“Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that softens financial regulations,” the New York Times reports (5/23/13). “Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves.”

Exhibit A: HR 992, the so-called “swaps push-out” bill. This legislation, which “sailed through the House Financial Services Committee… over the objections of the Treasury Department” was essentially written  by Citigroup, according to Times reporters Eric Lipton and Ben Protess. Citi’s recommendations influenced “more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill,” they add. Two key paragraphs “were copied nearly word for word” from a draft prepared by Citi and two other large banks.

Since the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act, “bank lobbyists have blitzed the regulatory agencies… chipping away at some regulations,” the article continues. In addition, Wall Street has targeted Congress – the House Financial Services Committee in particular – as “a place to push back” against strong implementation.

The Times story focuses on two derivatives bills – HR 677, which would create a broad regulatory exemption for so-called “inter-affiliate swaps,” and HR 992, which would substantially loosen a rule requiring derivatives activity to be walled-off from bank units enjoying federal deposit insurance and other forms of government support. “The bill restores the public subsidy to exotic Wall Street activities,” AFR policy director Marcus Stanley told the Times.

The bill first proposed by committee Republicans would have eliminated the push-out requirement altogether. But when its drafters decided that that would be going too far, they enlisted Citi’s help in drafting a “compromise proposal that simply exempted a wider array of derivatives,” according to Lipton and Protess. The resulting proposal was incorporated into legislation approved by the committee on May 7 and now awaiting action by the full House.

“Citigroup executives,” the article notes, “said the change they advocated was good for the financial system, not just the bank.”