Three years after the law’s enactment, Kevin McCoy of USA Today (6/4/13) looks at the financial sector’s seemingly endless efforts to obstruct, water down, and delay implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Act.

On a single day in February 2012, “bankers, lawyers, and consultants” held nine different meetings with regulators to discuss the Volcker rule – the piece of the law meant to keep federally insured banks from engaging in more of the high-risk trading that fueled the financial meltdown of 2008. “The pushback succeeded,” McCoy writes. The rule “remains unfinished and long behind schedule today.”

With the Volcker rule as a case study, USA Today calculates that some 85% of the meetings held by federal rule-makers on that provision have been with industry opponents. Those opponents,  in addition to “swarming regulators,”  have also “used courts to attack Dodd-Frank,” the article continues, in some cases tapping “attorney Eugene Scalia, son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, to lead the legal charge.”

Congress has also been a vehicle for industry resistance. McCoy cites a package of seven reform-weakening measures moving toward approval in the House recently. “The Senate isn’t expected to approve the House actions,” he adds. “But Dodd-Frank supporters fear the votes could be a harbinger.”

“We expected that it would be hard to keep what we’d won and do more going forward,” Americans for Financial Reform executive director Lisa Donner told McCoy, adding: “It’s been slower and harder than we’d hoped.”