphasis added). A different version of the bill, however, would have totally excluded from the Act’s coverage “any person who enforces or attempts to enforce a security interest in real or personal property.” S. 1130, 95th Cong., 1st Sess., §802(8)(E) (1977). Given these conflicting proposals, the Act’s present language has all the earmarks of a compromise: The prohibitions contained in §1692f(6) will cover security-interest enforcers, while the other “debt collector” provisions of the Act will not.

These considerations convince us that, but for §1692f(6), those who engage in only nonjudicial foreclosure proceedings are not debt collectors within the meaning of the Act.

Obduskey makes several arguments to the contrary. But, on balance, we do not find them determinative.

First, Obduskey acknowledges that unless the limited-purpose definition is superfluous, it must make some kind of security-interest enforcer a “debt collector” who would not otherwise fall within the primary definition. Reply Brief 11–13. But, according to Obduskey, “repo men”–those who seize automobiles and other personal property in response to nonpayment–fit the bill. See Black’s Law Dictionary 1493 (10th ed. 2014) (explaining that “repo” is short for “repossession,” which means “retaking property; esp., a seller’s retaking of goods sold on credit when the buyer has failed to pay for them”). This is so, he says, because repossession often entails only “limited