President Obama To Sign Law Weakening Wall Street Reform

While most of the political press was beating its collective baloney over the white House’s failure to send a sufficiently large cheese to this weekend’s unity rally in Paris, the foreseeable future of legislative action in the United States came into focus a bit more. The House of Representatives has introduced a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security for the remainder of the fiscal year, and if the bill doesn’t pass, the agency’s funding will run out on Feb. 27. House Republicans have begun to add amendments in order to gut President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, essentially holding Homeland Security funding hostage in exchange for these concessions.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest opened Monday’s White House briefing by slamming the GOP effort to “muck around with that legislation,” and when asked point-blank, confirmed that the president will veto any attempt to weaken his immigration policy:

Q: “(S)o the president would veto this legislation that the House has assembled?”

Josh Earnest: “Well, we’ve made clear, dating back to last fall, that the president would oppose any legislative effort to undermine the executive actions that he took to add greater accountability to our immigration system. So, yes.”

You can add that veto threat to the recently-reaffirmed threat to block any legislation forcing approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, and his threat to veto a bill that would delay implementation of the Volcker Rule.

That last one is already dead in the water, having failed to secure the two-thirds majority required to pass it under a suspension of House rules. That’s especially good news for proponents of financial regulatory reform, or rather, news that could have been worse. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law was already dealt a serious blow during negotiations on the lame duck “Cromnibus” bill, so all this does is prevent that law, already passed and signed by duly-elected officials, from being weakened further.

So, that’s the good news, that the American people will get to not lose three things they already have. The bad news is that Republicans never get tired of attacking Wall Street reform, and in the new era of “compromise,” they’ve secured a second straight victory on that front. At that same briefing, Earnest announced that the president will sign the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2015…READ MORE

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By: Tommy Christopher

Tommy Christopher is The Daily Banter's White House Correspondent and Political Analyst. He's been a political reporter and liberal commentator since 2007, and has covered the White House since the beginning of the Obama administration, first for PoliticsDaily, and then for Mediaite. Christopher is a frequent guest on a variety of television, radio, and online programs, and was the villain in the documentaries The Audacity of Democracy and Hating Breitbart. He's also That Guy Who Live-Tweeted His Own Heart Attack, and the only person to have ever received public apologies from both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.