A Fighting Chance

“Good,” Barney said. “Let’s go.”


Everyone hurried out of the room, off to meetings or hearings. For a minute, I sat still, absorbing what had just happened. I had always been content to coach people—to offer ideas or warnings—in the hope that they would fight the good fight behind closed doors. But my worldview had just shifted. I had seen firsthand what it meant to be in the room when the law gets negotiated.

The part I’d asked for stayed in the bill through the House version and through the Senate version and was signed into law. After that meeting, I knew that if we got the agency, there would be a watchdog keeping an eye on the credit agencies to make sure they followed the law. I loved it.

As the House version of the financial reform bill came together, Barney was everywhere and did everything. He negotiated every part of the bill, meeting with stakeholders and reluctant members of Congress from before dawn until long after dark. He worked out deals among his colleagues in the House and Senate; he hashed out compromises with the White House. He cajoled and badgered and cut deals, and ultimately he nailed down the key pieces needed to make the consumer agency work. Barney was amazing.

In the final flurry of negotiations that took place that fall, one assault on the consumer agency came on swiftly, and Barney and the consumer advocates couldn’t beat it back. Car dealers wanted their auto loans to be exempt from the agency’s oversight. I immediately remembered Jason and how he’d been cheated. The thought of allowing that to happen again (and again and again) to other people made me want to smash my fist through a wall. But there were car dealers in every congressional district in the country, and they were riled up about the agency. Once the car dealers started calling Washington, members of Congress started caving, one after another. Barney did everything he could to fight them off, but in the end, the car dealers got their way.

The consumer agency was a little battle-scarred, but the important provisions were all there. The agency had survived—strong and independent. And in December 2009, Barney steered the financial reform bill through the House of Representatives.

Now all that remained was to get the bill through the Senate.





Death in Committee

It was Friday morning, January 15, 2010, and the calls started coming in early. I was at home, up early to work out on the treadmill in the basement, and I was still huffing and puffing when the phone rang the first time.

Had I seen this morning’s Wall Street Journal? The rumors were flying on Capitol Hill: The consumer agency wasn’t going to make it. In an effort to move the larger financial reform bill forward, Senator Dodd would trade it off. There might be some face-saving attempt to set up a new consumer protection department somewhere else in the government, but there would be no strong, independent agency with the authority to get much done. The insiders sent the word out: Too bad. So sorry. It was a good idea, but unless the agency was dropped from the reform bill, the whole package of legislation would fail. Better to toss the consumer agency overboard and get the other reforms through.

I listened. This was it: the consumer agency was dead.

All the families who had been cheated by the big banks and the credit card companies. All the hard work by Barney, the consumer groups, Heather, Dan, the president. All that knocking on doors and all those meetings. And now it was coming to an end.

I asked if there would be a vote—even a losing vote—but the answer, apparently, was no. The death wouldn’t be a public execution. Instead, the Senate Banking Committee would propose a financial reform bill with no consumer agency. No one in the Senate—not a single Democrat or a single Republican—would ever have to vote against the agency. Instead, it would just be suffocated quietly in its crib. No one would ever know exactly who had killed it, or why.

So I asked my last question: When? How long before the locked-in version of the bill would be introduced in the Senate Banking Committee, with or without the consumer agency?

Best estimate: three weeks. The deal wasn’t finalized, and there were a lot of moving pieces that still needed to be worked out.

I called Dan. “We’ve got three weeks.”

Blood and Teeth on the Floor

The way I saw it, we had nothing to lose. I didn’t want a job in the Capitol, so what did I care if I ticked off a lot of people in Washington? This was our last chance to get this agency into law. If we lost now, we lost forever.