Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) will attempt to slip a handout to big retailers in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a bill that is supposed to be focused on maintaining America’s military might.
While the House passed its version of the NDAA, which focused on depoliticizing the military, Durbin appears to be intent on politicizing the Senate’s defense authorization bill by attaching legislation unrelated to maintaining America’s defense readiness.This is not the first time that Durbin has attempted this scheme to politicize the NDAA. He tried unsuccessfully to insert the legislation last year into the NDAA. Americans Tax Reform (ATR) said that they anticipate that Durbin will attempt this trick once again.As ATR noted the legislation would act as a “backdoor price control” and an expansion of the Durbin amendment as enacted in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street and Consumer Protection Act, which was passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Essentially, the bill would direct the Federal Reserve to draft rules requiring credit cards issued in America to offer at least two unaffiliated payment network options for point-of-sale and online transactions. ATR argued that the bill would harm Americans by:
Removing more than 60 billion in credit card rewards that consumers receive every year, according to the International Center for Law & Economics
Force small banks and credit unions to cease providing co-branded cards that Americans use every day
ATR also said that there is no evidence that the amendment will pass savings down to consumers, as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that had the Durbin Amendment not passed, “65 percent of noninterest checking offered by covered banks would have been free.”
John Noonan, who served as national security adviser to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), noted that the bill may open up Chinese access to sensitive financial data:
