WASHINGTON–The SAFE Banking Act has new life in Congress, but it also still has a long road to go before becoming law, according to NAFCU’s VP-legislative affairs.
As CUToday.info reported, the legislation, which would provide protection to credit unions and other financial institutions that serve cannabis-based businesses in states where it is legal, was passed as an amendment to the America COMPETES Act.
That leaves its fate to both support for the COMPETE Act and potential compromises between the House and Senate that would be necessary before sending the bill onto the president’s desk.
As NAFCU’s Brad Thaler noted, the COMPETE Act that passed is the House version of the Senate’s Strategic Competition Act, which is primarily aimed at responding to China across a number of areas. The House version is nearly 3,000 pages long.
“The debate now will be in the Senate on reconciling differences,” said Thaler. “There seems to be bipartisan support for the idea that something can be gotten done.”
Idea Being ‘Kicked Around’
Thaler said one idea being kicked around is the Senate could simply attach its version to the House version and then request a conference committee, a once common practice for reconciling differences in legislation that has become “pretty rare.”
“It’s unsure what a conference committee would look like in a 50/50 Senate,” said Thaler.
Thaler further noted that Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO), the primary sponsor of the SAFE Act and whose announcement he will not seek reelection helped to resurrect the bill, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had told him that getting the SAFE Act into conference committee will be a priority.
“It comes down to whether the SAFE Act will be accepted as it is, when advocates on the Democratic side want to go even further with criminal justice reform.”
One More Complication
Thaler told CUToday.info. “It is a popular, bipartisan provision. It comes down to what they can work out between the two bills. The SAFE Act was not included in the Senate version.”
If the situation were not complicated enough, Thaler reminded that Sen. Ben Ray Lujan recently had a stroke, meaning he will be out of the Senate for several weeks and depriving the Democrats of a desperately needed vote in an evenly divided Congress.
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