for the united states debtors in chapter eleven bankruptcy cases are required to pay for early fees in order to fund federal bankruptcy administration at issue is whether these debtor were responsible starting in twenty eight unconstitutional i'd like to begin with the uniformity issue and with the court's indulgence there i'd like to very quickly just identify the four different reasons why they uniformly play fails and that i'd be happy to turn to whatever courts most interested in for reasons st the term uniform in the bankruptcy clause which is primarily a grant of authority to congress to the extent that it's also a restriction on congress's authority that restriction applies only to the subject matter of bankruptcy and not to laws setting up the machinery of bankruptcy administration nd even if uniformity extends beyond the subject matter bankruptcy and substantive bankruptcy law no one here has disputed that congress acted within its authority in setting  trustee program and the bankruptcy administrator program side by side and once you accept that it's constitutional to have two different programs there's no apparent problem with congress funding each program separately and in accordance with the needs of each rd even if uniformity required these two separate programs to have exactly the same feasible that's that's exactly what congress provided for here for decades congress to specify a quarterly fees in bankruptcy administrator districts must be quote equal to those imposed unquote and us present a statute says may though so so the lack of uniformity would be trustee trustee districts you have to have these courts the option to charge no fees at all the statute says that the bankruptcy administrator districts may charge fees equal to those imposed and when this law was st proposed that the court said hey congress we want to charge quarterly fees we don't have the authority to do it now please give us the power to do this you want the forty dollars chart comparable fees the law that congress and acted was granted the usual conference what it had proposed to change the word comparable to evil because congress wanted fees you know empower us to do this everybody all along was thinking you know we're going to charge the same fees in bankruptcy administrator districts as us trustee program districts and that's as soon as the laws enacted it you shall conference issued an order saying fees in bankruptcy administrator district shall be the fees in us trustee program districts as those amounts may be amended from time to time so you know everyone read the law for at least up until twenty thousand dollars as requiring people fees and so even if you think you know there's room for an additional conference under horse to charge fees in a different amount but these have to be equal and just of the final point i wanted to get it out there is that even if you thought there was a constitutional problem on these facts that the remedy would not be to order that a statu e be it more nationwide that debtors in this case are essentially complaining that the statute was correctly applied to them but it was incorrectly applied to debtors elsewhere in a way that certain other d carolina and alabama you need to start charging more fees and how does that work i understand theoretically but how does it work on the ground or that remedy that the theoretical point is is the dispositive boy nothing you know in the case that we standing to to the party who's erroneous that giving a break to someone else that doesn't mean that you then you know order a nationwide violation of the statute it just means that it's not appropriate to enter relief in this case and you end up in a situation much like  question and uniformity if you're going to move on to other things what about the two percent you know there's a number of bankruptcy court decisions on this issue but i used the florida decision a mosaic that said well the two percent that's not going to the trustee program but is going to these new bankruptcy judges is a problem even though it otherwise agree with your argument because if the whole idea is well it's congress can it's uniform for congress to say those debtors interest districts are distinguishable and have to of all it's still a user fee of two percent that's going to bankruptcy judge ships is going to the bankruptcy system still you can have a user fee that funds to parts of the bankruptcy system nd the eighteen dollars bankruptcy judge ships that are being funded by that two percent every every one of them except for one is in a u s trustee program distrait so that money is still in a sense remaining within the u s trustee program district except for one judgeship in north carolina which is is de minimus and the rd point is the bankruptcy administrator districts the quarterly fees that they pay under to a nationwide account is not clear why there should be a problem with two percent of us trustee program funds going to an account that in the end is basically you know just the money's being your mark basically just for the u s trustee program district purposes so you know we think there's a lot of paths to resolving the uniformity claim here we think the simplest basis for reversal is you know even assuming a uniform a requirement applies and we really don't think it does but even assuming want to applies the statute here is is uniform on its face  right but it looks to issues more broadly than that i hope the court will bear in mind that the supreme court when it has looked at the you know her many provision which spent pretty rarely the only circumstance in which the supreme court has ever invalidated the laws non uniform was when congress a statute that said with respect to the pre bankruptcy predators of a particular railroad these predators when those predators loose and the law apply don't to only one railroad and the supreme court said well uniformity you know it means that congress can't pass  bankruptcy laws and we're very far from that here everyone agrees that the fees apply uniformly within the u s trustee program and uniformly within the bankruptcy administrator program we further think congress intended to apply a same feasts you know  programs and if there was a blip in the implementation of one of those fee increases it's not a fault of congress and all the constitution requires is uniform laws not that the laws be uniformly implemented on the so called  activity issue the bankruptcy court similarly i think misunderstood the analysis each staff the very st question is whether using normal principles of statutory construction you can figure out the temporal application of the statu for disbursements made in any calendar quarter that begins on or after the date of an act of this act meaning any counter quarter beginning on january and point january th in congress didn't say that the increase would only apply to new cases it said it would apply to quarterly fees payable for disbursements under the statute and the statute which is being amended says in each case on a quarterly basis these are the fees to apply so we we think is you know clear on its face that this was intended to affect all just you know fees base for all the st months for all cases beginning january th and even to congress could have been you know a little bit clearer we're talking here about a prospect of change in fees not a retroactive change in fees the debtors are complaining that if they had had a crystal ball and known a while ago that the fees were going to be increased in the future they might have considered making some different choices but that's that's just how business works you know the old country buffet is might choose to open in new orleans rather than men thinks that taxes are going to be lower in new orleans than in memory but then if the orleans parish increases the property taxes that may frustrate your expectations about the future fact that you're operating under chapter eleven plan doesn't mean that you're exempt from that have looked at this question of what is a disbursement and they all agree that the term disbursements refers to all payments made by a debtor during a pending chapter eleven case and that's true regardless of the particular stage at which the chapter eleven case single statutory subsection needs to be given a consistent meaning and there is no difference in statute between confirmation of his confirmation and even if you went with the others idea that you could somehow are out an exception for post confirmation it's not clear how their theory would even work because it seems like they would require an item by item analysis of whether a payment is more closely related to the bankruptcy or less closely related to bankruptcy which would turn into a kind of the kind of litigation that congress was hoping to avoid in the  place congress didn't want this to be like attorneys fees where counsel had to put in detail records of how many hours they billed and what was it spent on and are these excessive congress wanted a simple easily administered rule where you have a percentage fee based on total payments by the darul disbursement report is file a debtors breaks al disbursements that are related to the bankruptcy and dispersants that are not so in this case post confirmation the new owners of the company were charged  statement as to its intent to operate retroactively in order for that to be to be met and in fact it can only be one interpretation here to bankruptcy courts well similar to me let's say tomorrow complemented a lot of money i see and i understand why this case is here and why buy this is being litigated all over the country let's say to me tomorrow congress passes some new tax law that makes it now in retrospect oh the way we reorganized this company of a phase didn't turn out so well you know if we'd known about this tax father was coming down we would have structured things differently but as long as the tax law applies to things would say this is you use your feet under the bankruptcy clause and not a tax and so it makes it for example more similar to what happened in languor for for that matter in a case that i think is very much on point there  resident he could leave the country temporarily and he did frequently go back to his home in groups subsequently congress passed the illegal immigration and immigrant responsibility reform act of a so that correctly  temporarily and came back he would have to apply for readmission as an immigrant and and the court found that the requirement that he and in fact the conviction would be just qualifying factor he was in fact  ordered to be deported well the court found that they that this new disability the fact that he could not leave without being readmitted cause that statute  had we known we had another one million dollars in us trustee feast paid we here would have paid less for sure or alternatively could have required the liquidating trusts to pay these fees and effectively through known of this increased fee which was material and again i come back to the magnitude of the fee which created you know if we were talking about you know a marginal adjustment such as what happened  several occasions in the past no one would be here but we're here because was this dramatically changed if the feasibility as the bankruptcy court found it affects the feasibility of the ability of this debtor to pay  reorganized or to pay the ongoing claims which remains today responsible for something and so it's it is very much an issue of magnitude and there's there is no of increased curly had a retroactive effect as the bankruptcy court found it also violated due process in the sense that party should know when they enter into a transaction you know what they are what the a non uniform structure the kind of go through the various d arguments that the government made with respect to the bankruptcy clause argument that argument has been made by the government  basically every case involving uniformity and it is the uniform you rejected and the cases that we've cited in our brief the basically the description of bankruptcy in the scope of is paying now and you know the geographic discrimination could be seen in the court and circuit city pointed out at circuit city filed their case only one hundred and forty miles to the south in raleigh north carolina then they would have always act but it all the railroads that or impacted were in that region and so what the supreme court valuable engine was that all debtors in the u s were treated similarly because all of them were in that re that were that that statute applied to similarly all creditors of debtors in the united states and for those railroads were treated the same because they would bring their claims into the under the act you have claims against those roads that's not the case that's not the case here if in order to determine whether there is geographic discrimination you have to look at the class of impact simply a problem that existed in worth carolina or alabama or alternatively a problem that simply existed in the other districts the final  the takings an excess piece with the minute i have left the argument if the fees are been in place from the tom that this case was initiated to buffet's bankruptcy case helis the other case that my hose and colleagues talking about there was a new consequence imposed on a criminal conviction that had happened in the past and that consequence was you could no longer travel outside the country and come back again and the supreme court said that was that was a disability put on your prior criminal conviction rather than on anything you might do in the future if the fact that you traveled outside the country the government there had argued yes it that you're traveling outside the country in a future that's a perspective change but know that the thing that the statutory analysis should be different but with respect i don't think that there's any rule of statutory construction that says existing users of it of a government service don't have to pay a fee increase in us congress says existing users of this program or service also have to pay the fee and normally if there's any sort of you know grandfathering out of new requirements that would be done expressively on the one just the magnitude of the fee increase generally you know it's my posing colleague is quite right that this was a six dollars significant increase  the that is because taxpayers were all of a sudden on the hook for funding federal bankruptcy administration and that has been contrary to congress's almost any policy congress wants the bankruptcy system to be funded by bankers users rather than taxpayers and by  applying the the if you increase to all pending cases you actually are spreading the cost of the program out more what i think my opposing colleague is suggesting is that you know you should exempt it such a big fee increase you should exempt all of the current cases well that would just impose an even more crushing burden on the new e file cases in order to make up the difference in funding in the program in any event there is a rational basis for congress's choice your congress set up a reserve wanted to set a reserve amount for the u trustee program the reserve picked as relevant to this case was two hundred million dollars that's still less than the annual cost of the us trustee program but there's nothing irrational about congress wanting to have a you know small safety net of funding on hand so that you wouldn't have to d taxpayer funds on uniformity i think my posing colleagues reasoning suggests that because there was a difference in how the law is applied here that there's a uniformity problem and it's unconstitutional but it can't be that just because a whore a one hundred and fifty miles down the road would apply a different fear a different rule of law that means the law is unconstitutional i mean there are there are multiple bankruptcy cases at a supreme court each term because there's a circuit split you know the th my colleague is right that most courts that have considered the subject of bankruptcies issue have ruled against the government respectfully those courts didn't engage in the kind of you know careful appellate style analysis of the question that we think is  those cases is that congress has broad power to both set up a bankruptcy system and to impose a uniform substantive bankruptcy law and so it would be sort of perverse to read the supreme court statements about the breadth of congress's power as somehow