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The House of Representatives yesterday easily passed legislation to ease some of the banking regulations adopted after the financial crisis, with 29 Democrats shrugging off President Obama’s veto threat to join united House Republicans, the New York Times reported today. The bill, which passed 271 to 154, follows two other measures approved in the last month that made changes to the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law, but this one would be the broadest effort to shift course. It would delay by two years a Dodd-Frank mandate that financial firms sell off bundled debt, known as collateralized loan obligations; exempt some private equity firms from registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission; loosen regulations on derivatives; and allow some small, publicly traded companies to omit historical financial data from their financial filings. Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, called those changes “modest clarifications of the Dodd-Frank Act,” noting that almost all of the provisions had previously passed the House with bipartisan majorities over the last two years, if not by unanimous agreement. Democrats, led by Obama and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said they intended to draw the line against legislation that further erodes Dodd-Frank.

The House plans to reconsider a bill to amend the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial system overhaul, as well as a regulatory process reform measure, The Hill reported on Friday. House Democrats derailed the Dodd-Frank bill on the second day of the new Congress when it was considered under suspension of the rules. The fast-track process requires a two-thirds majority, which Democrats prevented. The legislation will subsequently be considered under a rule requiring only a simple majority next week. "This bipartisan bill will modernize the regulatory process, ensure transparency and reduce overly burdensome costs that are hurting job creators across the country," House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on Friday.

On the second day of Congress’s new session, U.S. House Republicans lost a bid to quickly pass legislation to relax some requirements under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law, Bloomberg News reported today. The measure would have delayed until July 2019 a provision of the law’s Volcker Rule intended to limit risky investments by banks, and make other changes. The package was defeated because Republican leaders used a voting procedure usually reserved for non-controversial measures, requiring two-thirds support for passage. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi urged Democrats not to support the measure, which failed on a 273-146 vote with 289 needed. Yesterday’s vote margin would be enough to pass the measure under a non-expedited procedure requiring a simple majority. Leaders plan to bring back the bill for such a vote, said a Republican leadership aide who sought anonymity.

After the drama of electing a new speaker of the House and the changing of control in the Senate, the House yesterday approved an obscure but significant rule change requiring the economic effects of legislation to be included in a bill’s official cost to the Treasury, the New York Times reported today. The change on “dynamic scoring” — ardently sought since the 1990s by Republicans — could ease passage of major tax cuts by showing that their impact on economic growth would substantially reduce their cost to the Treasury. The move is widely seen as a way for Republican leaders to set ground rules for an ambitious overhaul of the entire U.S. tax code. “We’re saying, ‘If you think a piece of legislation is going to have a big effect on the economy, then include that effect in the official cost estimate,’ ” said Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), the new chairman of the House Budget Committee. “So if you think a bill is going to help or hurt the economy, then tell us how much.” Opponents said the rule change would invite politicized scorekeeping, further tilt policy to benefit the rich, and expand the budget deficit. “The basic problem remains that macroeconomic work is useful in the laboratory but not in the field,” said Edward D. Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a longtime chief of staff at the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, which officially tallies the cost of tax proposals. “The models are too simplistic and the range of the possible outcomes so great that it opens the process to too much in the way of political intuitions.”

The House narrowly passed a $1.1 trillion spending package last night that would fund most government operations for the fiscal year, the New York Times reported today. The accord was reached just hours before the midnight deadline, in a 219-206 vote, and the legislation now heads to the Senate, which is expected to pass it in the coming days. A split in the Democratic Party was shown in the process when Representative Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader and one of President Obama’s most loyal supporters, broke with the administration over a provision in the bill that would roll back regulation of the Dodd-Frank Act, which Pelosi said was a giveaway to big banks whose practices helped fuel the Great Recession. She spoke on the House floor in the early afternoon, expressing her strong opposition to the bill. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. were pressed to make a furious round of phone calls to try to persuade wavering Democrats, while House Speaker John A. Boehner worked to get more Republican votes. The final vote was a blow to Pelosi, the liberal wing of the party and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who led the charge against the Dodd-Frank rollback.

A bipartisan group of congressional leaders reached a deal yesterday that would for the first time allow the benefits of current retirees to be severely cut, part of an effort to save some of the nation’s most distressed pension plans, the Washington Post reported today. The measure, attached to a massive $1.01 trillion spending bill, would alter 40 years of federal law and could affect millions of workers, many of them part of a shrinking corps of middle-income employees in businesses such as trucking, construction and supermarkets. The idea is reluctantly supported by some unions and retirement fund managers who see it as the only way to salvage pensions in plans that are in imminent danger of running out of money. But it also has stirred strong opposition from retirees who could face deep pension cuts and from advocates eager to keep retiree pensions sacrosanct, even in cases when funds are in a deep financial hole. The advocates argue that allowing cuts to plans would open the door to trims for other retirees later. The deal reached would apply to multi-employer pensions, where a group of businesses in the same industry join forces with unions to provide pension coverage for employees. The plans cover some 10 million U.S. workers. Overall, there are about 1,400 multi-employer plans, many of which remain in good fiscal health and would be untouched by the deal. But several dozen have failed, and several other large ones, including Central States, are staggering toward insolvency.

The ABI Commission to Study the Reform of Chapter 11 released its final report today containing recommendations for modernizing the Bankruptcy Code for chapter 11 business reorganizations. “Chapter 11 works to rehabilitate companies, preserve jobs, and provide value to creditors only if distressed companies and their stakeholders actually use the chapter 11 process to facilitate an in-court or out-of-court resolution of the company’s financial distress,” according to the Commission’s final report. “Chapter 11 in turn needs to offer tools to resolve a debtor’s financial distress in a cost-effective and efficient manner.” Funded by ABI and the Anthony H.N. Schnelling Endowment Fund, the Commission’s final report incorporates the recommendations of the Commission’s 13 advisory committees, which examined key issues in corporate bankruptcies and presented testimony at 17 public hearings held between 2012 and 2014. More than 130 other leading experts participated on topical advisory committees to thoroughly study chapter 11 practice in the most comprehensive study of its kind in more than a decade.

Top restructuring professionals say that U.S. corporate bankruptcy law is broken and are pushing lawmakers for changes that would give struggling companies a better shot at survival, The Wall Street Journal reported today. In the report, industry professionals called on federal lawmakers to pass reforms that they say would make the chapter 11 process cheaper and more efficient, potentially saving jobs and stabilizing the economy. The 400-page report from ABI’s Commission to Study the Reform of Chapter 11 describes how federal lawmakers could restore protections that have eroded since the last major overhaul of corporate reorganization law in 1978. The proposed changes to the law could make chapter 11 cheaper and simpler for small businesses, which would have access to a new restructuring advisor and no longer have to pay for an expensive committee of creditors in most cases. It would also make it easier for small-business owners to hold on to their companies.

The House of Representatives passed a bill yesterday that would allow for banks to voluntarily begin bankruptcy, MarketWatch.com reported yesterday. The bill, known as “The Financial Institutional Bankruptcy Act of 2014,” allows financial institutions to voluntarily begin the process of bankruptcy, or, in some cases, allows the Federal Reserve to begin the process. The bill was passed with bipartisan support, and was co-sponsored by Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), and Ranking Member John Conyers (D-Mich.). The bill uses a “single point of entry” approach to enable a holding company to go into bankruptcy while permitting subsidiaries to stay out of the process. The law builds on attempts to prevent taxpayer bailouts of financial institutions like the ones in 2008. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, there is a provision for an administratively-driven resolution process.

Lawmakers ratcheted up the pressure yesterday on companies seeking tax relief by moving overseas, introducing a bill that would withhold government contracts from companies that undertake so-called inversion deals, the New York Times DealBook blog reported yesterday. The No Federal Contracts for Corporate Deserters Act — introduced by four Democrats, Sens. Richard Durbin (Ill.) and Carl Levin (Mich.), and Reps. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.) and Lloyd Doggett (Texas) — seeks to discourage companies from reincorporating abroad by threatening to withhold federal dollars from the offending companies. The proposed bill would also allow federal agencies to stop doing business with companies if they subcontract with inverted corporations, potentially widening the scope of those affected.