The Financial CHOICE Act, the Republican-crafted replacement for the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, may enjoy the support of the House Financial Services Committee, the Trump administration, and even President Donald Trump himself, but the Senate’s top Republican said this week that he believes that the bill may never make it to President Trump’s desk.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said Tuesday that the bill needs Democratic support in the Senate to move forward, which will likely be hard to come by.
From Bloomberg:
“I’d love to do something about Dodd-Frank, particularly with regard to community banks but that would require Democratic involvement,” Kentucky’s McConnell told Bloomberg News in an interview Tuesday. “I’m not optimistic.”
“So far, my impression is the Democrats on the banking committee believe that Dodd-Frank is something akin to the Ten Commandments,” McConnell said.
McConnell’s read of the Democrats’ opinion on replacing Dodd-Frank shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, considering that Democrats in the House have taken to calling the Republican bill the “Wrong Choice Act” and are fighting the bill at every turn.
House Democrats have also taken various steps to delay the bill from moving through the House, including several other House committee ranking members asking their committee chairmen to allow their respective committees to weigh in on the bill.
Ranking Member Elijah Cummings, D-Md., of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Ranking Member Bobby Scott, D-Va., of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and Ranking Member John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., of the House Committee on the Judiciary each sent a letter to their committee’s chairman to ask for the committee to consider the Financial CHOICE Act.
And as Bloomberg notes, a major bill like this requires 60 votes for passage in the Senate, meaning 8 Democrats would have to flip and support the bill.
That’s a scenario that McConnell apparently considers unlikely.
Again from Bloomberg:
Unless the situation in Congress changes, we will be “stuck with whatever the administration thinks it can do on its own to modify the impact of Dodd-Frank,” McConnell said.
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