Campaign Action
A reader shared a response they received from Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) explaining his support of the banking bill being pushed through the Senate now, a bill that would rollback parts of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform, and ease regulations on banks. Here's one of the things Warner asserts:
"This bill institutes several important consumer protections. It allows consumers to get one free year of fraud alerts, which will help consumers who have been impacted by situations like the Wells Fargo scandal or whose identities or personal information has been stolen. […] It protects the credit ratings of Veterans from being wrongly penalized by medical bill payment delays by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), as well as establishing a dispute process for veterans seeking to remove adverse actions already on their report."
Except the bill doesn't really do that anymore.
An amended version of the bill, introduced late Wednesday, would also give free credit monitoring to active-duty members of the military.
“A small gesture to the people that serve our country was too much for the Republicans and Equifax,” Brown said on the Senate floor Thursday.
“In exchange for this token benefit, they demanded consumers and service members give up their right to take Equifax to court the next time the company’s recklessness exposed sensitive financial data,” Brown said.
So service members can get free credit monitoring, but they would no longer have the right to sue if a credit monitoring company, say, allow their and 143 million other people's personal information to be stolen by hackers. Because that never happens, right?
Warner also says that the bill provides "targeted, meaningful relief for community-based financial institutions and other institutions, like regional banks," and to "help Main Street by rolling back unnecessary and burdensome regulations on credit unions and small community banks while ensuring that larger banks remain subject to the rules of Dodd-Frank." Except that 28 of the 35 biggest banks would be effectively deregulated under this rollback. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office has said that the bill would make it more likely that the federal government will have to bail out a big bank, again.
Republicans have been making changes to the bill, but none of them are changes that make it stronger for consumers or better for Main Street. The changes instead are aimed at pleasing House Republicans by making it far more Wall Street-friendly.
As Brown says, "Everything about this bill is getting worse and worse." It's getting further and further away from anything a Democrat should support. If they wanted to do a reform to help credit unions and community banks, that's what they should fight for.