HUFFINGTON 09.09.12
he’s raised questions about whether or not we can actually go forward, and I’ve had to convince him
that I thought we could go ahead
and get the bill, but it was right to
ask the question,” Dodd told The
Huffington Post at the time. “A
couple of times on financial reform, when they thought maybe we
just ought to go on to something
else, when we had so many cloture
votes on it, but I and others were
able to convince him that no, that
we thought we could win the issue
and we ought to keep it up.”
With White House backing, Senate Democrats kept it up. Every
attempt by Republicans or bankfriendly Democrats to rip out or
water down Warren’s brainchild,
the Consumer Financial Protection
Agency, was met with fierce resistance. “My first choice is a strong
consumer agency,” the Harvard law
professor told The Huffington Post
in March 2010. “My second choice
is no agency at all and plenty of
blood and teeth left on the floor.”
Meanwhile, in Arkansas, online liberal activists teamed
with Big Labor to challenge Sen.
Blanche Lincoln in a Democratic
primary. Lincoln had long been
one of the most conservative
Democrats in Congress, and as
chair of the Agriculture Committee, she was charged with writ-
THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
shot through with carve-outs and
loopholes for the banks.
A strange thing began happening in the Senate, however. With
consumer advocate Elizabeth
Warren and a coalition of progressive and labor groups taking
the fight to the public, the bill got
stronger in the upper chamber.
The White House, for its part,
seized on a major Goldman Sachs
scandal, as the bank was charged
in April by the Securities and Exchange Commission with defrauding investors. Republicans and
bank lobbyists found the timing of
the announcement suspicious, but
it worked to reignite public outrage at Wall Street. Rechristened
“Wall Street reform” — much
catchier than “finreg” — the bill
started steamrolling.
Democrats saw a chance for a
political win-win: Harry Reid took
financial regulatory reform to the
floor, knowing it didn’t have 60
votes, but daring Republicans to
brave the headlines that would
come from defending Wall Street.
As cloture vote after cloture vote
(the 60-member threshold vote
needed to end debate) failed, Reid
grew impatient. He wanted to pull
the bill off the floor and move on,
said Chris Dodd, then chairman of
the Banking Committee.
“There have been times when