Texas Republican Rep. Jeb Hensarling accused Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren of “pointlessly partisan obstruction and gridlock” in her opposition to Wall Street at the expense of middle class workers and small businesses Thursday.
“Thankfully, now that the Senate is under new management, the days of such pointlessly partisan obstruction and gridlock are over,” Hensarling, chairman of the Financial Services Committee, said. “Still there are some who are so blindly, rigidly ideological that they will try to obstruct even the most modest, reasonable and overwhelmingly bipartisan clarification to Dodd-Frank.”
In an apparently unintended consequence of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, farmers, ranchers and small business owners are currently subject to regulations meant for Wall Street. A provision clarifying the rule is now headed to the president’s desk over the objections of Warren and her Democratic supporters, who argue the provision waters down Dodd-Frank.
“If we fail to challenge this cynical strategy now, it will only encourage Republicans to pull our financial regulations apart piece by piece,” Warren said, before she offered the amendment to strip the bill of the provision.
Warren is a progressive darling who has gotten a reputation for taking a hard-line against Wall Street. (RELATED: MoveOn.org Is Begging Elizabeth Warren To Run For President)
“Certain Democrats seem to think they have the moral authority to cripple Main Street in order to occupy Wall Street,” Hensarling said.
The provision is attached to a larger bill reauthorizing the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, which allows big businesses to purchase terror insurance from the federal government. Warren and her supporters were largely responsible for the bill’s derailment in December, when Democrats still controlled Congress. (RELATED: Harry Reid Lets Terrorism Insurance Die)
“The truth is Dodd-Frank was not chiseled in stone; nobody brought it down to us from Mount Sinai,” Hensarling said. “Congress would be negligent in its duties if we did not continually monitor and fix Dodd-Frank’s unintended consequences.”
More than 180 Democrats, including Rep. Maxine Waters, ranking member of the Financial Services Committee, voted to pass the provision as a separate bill in June 2013.
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