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That Senate Democrats are allowing business as usual to continue at all is kind of mind-boggling. That 16 of them (plus independent Angus King) have voted to advance a bill that would roll back key Dodd-Frank reforms—and is racist at its core—is unfathomable.
Democrats are hearing about this, and they're giving themselves a fig leaf to say they tried to fight that racist part of it.
In a final indignity, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., has offered an amendment essentially striking a controversial provision from bipartisan bank deregulation bill S.2155 that would limit tools prosecutors use to detect mortgage lending discrimination, while acknowledging that the amendment probably wouldn’t get a vote — and wouldn’t be necessary for his ultimate support.
At issue is Section 104, which exempts all banks and credit unions issuing 500 mortgages or less from enhanced Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, or HMDA, data requirements used to identify lending discrimination. This would cover 85 percent of all regulated mortgage lenders from the new requirements, which were part of the Dodd-Frank Act.
The 17 members of the Democratic caucus who support S.2155 have taken significant heat from their colleagues over this measure, which critics believe would deeply damage fair lending enforcement, by making the new HMDA data incomplete and unreliable. The subprime crisis, which disproportionately fell on black and brown borrowers, proved that new data for housing discrimination was necessary, but this provision would wipe that away.
Kaine almost certainly won't get a vote on this amendment. The bill is likely to come to a vote Wednesday, and thus far those 17 haven't broken ranks. There is every indication that they will vote for final passage, even with that provision still there.
Four Democrats—Sens. Jon Tester of Montana, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp or North Dakota, and Mark Warner of Virginia—are cosponsoring Kaine's amendment. If they wanted to, they could force Mitch McConnell to allow it to come to the floor. If they wanted to, they could tell McConnell that their vote on final passage will be a no unless Section 104 is stripped from the bill. They could have supported an amendment from Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto to do just that. They haven't.
Shockingly, they are proceeding as if absolutely everything is normal. As if giving Republicans—and Wall Street—this racist win is critical to their re-election this November. Instead of shutting the whole Senate down in response to having a fraud propped up by Republicans in the White House, they're pretending like all they can do is offer amendments they know will be rejected.