220
Opinion of the Court
Whatever weight some Members of this Court might accord to floor statements about proposals actually under consideration, remarks that purport to clarify "related" areas of the law can have little persuasive force, and in this case none at all. For the Senators' remarks were not only at odds with the governing text but also with the current of the broader statutory history of the preference provisions, which persuasively suggests that Congress intended § 547(c)(3)(B) to establish a uniform federal perfection period immune to alteration by state laws permitting relation back. The former version of the preference provisions, § 60 of the previous Bankruptcy Act, referred explicitly to state law in determining when a transfer occurred. It first provided a general rule that a transfer of an interest in personal property occurred "when it became so far perfected that no subsequent lien upon such property obtainable by legal or equitable proceedings on a simple contract could become superior to the rights of the transferee." 11 U. S. C. § 96(a)(2) (1964 ed.). But it then subjected this general rule to the exceptions that
"[w]here (A) the applicable law specifies a stated period of time of not more than twenty-one days after the transfer within which recording, delivery, or some other act is required, and compliance therewith is had within such stated period of time; or where (B) the applicable law specifies no such stated period of time or where such stated period of time is more than twenty-one days, and compliance therewith is had within twenty-one days after the transfer, the transfer shall be deemed to be made or suffered at the time of the transfer." § 96(a)(7)(I).
Thus, a transfer was deemed to have occurred on the date of the transaction that gave rise to it, not on the later date of "recording, delivery, or . . . other act," so long as the creditor had complied with state relation-back law within 21 days. But even this former version of the Act, which explicitly
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