The House of Representatives failed on Wednesday afternoon to ram through a bill that would further delay implementation of Dodd-Frank financial reform.
Republicans attempted to pass the measure after suspending House rules–a procedure which denies members the right to amend or debate a bill, but requires two-thirds of the chamber’s support for it to advance. Only 276 Congresspeople voted in favor of the bill, while 146 opposed it.
Prominent Democrats managed to marshal sufficient opposition to the maneuver, with Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) calling the suspension of House rules “inappropriate.”
“This bill contains not only procedural problems, but substantive problems which have never seen the light of day in any committee. Some of the legislation has only been public for about 24 hours,” he said.
The Volcker Rule, a regulation that forbids banks from engaging in proprietary trading with publicly-backed consumer deposits, will not apply to a range of investments until 2017. The legislation that failed to pass the House on Wednesday would delay until 2019 the rule’s application to collateralized loan obligations.
On Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told The Huffington Post that the legislation would amount to “a big bank giveaway.”
“One day into the new Congress, House Republicans are picking up right where they left off: trying to gut Wall Street reforms so that big banks can make more risky bets using taxpayer-backed money,” she said, referring to the “Cromnibus” legislation passed last year that removed restrictions on making derivatives trades with federally-backed savings.
On Wednesday morning, the public interest group Public Citizen called on Congress to oppose the bill, and pointed out that the original Volcker rule in 2010 called for collateralized loan obligations to be segregated from retail deposits by 2012.
“Not a month since Congress unwisely pierced a key Wall Street safeguard that would have prevented certain bank speculation with taxpayer-insured funds, the House now considers a package with several measures that threaten the fabric of other protections,” its letter to lawmakers stated.
