May 10, 2011
Efforts to deter Dodd-Frank sparked a war of words Tuesday between party heads on the U.S. Senate Banking Committee.
Reuters reports that chairman Tim Johnson (D-SD) claimed delaying or diminishing the regulatory scope of Dodd-Frank “would be dangerous and irresponsible.” He vowed that any initiatives to roll back the financial reform bill, including those from GOP House representatives, would face a difficult battle in the Democratic-dominated Senate, according to Reuters.
“We cannot allow Dodd-Frank to be dismantled,” Johnson said at a hearing reviewing the research of an independent panel that examined the financial downfall of 2007-2009 that eventually resulted in the Dodd-Frank reforms. “We simply cannot afford to go back to the old financial system that destroyed millions of jobs and cost the economy trillions of dollars.”
The leading Republican on the banking committee, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), responded that Dodd-Frank is “a wish-list of reforms long sought by liberal activists, special interests and federal bureaucrats.”
Shelby added that the banking committee should have done its own investigation into the financial collapse, rather than give the task to the independent Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC). Reuters reports that the bipartisan commission was unable to produce a unified report and that the results were not available until many months after Dodd-Frank’s passage.
“While it is unfortunate that the commission was unable to reach a bipartisan consensus on its final report, it is more unfortunate that, in the end, it did not matter,” Shelby said.
A House panel last week approved legislation that would restrict the regulatory authority of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created by the Dodd-Frank bill.
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