218
Opinion of the Court
Com. Code Ann. § 9301(2) (West Supp. 1997); R. I. Gen. Laws § 6A-9-301(2) (1992).
Under Fidelity's view of the way § 547(c)(3) acts together with state law, a creditor in any of those States could have perfected its security interest between the 10th and the 20th day and still have complied with the 10-day deadline in the pre-1994 version of the Bankruptcy Code. Indeed, on Fidel-ity's view, the only States in which antecedent perfection would not have been recognized under the old federal 10-day period would have been States with no relation-back period at all (of which there was none), or States in which relation back went only to the 11th (or a later) day after creation (of which, it is not surprising to learn, there also was none), or States in which the time for acting under the relation-back rule was less than 20 days (of which there were only eight, plus Guam and the District of Columbia). If Congress had shared Fidelity's view of the federal 10-day provision, then the 1994 amendment would have accomplished very little, extending the period only in those few States that lacked a 20-day grace period. And, of course, it is hard to understand why Congress would have wanted to do that. The change would not have brought uniformity to federal bankruptcy practice, for on Fidelity's view a State could have chosen a longer period (and, in the context of motor vehicles, at least some have done so, see, e. g., W. Va. Code § 17A-4A- 4(a) (1996) (providing 60-day period)). The net effect of the 1994 amendment would thus have been merely to benefit a class of creditors in only eight States, Guam, and the District of Columbia, jurisdictions which could have looked out for their own creditors if they had chosen to do so. It is not easy to imagine that Congress meant to accomplish nothing more, and nothing uniform, by its effort.
Driven to the last ditch, Fidelity relies on an isolated piece of legislative history. On the floor of the Senate one day in April 1994, during consideration of the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1993, a bill which was never enacted but which had a
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