Civil and Human Rights Coalition Opposes Proposed Roll Back of Financial Protections

WASHINGTON –Nancy Zirkin, executive vice president and director of policy at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, issued the following statement in response to a new bill introduced by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby that would roll back multiple oversight provisions of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act:

“Five years after former Senator Chris Dodd reached across party lines to fix a banking system that brought the economy to its knees, we are stunned that the Senate Banking Committee is bent on unlearning as many lessons as it can from the financial crisis. Even before all the consumer and systemic protections of the 2010 law have been fully implemented, the bill released by Chairman Shelby would erode bank oversight and make it easier to give borrowers loans they can’t realistically afford.

For weeks, we heard that the goal of this bill was to make it easier for small community banks to comply with the new wave of financial rules. This would have been understandable. Instead, most of the bill unveiled yesterday has little to do with small lenders. Perhaps the Committee believes ‘trickle-down economics’ will work better for our banking system than it did for our federal budget. We don’t know, because civil rights and consumer stakeholders were shut out of the process.

We would be glad to work with the Committee on thoughtful, bipartisan legislation to address concerns about regulatory burdens faced by small lenders, who had little to do with the financial crisis. In the meantime, we urge the Senate Banking Committee to pull the plug on this Wall Street wish list.”

Nancy Zirkin is the executive vice president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition charged by its diverse membership of more than 200 national organizations to promote and protect the rights of all persons in the United States. The Leadership Conference works toward an America as good as its ideals. For more information on The Leadership Conference, visit www.civilrights.org.

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