The bill's trickiest sticking points had been resolved at the 11th hour, and the Connecticut Democrat said he felt confident he had enough support to win the necessary 60 votes to push the agreement through the Senate.
It took only a few hours before he realized he was wrong. A key Republican supporter threatened to vote against the bill after a last-minute addition to it. Within three days the situation had become a full-blown crisis, with the death of Sen. Robert Byrd and opposition from a fellow Democrat robbing Dodd of other badly needed votes.
It was arguably Dodd's lowest moment during the battle over regulatory reform. After an 18-month bout of negotiations, everything threatened to come apart. To get it back on track, Dodd had to reopen the conference committee after it had already signed off on a final bill — an unprecedented move in the U.S. Senate.
"We signed the conference report. I had heart failure thinking, what does that mean?" Dodd said in a sit-down interview with American Banker. "In the final hours, I had to go back into a conference again … and go to the parliamentarian to find out how to do it."
In the nearly hour long interview in an office in the Russell Senate building before the chamber went on its August recess, Dodd was candid about his peaks and valleys during the debate, including his disappointments with the final bill.
He also weighed picks for key agencies, rebutted criticism that the law lacks detail and described the Treasury Department's relentless defense of the Federal Reserve Board, which helped scuttle Dodd's plan to create a single banking regulator.
Ultimately, of course, Dodd was able to get a final bill passed. But in the days immediately after the conclusion of the conference, the situation looked bleak.
At first, the parliamentarian told Dodd he could not reopen the conference, a decision Dodd could not accept.
"The parliamentarian first told me, 'Oh no, it says you can't go back in,' " Dodd said. "I said, 'Well, tell me what rule I'd be objecting to if I wanted to go back in?' And he said, 'Oh, well, it's tradition.' And I said, 'Well, that's not a rule.' We went through this daylong thing over here trying to convince the parliamentarian. I finally said I'm just going to do it, because there wasn't any rule."
Many observers were shocked when the conference reopened, while others criticized Dodd for not ensuring adequate support ahead of time. The matter had come up after the House added a provision to the bill that would have taxed large financial firms to pay for the costs of the legislation. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., and other key Republicans objected to the measure, saying they could no longer support the final bill.
Dodd acknowledged it crossed his mind the tax "might" be an issue, but said he thought Republican concerns had already been addressed by a last-minute change a GOP staff member successfully added to the bill.
According to Dodd, Mark Oesterle, a staffer for Sen. Richard Shelby, the lead Republican on the Banking Committee, said receipts from the tax should be given to the Treasury, not the FDIC, to ensure it did not look like a bailout fund. Dodd delayed a final vote on the bill during conference in order to change the provision.
