The omnibus government spending bill made public this morning did not include the dangerous financial deregulatory riders that Wall Street and its allies had been promoting. That is very good news. Financial industry lobbyists and their friends in Congress pushed hard to use this “must pass” legislation to achieve a number of unrelated, unpopular, and destructive policy goals. Among other things, they sought to block the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from regulating the use of forced arbitration in the banking and lending markets; to derail the Department of Labor’s efforts to combat the problem of conflicted retirement investment advice; and to significantly weaken regulatory oversight of large banks and giant non-bank financial institutions. They failed.

The defeat of these proposals is a credit to the determined opposition of key leaders in the House, the Senate, and the Administration, and to the effective organizing and advocacy of groups around the country. Of course, we should not have to expend so much time and energy seeking to keep narrow and powerful special interests from circumventing normal legislative channels and evading public debate. In other areas, that bad process produced bad results, such as a rider banning the SEC from requiring corporations to publicly disclose their political and lobbying expenditures.

Still, Wall Street did not win this time around – the rest of us did. That is something well worth celebrating.