Lawmakers Push Vote on Spending Bill; SEC Funding Boosted

The bill does not include language forcing the Department of Labor to wait for the SEC to move first on its fiduciary rulemaking before DOL unveils its fiduciary redraft, which is supposed to come in January.

Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, says the House bill was said to include such a rider but “the Senate rejected it.” There was also talk of including “a possibly watered-down version of that [DOL] language,” but no such rider ever made its way into the omnibus spending bill.

Former House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank told his former colleagues on Wednesday to reject the Omnibus Appropriations bill because of its “stealth attack on financial reform,” calling a provision inserted into the Appropriations bill known as the “swaps push-out” rule “a substantive mistake” and “terrible violation of the procedure that should be followed on this complex and important subject.”

Ironically, Frank said, “it was a similar unrelated rider put without debate into a larger bill that played a major role in allowing irresponsible, unregulated derivative transactions to contribute” to the financial crisis. How to regulate derivatives “is a question about which responsible people can differ, and the subject of what insured banks should be doing in this area is a legitimate subject for debate—but not for a non-germane amendment inserted with no hearings, no chance for further modification, and no chance for debate into a mammoth bill in the last days of a lame-duck Congress,” Frank said.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee, said that she was “disgusted” by the “back-room deal” to insert the rider, in which “some members and lobbyists for the largest banks are trying to undo a seminal component of the Wall Street Reform Act by reversing a provision that prohibits banks from using taxpayer-insured funds to engage in derivatives trading activity.”

AARP Senior Vice President Joyce Rogers spoke out against the Kline-Miller amendment, which she said would allow pensions of retired workers to be slashed. “This last minute backroom deal would, for the first time, amend the pension law to allow the earned vested benefits of retirees to be cut,” Rogers said. “After a lifetime of hard work to earn their pensions, retirees don’t deserve to receive a bad deal, in which they’ve had no say, cut behind closed doors and excluding the very people who would be impacted most.”

— Related: House Renews Tax Extenders Through End of 2014