Letter to the Hon. Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, The Hon. Harry Reid, Senate Minority Leader, The Hon. John Boehner, Speaker of the House, and the Hon. Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader - Committee Democrats Oppose Bid To Gut Wall Street Reform Via Funding Bills

Letter

Dear Majority Leader McConnell, Speaker Boehner, Minority Leader Reid, and Minority Leader Pelosi:

We appreciate your successful efforts to pass clean legislation to fund the government through December 11, 2015. As you continue to discuss government funding for the rest of the fiscal year, we are writing to express our opposition to appropriations riders that would roll back the protections of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

While we are opposed to the inclusion of all inappropriate and ideological policy riders to funding legislation, as the Ranking Members of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs and the House Committee on Financial Services, we are specifically concerned about ones designed to repeal, undermine, or delay provisions of Wall Street reform.

In May, 2015, the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs reported out S. 1484 along party lines. Instead of working with Committee Democrats to find consensus to bring a bipartisan bill to the floor, Senator Shelby attached his 200-plus page bill to the Fiscal Year 2016 Financial Services and General Government (FY16 FSGG) Appropriations bill in the Appropriations Committee. All Democratic members of the Appropriations Committee opposed this unprecedented maneuver. Similarly, Republicans included harmful policy riders in the FY16 FSGG Appropriations bill in the House, which likewise was uniformly opposed by Democrats on that Committee.

Last year, we, and several of our colleagues, opposed the inclusion of a repeal of Section 716 of Wall Street Reform in the funding bill, because it was a key component of the law. Former Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of Wall Street Reform, called the inclusion of this provision "an absolute outrage," and "a road map for stealth unwinding of financial reform." We do not think this action well served the American public, or the public's perception of the U.S. Congress.

Wall Street Reform was Congress' response to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. It has strengthened our nation's financial stability and provided much-needed consumer protections to millions of American families. 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.

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