WASHINGTON–Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the next chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has proposed a sweeping agenda for the committee, saying he will seek to improve housing and banking services for low-income Americans, fight global warming and foster racial equality now that Democrats control both chambers of Congress and the White House.
In a phone call with journalists, Brown said the committee, which oversees housing and transportation matters as well as banks and financial regulators, has been too deferential to the financial services industry.
“Wall Street doesn’t get to run this entire economy,” he said during the call.
Brown said he is interested in investigating the relationship among stock prices, executive compensation and workers’ wages, taking on a corporate business model that “treats workers as expendable.”
“We’re going to put the dignity of work at the center of everything we do,” he said.
‘Erase Attitudes’
The New York Times noted that while he said he looked forward to working with Republican colleagues like Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, who is set to be the committee’s ranking member, Brown also said he wanted to erase some of the committee’s earlier attitudes, the New York Times reported.
“This committee has flat-out pretended that climate change doesn’t exist,” he said. “Housing was a word left out of this committee for too long, and it won’t be left out anymore.”
But the Times also noted it’s “not clear how much of the wide-ranging agenda — which includes replacing public buses with zero-emission vehicles and expanding housing subsidies — Brown will be able to put in place. Democrats’ control of the Senate will be razor thin, and Republicans could, as Brown did when his party was in the minority, try to scuttle any changes.”
The report pointed out the proposals are a major shift for a committee that in Republican hands focused largely on loosening financial regulations. Democrats would reverse new rules for banks and other financial firms and seek to institute policies that Republicans have long resisted, including a public-banking option that would allow the poorest Americans to avoid high fees for simple banking services, Brown said, according to the Times.
Calls on CFPB Director to Resign
Brown said he told the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Kathleen Kraninger, to resign.
Brown’s staff, the senator said during the call, is also compiling a list of rules made final by Trump appointees, including Kraninger, so Democrats could try to scrap them using the Congressional Review Act, a law that lets Congress vote to reverse regulators’ actions.
Brown has in the past also weighed in on numerous credit union-related issues, including expressing criticism of NCUA for delays in risk-based capital rules; grilling NCUA Chairman Rodney Hood for his appearance in a video supporting President Trump; and raising concerns over the nomination of Kyle Hauptman to the NCUA board.