McConnell: Liquidation fund isn’t only problem with financial reform bill

Senate Republican Leader Mitch
McConnell (Ky.) on Sunday said it was more than just the so-called
“bailout fund” that’s keeping him from supporting Democrats’ financial
regulatory reform bill.

The fund to which McConnell refers is a
liquidation pool, paid into by banks, that would be used to ensure a
collapsing financial firm would not damage the entire financial system.

But
when asked if he would support the bill if Democrats removed that fund,
McConnell told CNN’s “State of the Union” he would still have other
issues with the legislation, though he did not say what those qualms
were.

“What we ought to do is get
back to the table and have a bipartisan bill,” McConnell said. “I don’t
know anybody in the Senate who thinks we ought not to pass a bill, the
question is what it looks like.”

McConnell made headlines earlier
this week when he described Democrats’ liquidation fund is a back door
for taxpayer bailouts. That earned him the ire of Senate Banking
Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who railed on McConnell this Thursday
during a Senate floor speech.

President Barack Obama later
slammed the Senate GOP leader during his radio address Saturday,
stressing he and other GOP leaders were standing “against common sense
reforms that we’ve proposed.”

But McConnell fired back on
Sunday, noting that even the president’s “own Treasury secretary, who
agrees with me” hopes the liquidation fund is removed from the bill.