On June 21, the Senate Banking Committee reported out S. 2190, a bill that empowers the federal banking agencies to remove and ban you from banking practically at will. The bill now heads for a vote by the full Senate.

Our June 20 letter to the Committee sums up many of the issues with this bill. Instead of wasting time on granting more enforcement authority to the agencies, which already have more authority than needed, the Committee should focus on how the agencies use their discretionary authority under existing laws – sometimes wisely, sometimes less so – and take appropriate action to mitigate supervisory and enforcement abuses and due process violations.

In a forthcoming alert, we will summarize the recent Supreme Court decision in Harry C. Calcutt, III v. FDIC, in which the Court overturned an FDIC order to remove and ban him from banking. The Calcutt case exemplifies the kind of apparent regulatory abuses that the Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee should be looking into.