It’s been a busy few days since I weighed in here last. The “Billings”
bill, S. 31, passed the House this morning with an amendment addressing
spendthrift trusts. The House Judiciary Committee decided that the amendment
really had no effect and let it go. The bill must now return to the Senate for
either its concurrence or rejection and request for a committee of conference. We
probably won’t know until next week what awaits the bill.
Yesterday and today were spent working on issues around
federal pre-emption in cases of bad faith assertions of patent infringement and
estate tax! The first is a pretty novel issue for the VBA to tackle but thanks to
the good efforts of the VBA’s Intellectual Property Section and its Chair,
Andrew Minitsky, the Section weighed in on its thoughts on S. 7. The bill then
emerged from the House Commerce Committee and is now headed to House Judiciary
for its review. I’m sure the VBA will be invited back to comment on the flaws
that members of the Section noticed.
The estate tax provision and the apparent creation of a
Vermont gift tax caught the attention of CPAs, members of our Probate and Trust
and our Tax Law Sections and finally resulted in the passage of an amendment
stripping three sections of the bill and creating a study committee to work out
the details of what the Senate was trying to do in H. 528. Many thanks to Senators
Ann Cummings and Peg Flory for their work on this amendment as well as to Paul
Hanlon who met with both senators on Tuesday afternoon.
The Senate will be debating the budget this afternoon and
tomorrow. after passage it returns to the House for conferees rto work out the
differences in each version of the bill. The same holds true for the tax bill
which passed earlier today.
As always, thanks for reading.
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