WASHINGTON - “My first memory is the serious situation in which the credit union movement found itself after the court decision,” said Paul Sarbanes, then the senior Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee.
“It really raised a major impediment to the credit union movement,” added the now-retired Senator from Maryland. “The legislation sought to correct that.”
“The credit unions were really in a do-or-die position,” said Sarbanes, who co-managed the bill on the floor of the Senate with then-Banking Committee Chairman Alfonse D’Amato of New York.
While the bill eventually passed both the House and Senate by overwhelming margins, Sarbanes remembered the backroom negotiations that made the votes possible. “The votes really did not reflect the give and take that went on in order to get the bill passed,” he said.
He recalled a vicious internal fight being waged by the banking lobby to either kill the bill or add restrictions on credit unions to it, some of which were eventually added.
“There were substantial interests working against the bill. If they had really had their way then we wouldn’t have had a bill at all,” recalled the Senator.
Eventually, recalled Sarbanes, the opposition melted away.
“When we got going, then everybody started to jump on,” he remembered, culminating in a 92-to-6 vote in the Senate.
“In the end, if one looks at the overwhelming votes, you might say it was easy to get,” said Sarbanes. “But I think it was, in a sense, quite difficult.”
