Gary Rivlin gives us an insight into the machinations of Wall street lobbyists on Capitol Hill:
As he prepared to sign the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act—the sweeping legislative package designed to prevent another spectacular financial collapse—into law, the president [Obama] first acknowledged the miracle of having a bill to sign at all. “Passing this…was no easy task,” he told the crowd of hundreds. “We had to overcome the furious lobbying of an array of powerful interest groups and a partisan minority determined to block change.”
Indeed, some 3,000 lobbyists had swarmed the Capitol in hopes of killing off pieces of the proposed bill……
That sense of victory barely lasted barely the morning. …..After Dodd-Frank’s passage, lobbyists for the big banks and industry trade groups divided themselves into eighteen working groups, each organized around a different element of the new law. “That’s when the real work began,” Talbott tells me……
Read more at How Wall Street Defanged Dodd-Frank | The Nation.