Pioneer Press - Bean Supports Legislation Creating Consumer Protection Agency

PUBLISHED: October 26, 2009

Members of the Financial Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives moved forward legislation, backed by U.S. Rep. Melissa Bean, D-8th, to create a federal Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The legislation, which would create an agency to impose stricter federal regulations on financial institutions, will now be debated on the House floor.

"Creating a CFPA puts one agency in charge of creating strong but streamlined regulations that can be applied and enforced consistently for consumers and investors across the nation," Bean said in a prepared statement.

Bean has long supported financial regulatory reform but said she will continue to work for an amendment that forbids state regulations from being more strict than federal regulations.

"My proposed amendment to CFPA would preserve current, longstanding law that allows nationally charted banks and federal thrifts to operate under a uniform set of laws," Bean said. "This amendment would in no way undermine current state laws that apply to national banks and federal thrifts, including state tort, contract, and criminal and foreclosure law, or a state's ability to sue."

Bean was not present for the committee vote and has not been in Washington D.C. last week because members of her family are sick with what is likely the H1N1 flu, said Jonathan Lipman, Bean's communication director.

"Since she was heavily exposed to the virus, there was concern she was contagious and that's why she wasn't at the committee vote," Lipman said.

Lipman said had Bean been present she would have voted in favor of the legislation, which was approved by the committee by a 39-29 vote. The chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., agreed to work with Bean and others on the federal preemption issue while the legislation is being debated on the House floor.

Bean said allowing each state to impose more restrictive regulations than those at the federal level would be costly, create confusion and be unnecessarily burdensome.

"Rolling back this 140-year-old precedent of federal rules a system of 50 different state regimes increases costs for training and compliance, which gets passed to consumers, as in the insurance industry, where such costs are estimated at $13 billion annually," she said in a statement.