Mark Warner asked bankers Tuesday to lobby Republican leaders in the House to simply pass his bipartisan banking bill without changes, warning that the bill will die if the House seeks to add to the bill.
“This bill will not pass if it comes back to the Senate,” the Virginia Democrat said at a meeting of the American Bankers Association in downtown Washington.
“We’ve stretched this about as far as we can go,” he said of the legislation, S. 2155, which he helped write with Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee.
The legislative package would ease some post-crisis rules, mostly for small and regional banks. While it passed the Senate on a bipartisan basis over the objections of some liberal Democrats, the bill has stalled in the House as Financial Services chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas., has demanded to negotiate over adding more bipartisan House measures to the bill.
Some of the 17 Democrats who voted for the bill in the Senate have said they’ll abandon the bill if conservatives in the House change it.
Warner said Tuesday the priority has to be to get the bill signed by President Trump as soon as possible to avoid it falling off the agenda, citing the risk of it being overtaken by unpredictable politics. He asked the bankers to lobby Hensarling and House Speaker Paul Ryan to pass the bill quickly.
