How CCCA Sponsors See an Opportunity to Advance the Bill

Sponsors of the Credit Card Competition Act saw the passage of the GENIUS Act on a preliminary vote as an opportunity to give the CCCA new life in advance of plans to reintroduce the legislation in the current Congress.

Attaching the bill to the GENIUS Act, which would regulate stablecoins, was seen as a natural fit for the CCCA, as GENIUS bill is the first major piece of banking legislation to come to the Senate floor in the three years since the CCCA was first introduced.

Attaching the CCCA to the Genius Act also made sense because few standalone bills get passed in the Senate. “Amendments are the way the Senate legislates,” says Doug Kantor, an executive committee member for the Merchants Payments Coalition and general counsel for the National Association of Convenience Stores. “The opportunity to attach to the GENIUS Act came up before the CCCA could be reintroduced in this Congress.”

During the previous Congress, sponsors of the CCCA considered attaching the CCCA to defense and spending bills, but opted not to. “It didn’t work out for procedural reasons,” Kantor adds.

Procedural reasons can include a proposed amendment being deemed unrelated or non-germane to the original bill’s purpose. The Senate still must approve the CCCA as an amendment to the GENIUS Act.

Despite being introduced in the previous two Congresses, the CCCA was never voted on. “If the CCCA is attached to the GENIUS Act, it’ll have a better chance of becoming law as freestanding bills focusing on regulating payment-network practices and fees have never had any real success the federal level,” Eric Grover, principal at the consultancy Intrepid Ventures, says by email.

The prospects of passage for the CCCA as an attachment to GENIUS Act could get complicated. Grover points out that “while the progressive wing of the Democrat Party supports the CCCA, it doesn’t back the GENIUS Act,” he says “And many Republicans and Democrats who support the Genuis Act would rather not have to vote on the CCCA.”

While the CCCA has partisan supporters, there are “plenty of senators who would prefer that Congress not intervene to direct how the fiercely competitive credit card network market works,” Grover adds.

One vocal Senate opponent of the CCCA is Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who reportedly said he would withdraw his support for the GENIUS Act if the CCCA is attached to it.

Tillis’s opposition to the CCCA is well known. But Kantor says that, last November during a Senate committee hearing on competition in the payments industry, Tillis warned representatives of Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. that if the networks cannot resolve their dispute with merchants over card-swipe fees Congress would settle the matter, and neither party would like the outcome.

“[Tillis’s] comments indicate that Congress is prepared to address the problem, if need be,” Kantor adds.

But opponents of the CCCA argue previous payments regulations passed as amendments to larger bills have fallen short of expectations. Specifically, they point out that, while CCCA co-sponsor Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois attached Regulation II, also known as the Durbin amendment, to the Dodd Frank Act more than a decade ago, the legislation failed to deliver on its promise of merchants passing along to consumers savings from the debit card fee caps imposed by the legislation.

“The Durbin amendment passed without regular order, and it appears they are trying to do the same with the CCCA,” a spokesperson for the Electronic Payments Coalition says by email. “The Durbin amendment was a failure—no savings for consumers, the loss of bank services for consumers, and higher rates of fraud.”

When making “monumental changes” to the payment systems, such as passing the CCCA, those changes “should be discussed and debated—especially when those changes hurt our economy, small businesses, cardholders and local communities—and should not be added to any train leaving the station,” the EPC spokesperson adds.