It’s Not Business as Usual

It’s been a nice, quiet couple of weeks in Washington, right?

What rock have you been living under?

Just when you thought the mess in our nation’s capital couldn’t get any worse, along came the president’s telephone conversations with foreign leaders.

Regardless of whether you think the calls are an impeachable offense or not, you have to agree that the entire kerfuffle is sucking the air out of efforts to advance any major legislation in Washington.

The rhetoric alone may kill any small amount of goodwill that was left.

House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) has never been known as someone who holds back her criticism. But the California Democrat may have outdone herself with recent comments about President Trump.

“The lies, coverups, shaking down foreign countries & undermining our democracy will be recorded as one of the worst periods in the history of our country, all led by a dishonorable con man,” she recently tweeted.

And how about this tweet: “He needs to be imprisoned & placed in solitary confinement.”

Looking at the whole mess from a parochial point of view, how much did those comments poison a legislative well that was already pretty toxic?

Under normal circumstances, this would be the time for legislating. The presidential election is still more than a year away.

These are far from normal circumstances, but there are still a number of issues on credit union trade groups’ wish lists.

For instance, cannabis banking. The House has passed legislation that would give financial institutions a safe harbor for providing financial services to marijuana-related businesses.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Id.) is said to be preparing his own bill, which is likely to differ from the House measure.

That likely means Waters and Crapo will have to work out a conference deal.

Can it happen? Can they go into a room and cut a deal? Perhaps a joint or two might be in order to mellow the mood.

Then, there’s data security. In the best of times, congressional committees with conflicting jurisdictions have been unable to reach an agreement on this thorny issue.

And these sure aren’t the best of times.

The committees with jurisdiction over financial institutions have favored bills that would hold retailers’ feet to the fire in cases of data breaches that are their fault. The commerce-related committees, on the other hand, oppose those efforts.

With all that is happening, this issue once again could easily be ignored.

Congress always enacts the annual defense authorization bill, right? Well, this year’s version could become bogged down over funding for the wall along the U.S. southern border.

Still, conferees from the House and Senate are likely to push hard for this measure rather than simply pass a bill that extends current programs.

And if they do make a deal, they’re going to have to come to some sort of agreement on whether banks should receive the same rent benefits on military bases that credit unions now receive.

That issue has made the already bad relationship between banking and credit unions even worse. And with this issue, there’s really no middle ground. Somebody’s going to win and somebody’s going to lose.

While we’re on the subject of banks, Ryan Donovan, CUNA’s chief advocacy officer, recently made a pitch for more bank-credit union cooperation.

Writing in an Oct. 1 op-ed column in The Hill newspaper, Donovan said House passage of the marijuana banking legislation was a sign that when banks and credit unions work together, “we’ve almost always achieved a positive outcome for the institutions we represent and the consumers and small businesses they serve.”

He added banks and credit unions agree on 90% of the issues, but it’s the 10% that seem to get all of the attention.

“These are the issues that are quixotic at best, but often feel like we fight the fight because we’ve always fought the fight,” he continued.

And, he concluded, “Whatever we do next, let’s keep this going. They say that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Well this collaboration has been a tremendous step, and I can’t wait to see what kind of journey credit unions and banks can take when we work in accord.”

This obviously is a work in progress that may not succeed.

Just a few days later, the American Bankers Association filed a request for the full Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to hear the banks’ appeal of a ruling that dismissed most of its challenge to the NCUA’s Field of Membership rules.

You know, the one where the bankers accuse the NCUA of being lapdogs for the credit union industry and contend that credit unions are unfairly trying to grab as much business from the banks as possible.

Just in Time

I’m not sure if this is what the NCUA intended, but the rules governing its controversial Payday Alternative Loan II option go into effect on Cyber Monday, just in time for folks to go broke spending money online.

A recently published notice in the Federal Register stated that the rules for the new payday loan alternative option go into effect Dec. 2, the day online retailers offer big sales.

The payday alternative loans are intended to provide credit union members who need short-term, small-dollar loans an alternative to storefront payday lenders.

Consumer advocates probably would recommend against financing your holiday shopping with the loans that they say still will cost borrowers too much.

But still …

David Baumann is a correspondent-at-large for CU Times. He can be reached at dbaumann@cutimes.com.