WASHINGTON -- After three days of debate, the House Financial Services Committee voted along party lines to bring H.R. 10, also known as the Financial CHOICE Act, up for a vote on the House floor.
Democrats delayed the hearing with a series of procedural moves, which included proposing more than a dozen amendments and a reading of the 591-page measure.
None of the amendments were accepted and the bill going to the House floor still includes language to repeal the Durbin Amendment, the provision tacked onto the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act to limit the amount that Visa and MasterCard can charge retailers for processing debit-card payments. The Durbin Amendment also prevents Visa and MasterCard from blocking competing routing network options.
The House has the Republican majority to pass the bill, and while a date has not been set for a vote, it is expected to occur in coming weeks. Afterwards, the bill moves to the Senate where its passage is far less certain.
Democrats don’t have enough votes in the Senate to simply vote down the bill, but they have enough members to filibuster. This means that in order to pass the bill, Senate Republicans either need to convince a few Democrats to back the bill, which is laughably unlikely, or to do away with the filibuster entirely, which would open a political Pandora’s Box and fundamentally change the way the Senate works.
The bill could also change on the House floor, where the language doing away with the Durbin Amendment could potentially be removed. This is all conjecture, but a possibility nonetheless, especially given the number of senators and representatives trying to juggle support from both the banking and retail industries.
“This issue always makes me grumpy,” Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., a former Goldman Sachs banker, recently told Bloomberg when asked about swipe-fee limits. “I’m being forced to choose between the competing interests of two big industries.”
The convenience industry has come out hard against the Financial CHOICE Act due to the provision repealing the Durbin Amendment. “As long as H.R. 10 includes a repeal of debit swipe-fee reform, NACS urges the House of Representatives to reject it,” said Lyle Beckwith, senior vice president of government relations for NACS. “Debit reform has saved consumers and Main Street businesses $40 billion already. It makes no sense for the House to even consider a bill that would take away these pro-competition, successful reforms.”
The National Retail Federation publicly opposes the measure for the same reason, and the National Grocers Association sent more than 200 supermarket executives to Capitol Hill on May 2 to meet with lawmakers in an effort to preserve debit swipe-fee reform.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the author of the amendment that shares his name, has also come out publicly against the CHOICE bill with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. “Repealing the Durbin Amendment,” Durbin wrote, “would let big banks and card companies get away with charging Main Street billions more in unnecessary fees.”
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