An agreement has been reached between the House and Senate to advance legislation to ease some Dodd-Frank bank rules, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Tuesday.
Previously, the bipartisan Senate-passed bill had been held up as House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, demanded that more provisions be added to it. Now he will seek to pass those measures via different vehicles, Ryan said.
“We will be moving the Dodd-Frank bill,” Ryan said in a press briefing at the Capitol. “We’re also gonna be moving, in the Senate, a package of bills that we think will actually add to this that Financial Services has passed as well.”
The Senate-passed bill, S. 2155, would mostly relieve small and regional banks from some of the more onerous requirements put on them by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law. It passed with 17 Democrats voting in favor, although it was opposed by liberals such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who argued that it would allow big banks to take on greater risks.
The Senate package includes dozens of bills that have passed the House. But Hensarling’s committee has moved dozens of other bills, many of which have passed the House on a bipartisan basis.
He sought to add some of those bills to the Senate-passed measure because it appears to be one of the few legislative vehicles headed to President Trump’s desk before Congress slows down for the midterm elections.
Hensarling said Tuesday that he’d received a commitment from Senate Majority Leader McConnell for a vote on a package of House bills in the Senate. The legislative vehicle and exact measures were still being determined, he said, but the package will include legislation easing rules on capital markets and securities issuance.
The banking industry had been applying pressure to the House to accept the Senate bill and get it enacted as quickly as possible.
