Senator Christopher Dodd
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
Re: Support Attorney General Enforcement and a Strong Role for States in S.3217, Restoring American Financial Stability Act
Dear Senator Dodd,
As you continue efforts to improve and achieve bipartisan support for S. 3217, the Restoring American Financial Stability Act, we urge you to resist calls from Wall Street lobbyists to weaken the bill by gutting attorney general enforcement of consumer rules or weakening the current minimal protections in the bill against unnecessary and excessive preemption of state consumer protection laws. Please heed the bipartisan call of attorneys general and governors in the attached letters to give states a role in protecting their consumers.
We are facing the worst crisis since the Great Depression because lax enforcement of federal consumer protection laws and preemption of state predatory lending laws combined to leave consumers at the mercy of bank abuses. The bill already contains numerous concessions to the banking industry, including dramatic weakening of the protections in the initial draft against excessive preeemption. Yet the banks are asking for more because they don’t want to be held accountable to federal or state law. They want bank regulators to continue insulating banks from state law without even looking at whether a state law significantly interferes with banking or whether it addresses new abuses that fall in a gap in federal protections. And they don’t want state cops on the beat to make sure they comply with the nationwide federal rules the CFPB will be adopting.