Democrats said on Thursday that they would go it alone in an effort to pass an overhaul of financial regulation, increasing the likelihood of a bitter partisan showdown, Sewell Chan reports in The New York Times.
Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said he would put forward his own bill on Monday, despite the lack of a single Republican endorsement. Democrats concluded that bipartisan talks were not making enough progress and that going their own way was the only realistic hope of getting the legislation adopted in an election year, he said.
Mr. Dodd said the bill would rewrite the rules of Wall Street, end the “too big to fail” phenomenon and protect consumers from risky or abusive financial products. The Congressional calendar meant that further delay could imperil the legislation’s chances, he said.
The chief Republican negotiator on the bill, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, called Mr. Dodd’s decision “very disappointing” and said, “There’s no question that White House politics and health care have kept us from getting to the goal line.”
Mr. Corker said the impasse was caused by the Democratic threat to use the parliamentary procedure known as reconciliation to overhaul health care. “The elephant in the room is reconciliation,” he said, describing Mr. Dodd as “a victim of health care policy.”
Comment: End "too big to fail?" Am I missing something here, but wasn't it Dodd along with Franks that ushered in "too big to fail" for Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke? And why do we need a "separate" consumer financial protection agency, an agency meant to protect the citizenry, to be placed "inside" the federal reserve. How is that protection? Isn't Congress suppose to protect us?
Hey, how about ending the federal reserve and telling Congress to get back to the business of protecting the citizens rather than the Wall Street Bankers and the criminals at Goldman Sachs. That Misters Dodd and Corker would be real reconciliation.
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