WASHINGTON – The credit union lobby was licking its wounds yesterday, hours after congressional leaders pulled the credit union regulatory relief bill from a scheduled vote in response to a massive outpouring of opposition by the bankers.
John Magill, chief lobbyist for CUNA, said he was confident the CU Regulatory Relief Act would have gotten the two-thirds majority necessary under the House’s so-called suspension rules, if the bill had been put to a vote yesterday, as planned. “I believe we had the votes,” said Magill.
But hundreds of bankers descended on Capitol Hill in recent days, lobbying against the credit union bill. Leaders in both parties were reluctant to have their members vote on what turned out to be a controversial bill, pitting two powerful constituencies against each other, as election season is approaching.
The lawmakers were willing to vote by voice on the credit union bill, but were reluctant to be recorded, as would have been necessary, according to several Capitol Hill sources. “We thought they were going to have a voice vote side by side,” said Magill, of plans to consider the credit union bill and the bank bill together.
The plan was complicated on Friday when House leaders declined to put the bankers’ regulatory relief bill to a vote at the same time as the credit union bill, which they had planned to do to illustrate balance between the credit unions and banks. The bankers’ fight against the credit union bill so miffed House leaders, they pulled the bank bill from consideration.
Ron Ence, senior lobbyist for the Independent Community Bankers Association, said his group had sought to amend language in the bill so that entire U.S. cities, such as San Francisco, Miami, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia, would not qualify as underserved areas, as they currently do under NCUA rules. The ICBA also wanted language requiring loans credited to underserved areas actually are used in those areas.
“We wanted to tighten down the definition of underserved, so that underserved means underserved,” Ence told The Credit Union Journal yesterday. “But they (the credit union lobby) weren’t willing to sit down and compromise.”
The ICBA had more than 300 bankers in Washington over the weekend for its annual government affairs conference, all of whom took a turn lobbying Congress against the credit union bill.
CURRA would extend the ability to branch into underserved areas to all credit unions and exempt member business loans made in underserved areas from the current limit on MBLs, among other provisions.
The bill, according to the credit union lobby, already represents a compromise – a slimmed-down version of CURIA, the CU Regulatory Improvements Act. “CURRA was designed as a compromise of CURIA,” said Brad Thaler, senior lobbyist for NAFCU, noting that CURRA has eliminated the two major CURIA provisions the bankers found objectionable: an increase in the business loan cap and enactment of a risk-based capital system for credit unions.
The bankers’ Ence suggested that exempting all loans made in underserved areas from the business loan cap, as CURRA would do, has the same impact as raising the business loan cap, so that the only real difference between the two credit union bills is the risk-based capital issue.
“We’re certainly willing to sit down and discuss with them and talk about ways of making this work in tandem with our bill,” said Ence. “I don’t think it [the bank bill] is going to go anywhere without the credit union bill.”
Representatives of the American Bankers Association, which also lobbied hard against the CURRA vote, declined to comment.
