Democrats Push Back Against Dodd-Frank Changes

Leading Democrats in both the House and Senate are aggressively fighting efforts to incorporate changes to the Dodd-Frank Act into the government funding legislation.

According to a Washington Examiner report, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) claimed that “Democrats are standing arm-in-arm to protect” Dodd-Frank from efforts by Republicans to rewrite any aspect of the 2010 law. Schumer is widely touted as the potential successor to Harry Reid as his party’s Senate leader following the Nevada legislator’s retirement in early 2017, and his comments reaffirmed a longstanding partisan divide on the matter.

Furthermore, the top Democrats in the House and Senate Financial Committees, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Rep. Maxine Waters of California, sent a joint letter to congressional leaders detailing their efforts to oppose any tinkering with the Dodd-Frank law.

"We hope that Congress does not make the same mistake this year by including riders that weaken Wall Street reform in end-of-the-year funding legislation," Sens. Brown and Waters wrote in their letter, referring to the effort by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-AL) to attach a Dodd-Frank reform bill to the government appropriations bill. Congress needs to pass the appropriations bill by Nov. 3 in order to raise the debt ceiling, or the federal government will run out of money by Dec. 11.