OPINION:
For all the twists and turns that marked the 2024 election season, the results came down to one simple question that has been a campaign constant for decades: Are you better off than you were four years ago?
The answer from voters was a resounding no. By voting for a change in leadership, Americans signaled clear frustration with their political leaders who prioritized politics over the country’s many pressing economic challenges.
Rather than respond to the clear message sent by the people who put him in office, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin has instead chosen to double down with a last-ditch attempt to hand wealthy corporations another government giveaway before Republicans assume control of the Senate.
Within days of the election, Mr. Durbin, chair of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, announced a hearing on “bringing competition and lower fees to the credit card system.” What this hearing was, though, was a vehicle for the Illinois Democrat to advance his pet legislation, the Credit Card Competition Act.
Far from benefiting consumers, this act would instead transfer billions of dollars from Americans’ wallets to big-box retail chains such as Walmart and Target, which are lobbying aggressively for its passage.
Essentially, the Credit Card Competition Act would use the force of government to take choice and freedom away from consumers and put it in the hands of these chain retailers by allowing them to choose which networks they use to process credit card transactions. This would force consumers away from their networks of choice and onto networks that they may have never heard of, have inferior personal security and could have ties to foreign governments. But it won’t stop after the hearing, as there will certainly be a real push to attach this legislation to a completely unrelated bill before Republicans take control.
The hearing was predicated on the idea of an unchecked credit card duopoly, but this is the furthest thing from the truth. There are already three major payment networks, and once lawmakers approve Capital One’s acquisition of Discover, another significant player will be on the field. The free market, not the federal government, should decide which networks succeed or fail.
Competition isn’t the real issue here, so what’s going on? Two of the country’s most prominent corporate political darlings, Walmart and Target, are champing at the bit for Congress to pass this egregious case of corporate welfare. Although the bill would provide new windfall profits to these retailers, it would do so by gutting billions of dollars’ worth of consumers’ cash back and rewards benefits.
We already know these corporate welfare solutions won’t work. Just look at what is happening in Mr. Durbin’s home state of Illinois.
Earlier this year, it was the first state in the nation to pass legislation restricting how financial transactions are processed. The bill drew fierce opposition from federal banking regulators — even the Biden administration’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which criticized the law as an “ill-conceived, largely unworkable” measure that “threatens to fragment and disrupt” a functional system. The office further warned that the law will place “extraordinary operational burdens” on banks that “likely will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher fees, reduced services, and weakened fraud protection.”
Wolves in sheep’s clothing bills like these are exactly the kind of rhetorical duplicity one should expect from the old way of doing business. The last thing Congress needs is to give it a platform on the federal level.
This election should have been a wake-up call to lawmakers to focus on commonsense, bipartisan solutions that will provide real relief for hardworking Americans. That said, leopards don’t change their spots.
Hopefully, enough members of Congress feel the winds of change coming and aren’t fooled by his misleading hearings and don’t make a mistake they’ll regret.
• Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s 43rd treasurer, 48th secretary of state and a former Cincinnati mayor, is senior fellow for family empowerment at the Family Research Council.
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