By Pete Schroeder
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown said Tuesday that Democrats were drawing up a list of recent rules established by President Donald Trump-led regulators they hoped to quickly repeal in 2021.
Brown, who will chair the Senate Banking Committee once Democrats take control of the Senate this month, said lawmakers hoped to use the Congressional Review Act to begin repealing some of those rules around April. He did not identify specific rules that would be targeted.
He said his panel was already identifying banking and financial deregulatory moves that could be reversed, and expected other committees are doing the same.
That 1996 law allows Congress to vote to repeal rules finalized recently with a simple majority vote. With Democrats set to control both the House and Senate for the first time in a decade, lawmakers and liberals are quickly identifying industry-friendly rules authored by the Trump administration to be scrapped.
And in particular, rules easing restrictions on the financial sector will be a popular target for Democrats, who spent years criticizing Republican efforts to ease those safeguards. Liberal advocacy groups like the Center for American Progress had already begun identifying rules that could be repealed by Congress, with Democrats eager to move quickly to remove them.
(Reporting by Pete Schroeder, Editing by Franklin Paul and David Gregorio)
