As President Obama was meeting with top leaders of the House and Senate this morning, April 14, to turn up the heat on passage of financial services reform–which has become his top legislative priority–Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Connecticut), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, took to the Senate floor to lambaste those in Congress and on Wall Street who he said have been spreading “misinformation” about his financial services reform bill. Dodd said that his financial services reform bill would “be produced in the next several days.” The bill will then go to the full Senate floor for debate.
Dodd said on the Senate floor that he wanted to “set the record straight,” tackling first what he said was “one of the wildest and, frankly, most dishonest objections to this legislation, which is the notion that it is somehow a partisan document.” He went on to detail his 38 months in crafting the bill with Republican counterparts on the Senate Banking Committee, and how he’s had “countless meetings and hearings” on financial services reform. “Senator [Richard] Shelby and I have been working together for over a year on these issues, and I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone could claim with a straight face that this is a partisan effort,” Dodd said.